Customer Reviews

Escapement

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book was at least 1/3rd too long. The story of Ms. Childress had very little to do with the resolution and while her adventures were mildly interesting they added nothing. Traveling around the world in a submarine might be interesting reading, but not here. The story of the girl who made the gleam was interesting while she was on the Wall, but her trip to Europe and Egypt could have been improved. I never had the feeling that the author had been to Europe or Egypt. The author enjoys throwing out inferences to shadow groups and conspiracies, but you have to do more than glimpse someone once in awhile having an obscure conversation. The story of the sailor was just repetitious, fight an overwhelming number of people, get wounded, wander on, fight an overwhelming number of people.
As for the resolution, it was rushed and unsatisfying. You never had the feeling that any of the three parts were in danger, so there was little suspense. I have spent hundreds of pages with these people and you want more than a page saying that she wandered off with a character who is minor if not completely unknown.

Escapement is a great book. All of the good parts of its predecessor Mainspring are present with none of the bad parts. Because of Mainspring, I picked up and started Escapement with caution and low expectations. Now that I'm done, I can't wait for the next book in the series. This is some tasty fantasy!

My only complaint would be that we only got a glimpse of the many exciting and interesting locations and people our protagonists encounter. Hopefully Jay is planning to make this a long series with many installments, because he's created a world that deserves and supports many more adventures.

Escapement is a better book than its predecessor Mainspring because it explores its mechanically driven universe, evidenced by planets and moons driven by gears and clockworks, through the fascinating viewpoints of the three main characters with a richness of vision that is quite compelling.

Lake manages to create a world with mystery and mechanism, while exploring theology and human behavior, that promises the thrill of discovery that great sci-fi/fantasy delivers.

However, like Mainspring, which follows one character across a fascinating landscape only to descend into mysticism by its conclusion, Escapement offers loads of moral dilemmas and action by its ending without any more understanding of the fundamental workings of the universe that kept us reading all along.

Knowing that there must be another book to follow would have helped me to understand Escapement's place as a middle book in a trilogy. Now that you know, you may be able to enjoy even more than I did.

I bought this book hoping for a good science fiction read. Unfortunately Escapement wasn't what I was looking for. The story begins well but quickly fizzles out. I like the small community Jay Lake creates in the first few pages. This is largely what kept me reading on. I labored through this book in hopes that the story would get more interesting but it never did. If the story focused on the girl in the village and her journey, I would have enjoyed it more. But the author wastes alot of time on other characters that, in the end, don't matter. One of the storylines didn't have much of an impact on what I felt was the main storyline. Hundreds of pages were wasted on a woman sailing around on a Chinese submarine. Maybe her part of the story has more of an impact in the next book (which I will NOT read). Hundreds more pages were wasted on floating ships (the cover looks way cooler than the story actually is) and a giant drill.
I do have to say that Jay Lake is a good writer. He is very descriptive but not overly so. But this story is long and boring. It just wasn't that interesting to me. I doubt that I will every read another book by Jay Lake.
I finished this book as a matter of principle. If I buy a book, I will read it. From now on though, I will do some research first.

I finished reading Jay Lake's "Escapement" this morning. I enjoyed the book, which I found to be richer and deeper than "Mainspring", the first book in Lake's Clockwork Trilogy. ("Pinion", the third book in the trilogy, is currently available in trade paperback.) I don't have time for a full review, but I do want to comment on three things that the existing reviews on Amazon.com appear to have gotten wrong:

1. Read "Mainspring" first. Most of the people who have reviewed "Escapement" on Amazon.com appear not to have read the first book in the trilogy, and I think that has affected both their understanding of and their emotional engagement with the second book. While it is possible to read and mostly understand "Escapement" on its own, the first book eases the reader into the spirit of Lake's work in a way that the second does not.

2. Don't expect a religious tract. This trilogy is a "what if?" story: What if the world was so obviously designed and built by an intelligent hand that nobody could deny the fact? Lake's answer is, essentially, that religion isn't about objective facts, it's about what people make of the objective facts, and even really big, obvious, objective facts can produce many distinct (and possibly warring) subjective interpretations. It's more difficult to say what Lake wants us to make of the magical (and possibly Divine) events that occur, such as the appearance of Archangel Gabriel to young Hethor in "Mainspring", but I (a) hope that he provides some clarification in "Pinion" and (b) think that he's mainly just playing around with his own authorial role as God the Creator of this fictional world.

