The Light Ages

An excellent "steampunk"-ish alternate version of Industrial Age England in which a magical substance, "aether", has replaced coal and other industrial necessities, but leaving the overall situation for the common man the same. Does an excellent job with world-building, really evoking the sense of time and place as the main character experiences life in various classes - from the oppressive, rigid life in a coal-mining town to fomenting rebellion as a columnist for an incendiary newsletter to life among the Belle Epoque upper classes. The story itself isn't as strong as the setting and language that support it, but it was a worthwhile read.

Is this steampunk? In an alternate Britain, where mystical aether mined from the ground powers society, a young boy grows up in a mining town. Aether warps the bodies and minds of those who get too close to it, and the boy loses his mother to a hideous transformation that is somehow connected to a strange young girl he meets. He grows up, goes to London, and gets involved in a social justice movement with concerns similar to those in our own world, though the persistence of guilds (empowered by secrets of working with aether, which responds to certain signs and words) makes the social stratification different than that in industrialized Victorian Britain. There were some striking images of magic intertwined with crude technology in show more urban settings, but I couldn’t work up any sympathy for the characters. show less

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Hmmm. On the one hand, this is the book that China Miéville's Iron Council should have been. Complex, interesting characters, a sparsely sketched yet believable social set-up, just the corner of the irrational (the mysterious "aether", discovered in 1678, and the cornerstone of England's prosperity, but which has dreadful effects on those it touches directly). The literary references are on the whole to those Dickens novels I haven't read, and to Hardy who I haven't read at all, but for all that the cliches of nineteenth-century Britain are well-enough known that it all made sense to me (the revolution is clearly 1848, or just possibly Paris 1870, rather than 1968). So a deep and absorbing show more novel.

But the start is awfully off-putting - took me several goes to even begin properly. Once I was in it, I was flying, and found it easy enough to follow. But I still felt it could have been done more efficiently and briefly, in say 300 pages rather than 450. Maybe that makes it Great Literature, and me a philistine. I don't know. show less

So basically it's like Victorian times, but not really, because there are references to Victorian times sprinkled throughout the book as having happened a loooong time ago. But society and industry have stagnated at a certain level, due to the country's dependence on the substance aether to make things just plain work better. There's no innovation or real change due to the fact that it's just not needed, and society is stuck in a rigid class system based not on peerage but "guilds", which are kind of like unions but also kind of like a caste system.

Aether also has a dangerous side - too much exposure to it can change a person, giving them either powers or just making them horrendous, and those people are scorned and kept in asylums as show more horrific as Bedlam.

The book is the story of one boy growing up in the land, and going through the time of upheaval that marks the end of one Age and the beginning of the next. It's the story of his family and how it is affected by aether and the guild system, and how he in turn reacts to those things. It's also the story of how he meets and falls in love with Annalise, a mysterious girl around his age that he meets one day on a trip with his mother.

This is quite a good book. The writing is dense and full of description, and there were times when reading on the train or in the kitchen at work I didn't have the best time following along with it - but that is fully my fault, not the author's. The story is complex, nuanced, and utterly realistic - too much so, almost, on the infamous Butterfly Day and in the end, with the unicorn.

If you like complex stories, with a dose of realistic politics, and an interesting fantasy twist, then this is the book for you. show less

Mature prose, and a convicingly dark portrayal of an alternative Victorian England which is industrially gothic in timbre.

The plot pace is slow and seeping, this increasing the exhilaration and horror that arises from its set-pieces. These are wonderfully-written moments of impact amongst a skillfully crafted backdrop of unease and imminence.

The characters are interesting and plausibly constructed as they try to make sense of their pasts and the times in which they live, and all will find something to identify with in them.

Overall, a very impressive novel, and a worthy successor to quintisentially British predecessors like Dickens.

"The Light Ages" is a beautifully written book. MacLeod knows how to use language, both English and the invented words of his story, to create a vivid atmosphere of an alternate reality. This other world is a steam-punk futuristic Victorian England, where the people live in a caste society, revolution is in the air, and a magical substance called aether makes the world go around. For his writing style and atmosphere, I would give the book four stars at least. But alas, for the story I would give it two stars at best (hence my settling on three.) I had two issues with the story. One, there were no characters in the book that I could relate to, or that I really cared about. There isn't a lot to propel me through a book when I don't care show more about any of the characters. Second, I found the plot unnecessarily convoluted. To be fair, since I didn't care about the characters, my mind tended to wander while reading sometimes, so perhaps I missed important points, but it felt overly complex to me. show less

This book has all the feel of a Victorian England setting, but that's not quite right. It's set in an alternate England, and date of divergence appears to 1798 (although that's not 100% clear), and the story takes places three Ages after that--about three centuries.

The cause of the divergence is the discovery of aether, which makes possible a magic-based, Guild-controlled economy with a social structure much like Victorian England, only more repressive and with less hope for change. Guilds control all the really useful work, and all the wealth, and membership in a guild is a secure spot in the social structure. Unfortunately, working with aether carries with it the risk of becoming a Changeling, or, to use this society's ruder word, a show more troll--a mutant, essentially, usually monstrous. Trolls, or Changelings, even former Guild members, have no rights, and get locked up in warehouses wear they can, sometimes, be experimented upon. The Light Ages is the story of Robert Borrows, a young boy whose mother becomes a troll and is taken away, and who is later befriended by a Guild Grandmaster who apparently has some connection with his mother from years ago. Between the Grandmaster's strange behavior, and the differently strange behavior of a beautiful girl his own age who turns out to be a really odd sort of Changeling, Robert begins to suspect something of the dark secret stalking the Guilds. It's not until he runs away to London and experiences both the life of an unguilded, edges-of-the-law laborer and radical agitator, and the life of the wealthy high Guild families, that he truly starts to realize what a house of cards this all is.

It's an interesting world, and there's an interesting story in here, but Robert Borrows is both an amazingly passive protagonist, and annoyingly slow at catching on to anything involving people.

Good, but not as good as it ought to be. show less