The Waking Engine - Hardcover

Edison, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765334860 ISBN 13: 9780765334862

Publisher: Tor Books, 2014

Synopsis

Welcome to the City Unspoken, where Gods and Mortals come to die.

Contrary to popular wisdom, death is not the end, nor is it a passage to some transcendent afterlife. Those who die merely awake as themselves on one of a million worlds, where they are fated to live until they die again, and wake up somewhere new. All are born only once, but die many times . . . until they come at last to the City Unspoken, where the gateway to True Death can be found.

Wayfarers and pilgrims are drawn to the City, which is home to murderous aristocrats, disguised gods and goddesses, a sadistic faerie princess, immortal prostitutes and queens, a captive angel, gangs of feral Death Boys and Charnel Girls . . . and one very confused New Yorker.

Late of Manhattan, Cooper finds himself in a City that is not what it once was. The gateway to True Death is failing, so that the City is becoming overrun by the Dying, who clot its byzantine streets and alleys . . . and a spreading madness threatens to engulf the entire metaverse.

Richly imaginative, David Edison's The Waking Engine is a stunning debut by a major new talent.

About this title

About the Author

DAVID EDISON divides his time between New York City and San Francisco. The Waking Engine is his first novel.

Reviews

Imagine Cooper’s confusion when he wakes up in what appears to be a foreign city. Imagine his surprise when he’s told he died, and this is the next step on his journey, the same journey every person takes, dying and living for thousands of years on thousands of worlds. Imagine his mind-boggling shock when he’s told that the place where he’s awakened, the City Unspoken, is usually a person’s final stop; Cooper seems to have skipped right to the end of his own journey. There are more surprises in store, too, in this imaginative SF novel, in which everyman Cooper is positioned as the (possible) savior of the rapidly disintegrating City Unspoken. The author unavoidably covers some of the same ground as Philip Jose Farmer’s classic Riverworld series (in which people are repeatedly reincarnated along the banks of a seemingly endless river), but it would be a serious mistake to think of this as a retread. Edison breaks some new ground here, and even when he’s in familiar territory, he finds his own way of exploring it. An impressive debut. --David Pitt

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765334860
• ISBN 13: 9780765334862
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400