Customer Reviews

The Machinery of Light

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Williams' first two books The Mirrored Heavens and The Burning Skies were incredible works. I wondered whether Williams was setting himself up for an impossible act to follow and fizzle on the final installment--like so many trilogies seem to eventually do. But the finale of Williams' Autumn Rain trilogy delivers, with one of the most mindblowing endings I've ever read in science fiction. Questions are answered. And the future seems far more likely as told by Williams in The Machinery of Light than I'd like to believe. (I'm looking for bunkers in Montana this weekend!) Better yet, and particularly refreshing as I think about the Lost finale, he ties up all loose ends and answers all our questions. Just be prepared for the answers to the questions you ask. Set against the backdrop of an all-out war between Earth's two superpowers, this book moves fast and reads like a movie. My only regret is that now it's all over and there's no faux-encore coming folks. It's done and it's all here.

In 2110, the assassination of the American President Harrison leads to a military takeover of the United States. Ignoring the Treaty of Zurich of 2105, the American Generals seize an opportunity and quickly launch an attack against the Eurasian Alliance led by the Russians and Chinese in an attempt to destroy their space-aerial defenses. WW III has been lunched (See The Mirrored Heavens and The Burning Skies).

The Eurasian Alliance launches the top secret mega-spaceships to destroy the enemy and its fleet. Meanwhile the Autumn Rain commando unit begins a seemingly suicidal desperate maneuver on Luna just ahead of the Eurasian joint fleet but behind the squad's creator. At the same time super cyborg Claire Haskell the Manilishi post-human implements the programming of her designer-creator Matthew Sinclair. He is several steps closer to achieving his goal as he has deployed project Armageddon.

Fasten your seat belts as the latest dystopian military science fiction thriller starts at hyperspeed and accelerates from there. The action overwhelms the key characters, but no one (except bewildered stunned first time riders) will care as The Machinery of Light is an exhilarating action-packed futuristic twister in which reality is blurred at best. Readers will appreciate David J. Williams' fast-paced but extremely grim twenty-second century earth-moon sphere of operations.

Harriet Klausner

David Williams is somewhat of a genius when it comes to concocting plots. This has been evident from the first 2 volumes of the Autumn Rain trilogy Mirrored Heavens and Burning Skies. When both of them ended with cliffhanger-ish situations it made the wait for the last book The Machinery of Light a bit hard.

The Machinery of Light begins with Claire or Manilishi (as she's known now by everyone). It outlines the main conspirators behind the assassination of the US president Andrew Harrison, namely his Infocomm and Spacecomm heads Stephanie Montrose and Jharek Szilard who now have plans for each other but must wittingly galvanize their forces and fight off the Eurasian contingent.

Amidst all of this an Autum Rain devotee returns and is revealed to readers. This might be someone whom you had your doubts about since the latter 1/3rd of "Burning Skies". Seb Linehan manages to survive the end of the burning Skies and finds himself in some hot water (for lack of a better term). Leo Sarmax and Lyle Spencer seek to terminate a fugitive and find that their task might me harder than they expect.

All the main characters from the previous 2 books return for this trilogy ender. Many secrets are also revealed and the action just never seems to end following a trend from the previous books. David Williams has always said that the last book would be the actual end and would resolve all questions about the saga and he definitely stays true to his word. Not to give away details about the ending of this novel, but it was something totally unexpected. Sure there were clues interspersed but the climax is something which couldn't have been easily predicted. The end was what gave this book and the trilogy something of a spectacular read for myself.

David J. Williams continues his hyper-manic, action heavy prose and if you are reading this book then I'm going to assume that you like this style to finish the earlier two books. There's no let up as the all the characters are either chasing or avoiding each other as they go through multiple variations of their original mission.

What is eventually revealed about the Autumn Rain group will definitely blow the reader's minds. Based on this reveal, a lot of things from the previous 2 books make a lot of sense as to how and why Autumn Rain always had the upper hand in the most troublesome situations. The POV is constantly switched in between the chapters early on and by the time the end is approached POV changes are occurring every couple of paragraphs.