3. Don't expect pure steampunk, pure clockpunk, or pure anything. I would describe these books as fantasy with steampunk/clockpunk trappings, religious interests, mildly archaic language, and picaresque tendencies, leavened with a bit of science fictional narrative distance and fascination with weird technologies. As a science fiction fan who sometimes reads fantasy and who has no special interest in steampunk or clockpunk, this is fine by me, but readers who are heavily invested in *punk subgenres may be put off.

Lake's Clockwork Trilogy does not represent a major breakthrough in fiction, and I doubt it will bring on many religious epiphanies, but it is (at least in the first two books) well-written, packed with adventure, spiced with nice bits of weirdness, and sufficiently thought-provoking to avoid being filed in the "empty escapism" bin.

I enjoyed this book, but I will probably not read the first book in the trilogy (Mainspring) or the subsequent book (Pinion). I have two major problems:

1, Writing style - not as transparent as I would like. I kept running into things that just made me stop and think the author was trying too hard. A bit like if the comic book guy from The Simpsons decided to write an alternative history piece of science fiction.

2, Characters left dangling - I understand this is a trilogy, but I still feel like major characters in the book were just dropped with no explanation. I found this pretty unsatisfying.

That having been said, the overall concept is very sound and well-imagined. Without giving too much away, the plot weaves together a young prodigy, an old librarian and a surly military man on an adventure that covers large aamounts of Northern Earth. It's mostly a chase novel, with very little in the way of actual plot (or plot resolution). That having been said, I really enjoyed some parts of the plot and I finished the book. Maybe it should get 3.5 stars.

The only "Steam Punk" novel I've read was "The Difference Engine" but I found it intriguing. As I searched out more of the genre "Escapement" seemed to be at, or near, the top of the list. So I threw down me monies and tooks me chance. Not the best monies me ever spent.

This is by no means a bad book but far from a Hugo Award by my estimate. I do like the writing style. As with Gibson's and Sterling's "The Difference Engine" Jay Lake has the Dickensian style of patter down pretty well. He has a consistent voice and has created a nifty elsewhen and peppered it with some interesting characters. But there are some inherent problems as well.

You have three stories running simultaneously with three distinct characters. As others have pointed out, many pages have been spent on the Childress character and she has no real bearing on the outcome of things. On the other end, you are introduced to characters and situations early in the book who are later dropped, but who beg for a greater part in the proceedings.

Another problem I found was that some relatively heavy things happen during the story, but, even though we're told of the impact they have on the characters, we don't feel it. Some of the scenes should have been much more exciting to read given their content.

As I did a minor bit of research on Jay Lake, I found he's written a huge number of short stories and therein might lie the problem. He might need a bit more time to figure out how to use a larger canvas.

This is by no means a bad read. It just needs a bit of honing.

This book features characters we briefly meet in Mainspring. I highly recommend this book for those who loved Mainspring--this story is AWESOME! I was sad that Mainspring is so compartmentalized since Escapement really stands on its own. There is very little carryover from the first book. The spirit of the writing--the real magic--however, blossoms again through the new female protagonist and the old librarian lady from the first book. I was VERY happy to see her bloom in this book. I definitely see that Escapement could be really the first half of one book, so Paolina's journey can continue. It would truly be great if Hethor from the first book could reappear and have him intertwined with Paolina's story in a third book. This is a must read for Mainspring fans. Again Jay's work touched me deeply, and I truly cherish both his books. If other people are affected this way, he is going to have a cult following.

'Mainspring' was a self-contained adventure, and I wasn't sure what kind of sequel this could be. But all the elements of the first novel, and some truly interesting and surprising new characters make this a great novel all on its own. I can't wait for the next one: Pinion, I think, in 2010.

Similar to Mainspring, Escapement has characters that are very easy to follow. It also contains a quest that is engaging in an absolutely fascinating world.

Mainspring resolution ended in a manner that was painful for the reader escapement's improvement on the original is a much more satisfying conclusion.

The only complaint I have would be the time devoted to Childress' story, she was pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things and not all that interesting. I found myself skimming over her sections towards the end.

I'm very much looking forward to the next installment.