The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, the greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane.

I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book, which I would have been interested enough to seek out anyway.

It suffers slightly by comparison to another steampunk sci-fi favourite of mine, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age_Or_a_Young_Lady_s_Illustrated_Primer
but it is well worth the tour of this debut writer's dark imagination.

Even though I felt it was, at first, a gothic horror version of Charlie and the Chocolate factory crossed with Angela Carter's “Nights at the circus” [leaving aside the obvious “The Tempest” and “The Wizard of Oz”:] the plot soon grows into it's own unique creature.

Populated with mechanical men, monsters and wizards this is a fantasy world that is strangely like our own in it's noise and loss of faith in “the age of miracles”

I thought the book had a few sections that I skipped over where it was just a wall of words describing something I had long before gotten the point of, but other than that I thought the world portrayed made sense, had interesting characters and events and told a story I didn't want to put down.

It's hard to label Dexter Palmer's debut novel The Dream of Perpetual Motion. There are definitely elements of steampunk, but, at the same time, it's not exactly what I think of when I hear the word steampunk. You could just group it in the sci-fi genre–it's an alternative history where robots essentially infest the earth–but that doesn't seem the right place for it either. Inspired by The Tempest, this novel is equally Willy Wonka as it is Shakespeare. Classifying it is hard to do, which leaves the doors of criticism and interpretation wide open.

Fans of quality literature should not be scared however. Yes, there's a little steampunk and a lot of sci-fi. But there also is a wide spread of wonderful writing–vibrant language both formal and witty, moving scenes filled with a poeticism missing in too much literature. The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a thoughtful and gripping work.

My greatest critique of the book is that it loses it's magic half way through. Now, this is fitting given the subject–a world where everything magical has been explained away and duplicated with technology. The world where we first meet our hero, Harold Winslow, is seen through the eyes of a child. And it is a gorgeous, fascinating landscape. It is easy to become swept up in little Harold's dreams and fantasies. It's fun and it's terrifying, but mostly, it's magical.

As Harold grows, however, he begins to see how little magic there really is in the world. So it's only appropriate that the text reflect his. And Palmer does a magnificent job presenting this transition seamlessly. Whatever tiny elements of magic still exists at the end of the novel are explained away by the most tedious monologues. It's appropriate, but that doesn't mean it is as fun. Without the magic, the story begins to move with the mechanical motion of its army of robots.