The end sequence is what makes this book standout amongst the entire trilogy and as I was reading it, it reminded me a lot of the climax of the Godfather wherein orchestrated by Michael Corleone, a lot of killings and events occur simultaneously thereby heralding his ascension to the head of the Corleone as well the Mafia families of the East Coast. A similar play-by-play occurs in these last few pages except that David Williams has jacked up the action to almost unseen levels and by bringing it to a spectacular end, makes him known as an author to watch out for in whatever he chooses to write about next.

The Machinery of Light was a fascinating climax to the tale begun years ago and by closing on such a high, it is my hope that David will be hitting a lot of "Best-of" lists by the year end!

Lets start off first and note that this is the final book of the Autumn Rain Trilogy. Thus, if you have not read The Mirrored Heavens and The Burning Skies already, you should go do that now. If you have already read those, than you already have a fair understanding of what this trilogy is made up of. Fast, brutal action and more plot twists and double crosses than anyone should be tasked with keeping track of.

The Machinery of Light picks up where The Burning Skies left off. The World is on the very brink of World War III and our protagonists are scattered all over the Earth-Moon system. As the final war kicks off, the picture slowly starts to clear that everything has been orchestrated to get here. I won't go into details on the plot here, but will state that this book most assuredly concludes the series. There is no wiggle room to squeeze another book out or dangling plot threads to keep us wondering. This is a true bona fide conclusion that is so rare these days. I can also state that I never even came close to guessing how the endgame would play out. Even with 5 pages to go, I was still left wondering. But in the end, everything is revealed.

I thoroughly enjoyed this series. There are some things that potential readers should know. As a whole, this is a very bleak outlook on the future of our world. There are very few "happy moments" and in general, I can state unequivocally that I would hate to live in this future. The protagonists are in many ways unlikable human beings. Self serving, manipulative and treacherous. Yet I still found myself getting attached to a number of them and caring about how they fared with WWIII raging in the background. This series takes place in the year 2110, which raises my only bone of contention. The level of technology just doesn't seem plausible in only 100 years from now. At a minimum, we would need to have most of this technology now and be building at a breakneck pace to achieve the infrastructure that is present in these books 100 years from now. It's a relatively minor point, but one that stuck with me starting with The Burning Skies and through the end of The Machinery of Light.

Lastly, this book is almost worth the purchase price just for the cover art alone. This is seriously one of the best looking covers I have seen on a SFF book and it is also one of the few that really captures the essence of a particular scene in perfect detail.

David J Williams has written a tour de force to kick of what I think will be a brilliant career. I can't recommend this enough to fans of hard sci-fi, cyberpunk or even just good military fiction.

I didn't think that it was humanly possible for David J. Williams to come up with something even more action-packed than both The Mirrored Heavens and The Burning Skies, but somehow the author managed to outdo himself. I called the second volume a veritable train wreck, and The Machinery of Light takes it up a couple of notches. This final installment is another balls-to-the-wall, no-holds-barred kind of book that pulls out all the stops!

Here's the blurb:

With The Machinery of Light, David J. Williams completes his furiously paced, stunningly imagined trilogy - a work of vision, beauty, and pulse-pounding futuristic action.

September 26, 2110. 10:22 GMT. Following the assassination of the American president, the generals who have seized power initiate World War Three, launching a surprise attack against the Eurasian Coalition's forces throughout the Earth-Moon system. Across the orbits, tens of thousands of particle beams and lasers blast away at one another. The goal: crush the other side's weaponry, paving the way for nuclear bombardment of the cities.

As inferno becomes Armageddon, the rogue commando unit Autumn Rain embarks on one last run. Matthew Sinclair, an imprisoned spymaster, plots his escape. And his former protégé Claire Haskell, capable of hacking into both nets and minds, is realizing that all her powers may merely be playing into Sinclair's plans. For even as Claire evades the soldiers of East and West amid carnage in the lunar tunnels, the surviving members of the Rain converge upon the Moon, one step ahead of the Eurasian fleets but one step behind the mastermind who created Autumn Rain - and his terrible final secret.

