The Alchemy of Stone
After years of avoiding the genre, I’ve been lured back toward science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, slipstream, or whatever you like to call it (and however you like to parse it) by authors like Jeffrey Ford, Ted Chiang, and Ekaterina Sedia.
The Alchemy of Stone by Sedia is usually classed as a steampunk novel, meaning that it combines elements of 19th century gadgetry into a world that is otherwise futuristic or fantastic. The world created by the Russian-born author is a kind of alternative czarist regime, in which bomb-throwing anarchists threaten a powerful duke. But this duke travels in a carriage drawn by enormous six-legged lizards. The offhand references to the lizards helps the reader glide over his or her disbelief, as does the author’s close attention to the details, including the smells, of her imagined world.
The book concerns the struggle of the the dukedom’s two major power groups: the alchemists and the mechanics. The heroine, Mattie, has a stake in both groups. She is an automaton, created by a mechanic out of metal rods, whalebone, and human hair. But she is also an alchemist, skilled in brewing potions and creating homunculi out of human hair and blood scavenged from slaughterhouses. Mattie has all the emotions of a “real” person, and the sometimes tedious question of is-she-or-isn’t-she is left alone.
The book’s dialogue is sometimes a bit flat, and I’m not sure the plot hangs together, but Sedia’s gift for description makes it well worth reading.
She glided past him, the whirring of her gears muffled by the room—it was so full of draperies and old rugs rolled up in the corners, so cluttered with bits of machinery and empty dishes. Mattie reached up and swung open the shutters, admitting a wave of air sweet with lilac blooms and rich river mud and roasted nuts from the market square down the street.... She extended her hand, the slender copper springs of her fingers grasping a phial of blue glass. “One of your admirers sent for me—she said you were ailing. I made you a potion.”
