Angelmaker in Niners (io9)

Jun 26, 2012 Kaila rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2012, science-fiction, io9-book-club, fiction

I don't feel qualified to write a review for this. It's a real book - it transcends being labeled as "fantasy." And that makes me throw up my hands soothingly and say, "I didn't mean it, you know better, trust what they say over there!" I'm going to try to put down how I felt about it but I find it very hard.

First thing, both covers are gorgeous, and the one I had (the yellow and black) helped me understand what the hell he was talking about when it came to describing the "clock work book."

Ange I don't feel qualified to write a review for this. It's a real book - it transcends being labeled as "fantasy." And that makes me throw up my hands soothingly and say, "I didn't mean it, you know better, trust what they say over there!" I'm going to try to put down how I felt about it but I find it very hard.

First thing, both covers are gorgeous, and the one I had (the yellow and black) helped me understand what the hell he was talking about when it came to describing the "clock work book."

Angelmaker is written beautifully. The language is emotive and evocative. A few times I found myself wanting to read aloud certain paragraphs to whomever was in the room at the time, exclaiming over how pretty it was. The language and structure is so advanced, in fact, that anytime I actually got a reference I would be so proud of myself for understanding what he was talking about. I would then immediately feel stupid because that meant there were dozens of other references going right over my head. (view spoiler)

I didn't mind the shifting narratives, and I quite enjoyed Edie's sordid past. I think I liked the flashbacks more than the current events actually. You give me one big baddie with the awesome name "The Opium Khan," and I can picture him and know he is evil, and that is that. But the main story got so convoluted with bad guys and good guys and then THE BIG REVEAL at the end had me shrugging my shoulders with apathy. The best words I've heard applied to the characters is "Dickensian plotting." Which is really just perfect, because every character that you meet in the first 400 pages is guaranteed to show up for the big finish. Every side story is wrapped up conveniently in the denouement.

Apparently a lot of people find this books funny. I...didn't. At all. Like, I never even cracked a smile. Maybe it was because of all those references going over my head, or maybe it's because I don't really understand British humor, but I didn't even know it was considered a comedy until I read through some other reviews upon finishing it.

As a nerd, I find it my duty to watch through nerd shows. If you name any Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, I can probably rattle off a quick synopsis. So last year I decided I really needed to see what all this hoop-la was about one "Dr. Who". It is now a year later and I am only now finishing up season 2, because I find the show completely unbearable. No matter what happens, it is always, as I have come to call it, Dr.Who-ex-machina, or Deus-ex-Dr.Who, depending on my mood. A wave of the sonic screwdriver and all is fixed. Not to mention that all he has to do is show up and every woman for 10 miles around swoons and wishes she were as lucky as Rose Tyler (Season 2, remember).

Ok, I know, this isn't a review of Dr. Who, and yes, I am going to continue watching the series because I really REALLY want to understand why people like it so much. But if you, like me, are perhaps not the biggest Dr. Who fan, then you will understand why I didn't like Angelmaker. It also probably works the other way I'm guessing, in that if you love Dr. Who, you would probably love Angelmaker. The same tropes appear, and that is why I have begun to suspect I just don't get it because it's British. Joe Spork magically saves us with some sort of mechanical miracle that I still don't completely understand. He's a clueless nobody with nothing but good intentions, but he manages to bag the hottest girl around, with very little preamble except, "Amazing sex, you are now my life partner."

Man oh man, Polly Cradle: the love interest. She was so perfect, she became a caricature of herself. How convenient that she falls in love with our reluctant hero when neither one of them does anything the least bit romantic. She is basically around to convince us, the readers, that Joe Spork is in fact turning into a man. I'm not convinced, and Polly telling me it is so does not make it so.

This book will speak to the right person. I, however, just didn't get it. ...more

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Apr 04, 2013 Anne Charnock rated it really liked it

Shelves: arthur-c-clarke-2013

Nick Harkaway’s sprawling yarn Angelmaker starts out in present-day London and brings together two characters who are an unlikely SF duo. Joe is the son of a gangster and Edie is an octogenarian female spook. She’s ever vigilant with her bags packed, waiting for her past to pay a visit. Which it does.

Joe Spork leads an impecunious life having shunned a life of crime despite his first-class underworld connections. Instead he follows his grandfather’s trade – fixing clocks and Victorian automata. Nick Harkaway’s sprawling yarn Angelmaker starts out in present-day London and brings together two characters who are an unlikely SF duo. Joe is the son of a gangster and Edie is an octogenarian female spook. She’s ever vigilant with her bags packed, waiting for her past to pay a visit. Which it does.

Joe Spork leads an impecunious life having shunned a life of crime despite his first-class underworld connections. Instead he follows his grandfather’s trade – fixing clocks and Victorian automata. The relationship between the three generations of Sporks, is explored by jumping back and forth in time, providing some of the best writing in the novel. Harkaway also writes well about Joe’s relationship with technology:

"Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology – he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts the duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system."

Joe’s and Edie’s lives collide when he is asked to fix what turns out to be a doomsday machine. His life is then in peril as a sect of mad-monk ‘Ruskinites’ attempt to retrieve the machine and deploy it for their own evil purposes. And arching over this story are Edie’s previous espionage encounters with a Moriarty-style villain, Shem Shem Tsien.

If you like a SF novel that’s replete with tangential narratives then Angelmaker might be your preference for the Arthur C Clarke Award 2013. In the final 25% of the novel there are fewer asides and the pace picks up. I’d be the first to say that pace isn’t everything but the diversions in Angelmaker did, for me, feel draining.

In the first 25% of the novel, I was perplexed by Harkaway’s descriptions of female characters (even though they were minor characters). For example: ‘a bubbly, bounteous American woman’ and ‘a bubbly forty-something called Joyce, whose considerable cleavage…’ Coupled with a surprisingly adolescent tone when writing about Edie as a young woman, I decided that I probably stood outside the natural reader-catchment for this novel.

Angelmaker is regarded as science fiction in a wider understanding of the genre. It’s a surreal mix of spy thriller, gangster comedy and urban fantasy and its inclusion in the shortlist shows that the Arthur C Clarke Award is outward looking, which is a good thing. ...more

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Feb 04, 2013 Karlo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, mystery-detective, own, alt-history, ebook, espionage-spy

Wow. This was quite simply one of the best books I've read in quite a while. It treads some familiar ground; I could tell you that it's a bit like Kraken at the beginning, reminds me a little of Cryptonomicon in the way it jumps between a timelines in a family's history, has a pulp dimension that never quite dove in pastiche, and an economy of ideas that leaves nothing explained that doesn't at some point come back into the story and deliver in spades. Yay!

Sometimes I feel like Authors write boo ...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Ken rated it really liked it

Quite good. If Tom Robbins and Douglas Adams got together to write a steam punk crime caper novel, it wouldn't be this one, but that's as close as I can get to describing it. A delight, and quite worth the time. A bit wordy in places, which slowed the pace a bit much here and there, thus the missing star in my rating. But I will definitely be eagerly awaiting this author's next book. ...more

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