Oddly enough, I remember commenting that one of the shortcomings of The Mirrored Heavens was its lack of depth compared to the breakneck pace of the exciting action sequences. The Burning Skies revealed just how complex a tale this series truly was, setting the stage for one terrific finale. Well, it turns out that The Machinery of Light is even more multilayered and convoluted than the first two volumes combined. Filled to the brim with unanticipated twists and turns, Williams has the uncanny ability to switch things around when you least expect it, taking the story on a different path you never would have guessed. The man appears to relish the thought of pulling the rug from under his readers' feet every chance he gets, keeping us guessing and second-guessing throughout the novel. World War III is just the backdrop of this tale. To a certain extent, it's just a diversion as the truth about Matthew Sinclair and Autumn Rain is revealed.

The rhythm is pedal-to-the-metal from start to finish. There is not a single lull in the action, making The Machinery of Light a page-turner that is well nigh impossible to put down!

As the Manilishi, Claire Haskell remains the central character of the novel. And yet, as all hells break loose, a panoply of POV and non-POV characters have an integral role to play in the endgame. With storylines built on so many layers of deceit, the different perspectives of various characters are required to help make sense of all that is occurring. As such, it helped carry the myriad plotlines forward to have Strom Carson, Leo Sarmax, Stefan Lynx, as well as a number of other protagonists as point of view characters.

The Machinery of Light is divided into five parts. As was the case with its predecessors, there are no chapters. The narrative jumps from one POV to another in rapid succession, with each POV portion rarely exceeding a single page. Flipping from one quick sequence to the next will make your head spin. Like all good rollercoaster rides, all you can do is hang on tight and keep going till you reach the end. Which comes all too rapidly, what with such a pace maintained throughout the novel.

The Machinery of Light is a another fantastic blend of military science fiction and cyberthriller that should appeal to fans of Richard Morgan and William Gibson. By bringing this complex series to a close with such a bang, David J. Williams proved once and for all the he is for real. I'll be lining up for whatever he writes next.

Intelligent and exhilarating in equal measures, The Machinery of Light features enough politicking, backstabbing, action and explosions and battles to satisfy anyone looking for a good science fiction yarn that goes all out.

first things first: i thought the first two books of the Autumn Rain trilogy were very impressive. i picked up this one, eagerly awaiting the conclusion to the saga. i ended up blasting through it in just three days, its that amazing. it might not be perfect, but it holds your interest like nothing i've ever read. the trilogy started out as a pretty standard military/espionage scifi thriller, but The Machinery of Light takes the narrative beyond the here and now. by the end, the entire universe, as well as the course of human evolution is changed.

while i love the plot, pace, and intensity of the book, there are some issues that i'm a little annoyed with. firstly, the point-of-view changes A LOT. this is especially true when the action ramps up. you'll be following a certain character until something happens, and then you switch to another character until something happens, etc. i'm sure Williams does this to break up the narrative and give it that extra sense of urgency, but it can get confusing after a while. another issue: none of the characters are very well defined. loyalties switch on a dime, betrayals are everywhere, and no one seems to know who THEY are. this is a world where no one trusts anyone, and will use everyone as a tool in their own plan. this would be ok, except that everyone's plans always seem to be changing. also, when one of the characters asks what's going on, the answer they get is usually wrapped in riddle, or is just their own question repeated back to them. Claire is the biggest victim of this, because she doesn't know what she is and she's the one everyone else is trying to control. i'm all for a little mystery, but when even the characters don't know what's going on, the reader also doesn't know what's going on. this adds to the confusion.

however, despite those issues i really REALLY enjoyed this book. i enjoyed the entire trilogy for that matter. i highly recommend them. as long as you can keep your head straight and sort through the ambiguities, twists and turns, you'll probably enjoy reading the Autumn Rain trilogy too. i'm now eagerly awaiting what David J. Williams cooks up next...

