Souls in the Great Machine

It's a wonderful feeling, re-reading a novel you loved as a teenager and finding it lives up to your memories entirely. Indeed, I think 'Souls in the Great Machine' was formative of my sci-fi tastes. There is so much to love about it! For one thing, it's the first in a trilogy yet stands alone brilliantly. Moreover, the characters, plot, and world-building are all distinctive and fantastic.

If I had to pick my absolute favourite feature, it would have to be the characterisation. The women are ambitious, driven, competent, intelligent, machiavellian, ruthless, sometimes vengeful, and in charge. I adore Highliber Zarvora; few other protagonists can compare to her. Lemorel makes an excellent antagonist and her motivations are a neatly show more gender-swapped version of many heroic male characters. In her case, this shows the hollowness of, "I'll burn down the world because my romantic partner was taken from me". Other characters have also been harmed or lost people they love, but don't launch a continental war about it. Although I still respect Lemorel's skill as a warlord. Her final showdown with Dolorian is incredible. Darien is another brilliant female character, whose disability is cleverly shown but does not define her. I should also mention Theresla and Jemli, both delightful. The friendships, loyalties, and enmities between these women are absolutely central to the book. By contrast, the male characters are essentially himbos; easily manipulated even if clever, punished for treating women badly, and mostly there to be love interests. The main two, Glasken and Ilyrie, repeatedly learn painful lessons until they respect women properly. I'm not sure I noticed as a teenager that several forms of polyamory are shown, carefully distinguished from cheating.

That brings me to the world-building. 'Souls in the Great Machine' is set in Australia, two thousand years in the future. An ice age has been and gone, orbiting satellites fry any attempts at using electricity, and whales have taken revenge on humanity via the Call. This essentially mind-controls any mammals above a certain size to walk into the sea, where they are eaten by sharks. The massive impact this has on society, the economy, technology, and even theology is cleverly explored. It made me jump a little to read that the Call began in 2021! As electrical power is off the table and there is an ongoing taboo against steam engines, machines use ingenious forms of renewable energy. Trains are powered by wind or human pedalling and are run by engineers still obsessed with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Great Machine of the title is a human-powered computer that is central to the story. This incredible technology cannot be kept secret, despite best efforts, and the book chronicles the revolution it unleashes. More specifically, I love the fact that librarians run this world, fight duels over any professional or personal disputes, yet also guard what books remain from earlier times.

Finally, the plot is fast-paced and exciting. It covers a long period of time, a wide area, and a sprawling cast of characters, yet flows beautifully and keeps up the pace such that 600 pages seem too brief. There are moments of delightful farce, as well as tragic hubris, extreme drama, and thrilling discovery. For several hundred pages it is a war narrative that adeptly balances the epic and the personal, the political and the technological, the brutal and the exciting. Basically, this novel is just what I want from escapist comfort reading. Few writers hit on a combination of character, plot, and world-building that suits my tastes so well. I recall not loving the latter two books in the trilogy quite as much, but that doesn't matter. As a stand-alone novel, 'Souls in the Great Machine' remains one of my all time favourites. show less

Someone recommended this to me as:
"If you like unusual SF, you should definitely pick up Sean McMullen's Greatwinter trilogy of novels, starting with the first book Souls in the Great Machine. It's set in Australia (the middle book is set in North America) and it revolves around a post-apocalyptic society built slowly and realistically from the ashes of our own. You've got a kind of clock-punk level of technology in which fueled engines are religiously proscribed, yet society gets on at a pretty high level using workarounds like human- and wind-powered trains, long-distance communication via light signalling, and all the clockwork you can get your hands on. The main piece of technology around which the plot revolves is a show more human-(prisoner-)powered calculator, but the clockwork and trains play a huge part too.

The female characters aren't just "strong", they're actually real, genuine people - although the setting acknowledges gender inequality, many if not most of the movers and shakers in the story are believable women with authority, intelligence, and cunning. Male characters are similarly fleshed out, and gender (as well as cultural and romantic) conflict plays a part in the plot, but it's not heavy-handed or annoying, although some of the characters themselves certainly are (in ways that make them readably human).

The whole shebang is really well-grounded in Australian (and then North American) geography and culture, so non-Aussie readers would do well to have a map at hand while reading to get the full effect. In the second book, the North Americans fight their wars via duel-by-champion in wood-and-cloth airplanes, and that just racks up eleventy-million awesome points in itself. Saying too much about the third book would be spoilerish, but needless to say the tech is even cooler.

The main appeal, though, is that it's got dueling librarians. Like with flintlock pistols. And they do firing squads sometimes. And that is basically the most awesome thing ever." show less

I absolutely love the angles this book brings to bear on an advanced low tech society. The concept of a post-apocalypic, librarian run civilation is very fertile ground to hit upon the nature of progress confined.

I was tempted to give this novel five stars, but it doesn't quite match the perfection of Patrick Tilley's Mission or Robert Reed's Marrow.

McMullen strikes the perfect balance between science fiction and clockpunk in his Greatwinter trilogy. It's truly remarkable; the setting is sometime after a WWIII-ish apocalypse and technology has regressed to strictly mechanical levels. This builds a palpable steampunk quality into the everyday life of the characters while the ancient yet far-advanced technology helps drive the plot forward, satisfying my science fiction cravings. The characters are lovable as well as well-spoken and the Siren call that plagues the surviving members of humanity lends an intriguing level of mystery to the plot show more without being too fantastic.

I'll probably reread this book and increase its rating at some point. It's that good. show less

Overall this would be best classified as a fun book to read. Lots of action and lots of fun characters. The characters remind me quite a bit of characters from Ayn Rand's books, which means they seem to be slightly one dimensional in the behavior, but that does get toned down some later in the book. It loosely qualifies as steampunk. The post-apocalyptic nature of it sets it in a different era than a lot of steampunk. The setting for most of the book is Australia (in later books it seems that North America comes into play) and a lot of the book is about factions of religious zealots or just simply crazy people at war with each other.

I can't legitimately five star it due to the laborious battle scenes and the unexplainable (and show more unexplained) behavior of one of the main characters. At best I could simply extract that the character was just crazy and neurotic, at worst it comes across as a sloppy character shift for no other reason than to advance the plot.

Nevertheless, I found myself pouring through it at a brisk pace enjoying the larger scifi elements of the story and at the end I am wondering where it's all going to end up (I have the other two books on the shelf to find out). show less

Sci-fi lovers will get a kick out of this post-apocalyptic yarn where some humans are indeed cogs in the machine (or, more accurately, adders, multipliers, etc.

A great concept with fascinating speculations about the future of mankind two thousand years from now. The book dragged quite a bit from the middle onward unfortunately. Train aficionados will be riveted. A map of the future Australia would have helped quite a bit in following the course of disputes among the various factions, but this was not provided. I was left with the feeling that this book could have been so much more if it was just executed a bit differently. There is potential here for certain but not enough for me to continue the series.