skygiants

I picked up The Half-Made World because I saw Felix Gilman talk at an event a few years ago and thought he had interesting things to say. Unfortunately, I did not like The Half-Made World.

I can't actually think of any Weird Steampunk/SFF Westerns I do like particularly at the moment -- with maybe the one exception of Kage Baker's Mendoza in Hollywood, a book I love WELL beyond its deserts (& I guess The Gunslinger, a book of which this one is not un-reminiscent, but there's contextual reasons for that) -- so it's possible and even probable that the genre is just generally not my thing, but I'm ... let's say generously, KIND OF confused by the worldbuilding choices.

The Half-Made World is set in a West that's -- well, I can't tell if AU!Europe is actually on the same content as AU!America or not, there may or may not be an ocean in between, but either way in the East Things Are Civilized And We Have Hospitals And Fancy Psychology and Out West Things Are Weird And Violent And Controlled By Weird Spirits until you go all the way west and literally get to the end of the world where reality comes unmoored and monsters are created from the hazy mist.

The West is dominated by two extremely powerful immortal forces: The Line, which are giant ... possessed monster trains....? ... who conquer land to create dystopian industrial railroad-linked cities where all the people exist in downtrodden assembly-line order, and The Gun, which are violent spirits who possess/partner with violent individuals to create Forces Of Bloodthirsty Chaotic Neutral Verging On Evil that oppose The Line and also perform other random acts of ballad-worthy violence, just 'cause.

Our three protagonists are: Liv, a lady doctor who comes from the East and is Going West to try experimental psychology on patients who have been brain-damaged by The Line's weapons; Creedmore, a semi-reluctant Agent of the Gun who's been sent to kidnap one of Liv's brain-damaged patients who was once a general of the one Noble Foolish Doomed Republic and may hold Important Secrets; and Lowry, a Typical Agent Of The Line whose mission is to stop Creedmore and capture the general of the Noble Foolish Doomed Republic, ditto ditto. The Noble Foolish Doomed Republic, for the record, was stuffy and overly bureaucratic, but nonetheless had a brief period of inspirational glory which may have subsequently resulted in the only thing that can defeat The Line and The Gun.

The metaphors here ain't subtle, but what the actual message is, I'm honestly not sure. I'm also REALLY EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE about the fact that the embattled and oppressed indigenous population of The West are creepy magical inhuman white people with strange powers who live under hills, come back to life after you kill them and can't deal with iron? I can't actually decide which part is worse, the fact that it's full-on magical native, or literally overwriting the history of the American West with EUROPEAN FAIRIES.

I mean, to be fair, there are several explicitly non-white people in the book! But where they came from and how they got there is HIGHLY unclear, given that, once again, all of America's history of racial oppression, slavery, etc. is now being written onto -- I reiterate -- BASICALLY EUROPEAN FAIRIES. I think there might even be a mentioned human character who is coded Native American, which makes the metaphorical landscape THAT MUCH MORE CONFUSING.

That said, at one point a side character briefly appears -- a black showman-inventor traveling around to demonstrate his Miraculous Devices to the public -- who made enough of an impression on me in his three-sentence cameo that I was like "man, I wish I was reading the book about that guy!"

Turns out the sequel is in fact about that guy. Dammit, Felix Gilman!