Literally just finished reading the third book in David J. Williams' Autumn Rain trilogy, The Machinery of Light. This is an action-packed sci-fi thriller that you can totally see being made into a movie, with intense battle scenes that are non-stop, along with highly visual settings that the movie industry would love. There's also some heavy-duty tech going on, mostly dealing with the author's vision of what the "internet" and "computers" will be like in the future, what he's calling "zones" in the book. Nearly all of his main characters access these computer zones through hardware wired through their minds, and nearly all of the REAL warfare between the factions is waged and won on these zones. All of the high-tech mercenary gear and other massive weapons and mechware are essentially the brute force needed to get the razors--those who hack the zones--into place so they can do their thing.

All of this is background that was set up in the first book, but it gives you the flavor of all three. In this third novel, David J. Williams' takes the stakes--already set pretty high in the first two novels--to new levels. We still get the non-stop action, but now all of the players--mechs, razors, the Autumn Rain group, the Manilishi, etc--are into position for the final power play. And this power play will extend from the Himilayas all the way to the center of the Moon, and in many ways beyond. And through it all, the main characters are trying to determine if it all hasn't been foreseen and their actions predetermined by the mastermind behind it all, Sinclair, who's real purpose no one really knows.

I loved all three of these books. They are fast-paced (I'm not certain they could be any faster actually, without everything being an instant download to the brain), well-written, sharp, and with a driving force that propels the reader forward whether they want to go there or not. I don't generally read sci-fi, because too much of it is focused on the tech and not enough on the characters. There's a ton of tech here, certainly, but we also get to know the characters, and the final actions that some of them take are directly related to their own personal needs and wants. That itself was compelling, but where the novel ended--the real sci-fi element behind the book, not just the heavy-duty machinery and weaponry--was also suitably thought-provoking. Like any good sci-fi book out there, the end result isn't exactly precise, isn't perfectly understandable, but has just enough solidity to make it feel real and to leave readers with interesting questions that can only be answered by themselves. Think in terms of the ending of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Williams' ending may not be as profound (it's arguable), but it has that same flavor. I can't say much more about this ending without significantly spoiling the plot, so I'll shut up now.

I don't know what's next on David J. Williams' plate, but I'd definitely like to see what he comes up with.

First the not-so-good: Most of the book is written in choppy intercut scenes where each scene-let is as short as a paragraph. I understand the wish to allow parallel narratives to flow but this kind of fine-grained dicing of the narrative ultimately is distracting and tiring. Then every single SF trope is thrown in from downloaded consciousness to multiverse to metaphysics in a breathless way as if it is a great reveal. Further, the tropes are delivered as if they are hard-SF-self-evident but they are quite sloppily introduced without a convincing rationale. Yet, it's still a page-turning read. I think that is because the author does two things well: 1) He effectively delivers the sense of there being wheels within wheels within wheels and the reader is compelled to read on to figure out what is real and what is misdirection. 2) A very visual and clear description of complex scenes which effectively communicates some quite extraordinary (and apocalyptic) visions of combat, space travel, moon-scapes and more. So despite this not being great SF literature, it's a guilty but very satisfying pleasure with a very weak aftertaste.

The series concluded with just as much over the top action as before, but with an increased amount of metaphysical stuff that was kind of surprising.

I gave a rave review to the first installment of this trilogy, and truly enjoyed the second equally. The third and final? Well, it's good, but did not engender the same adrenalin-addicted delight as the first two. Still, worthy in the sense that the pacing is similarly frenetic and the storylines resolve. In terms of emotional payoff, however, I was left wanting. Claire needs to win in the end, emerge enlightened and triumphant! Alas, it doesn't quite work out this way... None the less, I am a fan of the trilogy and of Williams over the top style, at least as far over as he goes in this storyline. Williams' storytelling has turned out to be polarizing, and I wouldn't expect any other reaction to something this different. For me, cool, just that book three slightly lowered rather than raised the bar, but the bar was quite high to begin with!