Neil Williamson

Queen of Clouds by Neil Williamson. Billy Braid is apprenticed to a woodworker who makes “sylvans” out of special trees. Sylvans are sort of sentient puppets, animated by “motes” and Billy is the only one who can hear them think. They work until they eventually rot back to the earth. When the master receives an order for a sylvan from a family in the city of Karpentine, he sends Billy to deliver it. Billy has never been out of his mountain backwater, but he’s quickly sucked into the Machiavellian politics of the city and the fight for Law for All. This was quite enjoyable, and I will definitely look out for Williamson’s other work.Received via the LibraryThing Early Reviewer Program in return for an unbiased review.… (more)

I enjoyed this story very much, but, as so often happens with novellas, I felt that the ending was too rushed after a very well-crafted setup. I would have liked it better if the author had taken more time to let the resolution develop.

At the beginning of the story, the protagonist/first-person narrator has fully bought in to the surveillance state that she lives in. She claims to be perfectly comfortable with having her every move observed and critiqued by society at large. I thought the author did a good job of conveying the feeling that the character has not really thought deeply about the larger issues involved in this near-total lack of privacy. Even when her mother expresses objection to it, the protagonist pooh-pooh's them (much as people have dismissed their parents' opinions since the dawn of human history). So in some sense she is willfully blind to the implications, which would have been interesting to explore a bit more.

By the end of the story, after everything that the protagonist has experienced, she does a turnaround; she comes to recognize the pitfalls of having everyone know everything you've ever done. But I felt that this evolution of the character's thinking was short-changed by the format. A novel-length story would have given the author more opportunity to really delve into the gradual process of the character's coming to understand the nuances of the situation. We also could have gotten more of a look at how the character's profession has affected her viewpoint; as a memoirist, her whole job is all about uncovering people's secrets, and in a world where it's harder and harder to keep secrets, obviously that changes how she sees things.

Overall an interesting and thought-provoking read.… (more)