Tag Archives: dieselpunk

Cover of Amnesty

Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly

I’ve been looking forward to the finale to the Amberlough Dossier series for some time, and Amnesty did not disappoint. If Amberlough was like fantasy Cabaret and Armistice was like fantasty Casablanca, then Amnesty was like the fantasy Nuremberg trials. Gedda is trying to put itself together after seven years of OSP rule, and trying to work out how much each person is guilty for what happened. It’s a meditation on what justice is and whether anybody can get it. None of the main characters get just fates, but they do get satisfying ones.

Mad artistic props to Donnelly for not being afraid to write about permadeath.

As in the other books, she excels at characters and their inner workings. I wanted to know what happens to these screwed-up people to the last page.

My main complaint is the same I had for the other two books: I want politics. Donnelly’s really a romance writer who happens to have spies and governments in these books. Why was Gedda a GLBT paradise before the One State Party came to power? What was OSP ideology? They were homophobic, I guess? What was Hearther doctrine? The Hearther religion had political power under OSP rule and then they lost it again. Hearthers should remember this, yet lingering OSP support is nowhere to be found.

Gedda is supposed to be having a European-style election over the course of the book, yet Gedda’s parliament is nowhere to be found, either. Most irksome of all, two characters are running for prime minister. If Donnelly didn’t catch that, then Tor’s fact checkers really should have.

But I’m so glad the Amberlough Dossier exists. I don’t see nearly enough 20th-century fantasy, especially in a low-magic world that focuses on its people. My favorite scene of Amnesty took place at an all-night automat. As a smuggler cuts a deal with a radio broadcaster, the city of Amberlough shows how it isn’t how it used to be. Spec fiction has never ventured inside an automat before, so bravo for being on the vanguard.

Cover of Armistice

Armistice, by Lara Elena Donnelly

It’s a solid middle book.

Three years after the events of Amberlough, three Geddan exiles cross paths in the tropical nation of Porachis: Lillian DePaul, a press attaché blackmailed into serving fascist Gedda’s foreign service; Aristine Makricosta, a smuggler who got out of Gedda early and went (mostly) legit; and Cordelia Lehane, a railway bomber on the lam. They draw each other into a plot to do a de-kidnapping.

Donnelly, who was a debut author with Amberlough, hits her stride here. She’s ironed out the pacing issues she had with the previous book and toned down the overwrought description so it’s just lush. Middle books are hard, and Donnelly does a good job teasing out threads from Amberlough and weaving them into a setup for the events of Amnesty.

I like what she does with gender here – Porachis is a believable matriarchal society, not this. Men have some options and some room to negotiate, but they have to deal with a stereotype that women are practical and men think with their balls. Matriarchy isn’t the end of days, but it isn’t fair, either. One of the women characters chooses career over family, and Donnelly does an unflinching job of showing how that choice is hard, and has some consequences that the woman didn’t want.

Sometimes it feels like this world’s cultures are cut and pasted from Earth cultures without thought about how those cultures got there. Cordelia’s kind of Cockney, Gedda’s kind of German, Tatié’s kind of Russian, Porachis is kind of Indian, and the Chuli minority are kind of … Welsh. How did those cultures get next to each other? Which one invented the Industrial Revolution? Which one manufactures the airplanes and the cars? Which one invented democracy, and in general, how well is democracy doing on this planet?

Amberlough and Armistice are maddeningly light on specifics on what the One State Party wants. They’re supposed to be like Nazis and the main characters are disgusted like they’re Nazis, but all I ever see the Ospies do is act vaguely conservative and nationalist. I’m not convinced Ospie Gedda is worse than, like, Turkey right now. In real life Nazis made soap out of people. Maybe this gentle treatment doesn’t do justice to history. Or maybe Donnelly is biding her time. In Germany, the worst atrocities happened towards the end of the war. For Gedda, the war is about to begin.

So the geopolitics is flimsy, but the love affairs are wonderful. With the threads set up here, the conclusion of the series just might be gay Orpheus and Eurydice. That would be awesome.

Dieselpunk Nugget

Sometimes, when you’re doing research for a novel, you come across a passage that gives you chills. For example, take this quote from a lecture that Alan Turing gave to the London Mathematical Society in 1947:

Finally I should like to make a few conjectures as to the repercussions that electronic digital computing machinery will have on mathematics. I have already mentioned that the ACE will do the work of about 10,000 computers.* It is to be expected therefore that large scale hand-computing will die out. Computers will still be employed on small calculations, such as the substitution of values in formulae, but whenever a single calculation may be expected to take a human computer days of work, it will presumably be done by an electronic computer instead. This will not necessitate every-one interested in such work having an electronic computer. It would be quite possible to arrange to control a distant computer by means of a telephone line. Special input and output machinery would be developed for use at these out stations, and would cost a few hundred pounds at most.

Controlling a computer through the telephone lines. This was 1947. Damn.

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* The word “computer” had a different sense before the invention of modern digital computers. Here he’s talking about humans, usually young women, who were hired to do math problems all day.