Sunday, May 09, 2010

Reading - The Dream of Perpetual Motion

I am reading The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer. It's an alternative history of the early 20th century, where machines with gears and vacuum tubes dominate the landscape. In the time before the machines, just a generation before, real angels would appear and magically intervene, but no more. Harold, an unlikely hero (perhaps he's an antihero; I haven't gotten that far), tells the story of his life and interaction with the mega-mogul responsible for the man-machines and most other mechanical wonders in his city-state Xeroville: Prospero Taligent.

Dream is a very strange book. The writing is not of the read-lightly-get-sucked-in variety. The whole thing is rather byzantine, like the cover illustration:



All that's not to say I don't like it; on the contrary, I find it quite interesting. It's just not the kind of light read I could use at the moment.

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