Kirsten's Reviews > The Half-Made World

The world is unfinished. Everything is very solid and normal in the East, but the farther West one travels, the more unfamiliar and changeable the world becomes. Powerful forces will stop at nothing to gain control: on the side of chaos are the Agents of the Gun, individuals whose masters are demon-haunted firearms. On the other side is The Line, a society controlled by sentient machines known as Engines. The Line moves inexorably into the West, and the Gun does what it can to impede its progress. Caught in the middle are the remnants of the Republic, a short-lived movement to bring a kind of representative democracy to the West. The Republic is scattered, and its most famous general has gone insane, and now lives in the House Dolorous, a hospital watched over by a powerful spirit. John Creedmore, an Agent of the Gun, has been tasked with recovering the general, who is rumored to hold the keys to a weapon that could destroy both the Gun and the Line. Lowry, a Linesman, has also been given the same task. And meanwhile, a young psychologist named Liv is traveling to House Dolorous in the hopes her talents may be of some use in healing those who have been scarred by the Line's mind bombs.

I ended up loving this like crazy. It's truly bizarre, and the reader is often left to his/her own devices to figure things out, but the world Gilman has created is fascinatingly weird, alien, and creepy. You could easily class this book as Steampunk, but it's very different from the steampunk novels that have become popular recently: this is not Brown Goth.