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Liu,Cixin may have gotten the idea for a computer made up of human components from this author.

This book had the potential to be a lot better, especially because women were the Overlords. But the dude just could not resist his breast-envy, and thus turned this fairly awesome imaginative sci-fi into a teenage boy's book.

( )

Overall this would be best classified as a fun book to read. Lots of action and lots of fun characters. The characters remind me quite a bit of characters from Ayn Rand's books, which means they seem to be slightly one dimensional in the behavior, but that does get toned down some later in the book. It loosely qualifies as steampunk. The post-apocalyptic nature of it sets it in a different era than a lot of steampunk. The setting for most of the book is Australia (in later books it seems that North America comes into play) and a lot of the book is about factions of religious zealots or just simply crazy people at war with each other.

I can't legitimately five star it due to the laborious battle scenes and the unexplainable (and unexplained) behavior of one of the main characters. At best I could simply extract that the character was just crazy and neurotic, at worst it comes across as a sloppy character shift for no other reason than to advance the plot.

Nevertheless, I found myself pouring through it at a brisk pace enjoying the larger scifi elements of the story and at the end I am wondering where it's all going to end up (I have the other two books on the shelf to find out). ( )

Someone recommended this to me as:
"If you like unusual SF, you should definitely pick up Sean McMullen's Greatwinter trilogy of novels, starting with the first book Souls in the Great Machine. It's set in Australia (the middle book is set in North America) and it revolves around a post-apocalyptic society built slowly and realistically from the ashes of our own. You've got a kind of clock-punk level of technology in which fueled engines are religiously proscribed, yet society gets on at a pretty high level using workarounds like human- and wind-powered trains, long-distance communication via light signalling, and all the clockwork you can get your hands on. The main piece of technology around which the plot revolves is a human-(prisoner-)powered calculator, but the clockwork and trains play a huge part too.

The female characters aren't just "strong", they're actually real, genuine people - although the setting acknowledges gender inequality, many if not most of the movers and shakers in the story are believable women with authority, intelligence, and cunning. Male characters are similarly fleshed out, and gender (as well as cultural and romantic) conflict plays a part in the plot, but it's not heavy-handed or annoying, although some of the characters themselves certainly are (in ways that make them readably human).

The whole shebang is really well-grounded in Australian (and then North American) geography and culture, so non-Aussie readers would do well to have a map at hand while reading to get the full effect. In the second book, the North Americans fight their wars via duel-by-champion in wood-and-cloth airplanes, and that just racks up eleventy-million awesome points in itself. Saying too much about the third book would be spoilerish, but needless to say the tech is even cooler.

The main appeal, though, is that it's got dueling librarians. Like with flintlock pistols. And they do firing squads sometimes. And that is basically the most awesome thing ever."

I decided to read this book with my fiance after reading some awesome reviews. We gave it 100 pages but it wasn't doing anything for either one of us. None of the characters stuck out and the ideas were strange but not necessarily interesting. It's a huge book and I think there's another book after it so we didn't want to waste months reading it and then be left with a cliffhanger. ( )