The Waking Engine

December 16, 2013
The late Cooper, once of New York City, is surprised to find death a temporary condition, each life a brief stop in a nearly endless chain of existence. He awakens from his brief demise in the vast and ancient City Unspoken, a community dominated by cruel elites, where a fortunate few may perhaps find total oblivion. Marooned in the decaying city, surrounded by debauched Death Boys and Charnel Girls, Cooper, who has only died once, finds himself a curiosity in a realm where death itself rarely offers final release. Edison’s rambling secondary-world science fantasy tale, firmly anchored in the more amoral end of the New Weird, plays out in lavish prose, meandering through squalid slums and grand palaces, more interested in tourism than plot. The characters don’t object much to sadism and brutality, save when they do not themselves get to dole it out; readers who dislike graphic depictions of casual beatings may want to give this one a pass.

December 15, 2013
Imagine Cooper's confusion when he wakes up in what appears to be a foreign city. Imagine his surprise when he's told he died, and this is the next step on his journey, the same journey every person takes, dying and living for thousands of years on thousands of worlds. Imagine his mind-boggling shock when he's told that the place where he's awakened, the City Unspoken, is usually a person's final stop; Cooper seems to have skipped right to the end of his own journey. There are more surprises in store, too, in this imaginative SF novel, in which everyman Cooper is positioned as the (possible) savior of the rapidly disintegrating City Unspoken. The author unavoidably covers some of the same ground as Philip Jose Farmer's classic Riverworld series (in which people are repeatedly reincarnated along the banks of a seemingly endless river), but it would be a serious mistake to think of this as a retread. Edison breaks some new ground here, and even when he's in familiar territory, he finds his own way of exploring it. An impressive debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)