Reivew: "Souls in the Great Machine" by Sean McMullen

"Souls in the Great Machine" by Sean McMullen is the first book in the Greatwinter series, some of the best Australian SF I've read (which, unfortunately, is not much: Aussie SF is extremely hard to get a hold of. Only the very top authors can be found in bookshops and libraries) It's an incredibly inventive tale of Australia two millenia years after the destruction of civilization by a strange and mysterious force known as the Call that robs people of their minds and pulls them towards the sea.

Fortunately for humanity, this only occurs once every week or so, in great Callsweeps that cross the land. But other barriers exist to the resurgance of modern civilization. All the major Australian religons, Christianity, Gentheism and Islam, now prohibit the use of engines powered by fuel, and some force melts electric devices wherever they are activated. Still, humans are ingenious people. Clockwork Call anchors hold people from the Call, trains powered by wind or pedals cross ancient railways and a system of lighthouses functions as a telegraph in a world where electricity fails. The imagination Sean McMullen has put into this world makes it leap of the page and into your mind.

Most central to the story, however, is a human-powered computing engine known as the Calculor, built by the brilliant Highliber Zarvora Cybeline. Zarvora has decided to shake up centuries of tradition in Libris, the library that preserves ancient knowledge and serves a similar purpose to that of the Church in Europe's Dark Ages. From then on, the story progresses, pulling in several other viewpoint characters and progressing over several years.

The story is infused with a streak of humour that lightens the tone of the book considerably, and never at inappropriate moments. The only problem in this area is one character seems totally defined by the size of her breasts. Not funny, and not right either. The character only plays a relatively small part, though, and does not destroy the book.

A major weakness in this book is that midway through the book, half the characters have a massive shift in characterization. One turns into a villain, Zarvora stops being an iron-fisted tyrant and another becomer a romantic. I understand that the book was originally two novellas and a short story, which would explain the problem, but perhaps a little more attention needed to be directed to this 180-degree change in the characters in the editing.

That said, it's still a good book. Go and read it in a library, and if you like it, go and read the next one.

Score: 8/10