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shane_tiernan's review
2.0
I decided to read this book with my fiance after reading some awesome reviews. We gave it 100 pages but it wasn't doing anything for either one of us. None of the characters stuck out and the ideas were strange but not necessarily interesting. It's a huge book and I think there's another book after it so we didn't want to waste months reading it and then be left with a cliffhanger.
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
2.0
Pros: McMullen has a lot of really great ideas. This is a book set 200 years after the apocalypse, caused by a mysterious siren call that started luring people into the sea, leading to nuclear war and the placement of satellites that sweep the earth with electromagnetic pulses from time to time, prohibiting the use of electronics. The story, then, concerns the southern part of Australia (I think-the geography is hazy at best), where they have a produced a new calculating machine that uses people as binary components. Oh also an ancient net of nanomachines has started constructing a mirror in the sky to prevent global warming. This is a holdover from the pre-Apocalyptic world, of course, but I forget why it has started up again 2000 years in the future.
Cons: McMullen doesn't have a clue what to do with any of these ideas. None of them are fleshed out to any degree and their implications are never really explored. The characters (such as they are) and the plot (such as it is) clearly exist only to propel the reader along as McMullen careens from one idea to the next, which are often clearly just crammed into the narrative as he thought of them for the first time. (My favorite example of this: around page 300, it's explained that some people have bird DNA [don't ask:]. From there for the next 15 pages or so, one of the main characters is described as having bushy or feathery hair on just about every paragraph. This had never been mentioned in the prior 300 pages).
It's hard to convey here how poorly organized and structured this book is. Characters fall in and out of love immediately. They betray one another for the thinnest of reasons even more often (one such betrayal, toward the end of the book, isn't explained at all, as far as I could see). Pages will be spent on the most boring minutiae, and then McMullen will oftenhandedly reference the passage of 5 years. (or, another favorite example, after the first inexplicable betrayal that the plot hinges on, two characters ride into the desert to search for a third... and then the chapter is over and it's 5 years later and one is a monk and the other is a warlord). I could go on and on. There were a lot of head-scratchers in this book... and there weren't supposed to be.
Oh, one other thing: when I started this, I was stoked on the fact that all of the main characters were strong and sympathetic females... until he started writing about their breasts as their main identifying characteristics (not kidding). Then by the end it turned out that the philandering man was the main hero/character after all. Bah.
The more I write the more I'm convinced that this deserved 1 star, but I really enjoyed a few bits of it and I'm feeling generous. Let's pretend it's a 1.5
Cons: McMullen doesn't have a clue what to do with any of these ideas. None of them are fleshed out to any degree and their implications are never really explored. The characters (such as they are) and the plot (such as it is) clearly exist only to propel the reader along as McMullen careens from one idea to the next, which are often clearly just crammed into the narrative as he thought of them for the first time. (My favorite example of this: around page 300, it's explained that some people have bird DNA [don't ask:]. From there for the next 15 pages or so, one of the main characters is described as having bushy or feathery hair on just about every paragraph. This had never been mentioned in the prior 300 pages).
It's hard to convey here how poorly organized and structured this book is. Characters fall in and out of love immediately. They betray one another for the thinnest of reasons even more often (one such betrayal, toward the end of the book, isn't explained at all, as far as I could see). Pages will be spent on the most boring minutiae, and then McMullen will oftenhandedly reference the passage of 5 years. (or, another favorite example, after the first inexplicable betrayal that the plot hinges on, two characters ride into the desert to search for a third... and then the chapter is over and it's 5 years later and one is a monk and the other is a warlord). I could go on and on. There were a lot of head-scratchers in this book... and there weren't supposed to be.
Oh, one other thing: when I started this, I was stoked on the fact that all of the main characters were strong and sympathetic females... until he started writing about their breasts as their main identifying characteristics (not kidding). Then by the end it turned out that the philandering man was the main hero/character after all. Bah.
The more I write the more I'm convinced that this deserved 1 star, but I really enjoyed a few bits of it and I'm feeling generous. Let's pretend it's a 1.5
mpetruce's review against another edition
4.0
I almost gave up on this book. It just started slow for me and then, somewhere around 150 or 200 pages in, what a blast! Don't know why; maybe I took a while to get used to the world McMullen has created. Good post-apocalyptic sci-fi without the depressing edge that seems to pervade that genre. \
I always loved the idea about a society governed by a library, or rather, a Library and fancied some day writing a story about that myself. McMullen beat me to it and did a better job than I ever could. And this one is nice and edgy morally, but naive technologically, combining steampunk, windpunk, ethanol-punk, woodpunk, you name it. Skips ahead in time a lot, especially in the point where the originally published as two novels story breaks. Lots of humor, some action and, like a lot of good sci-fi, dirty (without being porny).
I always loved the idea about a society governed by a library, or rather, a Library and fancied some day writing a story about that myself. McMullen beat me to it and did a better job than I ever could. And this one is nice and edgy morally, but naive technologically, combining steampunk, windpunk, ethanol-punk, woodpunk, you name it. Skips ahead in time a lot, especially in the point where the originally published as two novels story breaks. Lots of humor, some action and, like a lot of good sci-fi, dirty (without being porny).
imitira's review against another edition
3.0
I really like this book—dueling librarians, human computation, etc—but the second half is, in fairness, a bit of a mess. Characters go various flavors of insane in lieu of actual development, the timeline starts leaping ahead Dune-style, and things generally get eyebrow-raisingly weird. It's at its best on first read, particularly if you're a teenager.
smcleish's review
3.0
Originally published on my blog here in August 2004.
There are plenty of post-apocalyptic novels, and plenty of science fiction about computers, but Souls in the Great Machine is the first story I have read which combines the two. Set about seventeen hundred years from now, following a nuclear winter, Souls in the Great Machine is about the effects of the development of a new form of a religiously proscribed machine, the computer. Because electronic equipment has become unusable (due to still functioning military satellites which destroy any detected electrical circuits), the components are men and women who perform the operations basic to the electronic computer of today by hand. The machine is slow compared to one using microchip technology, but powerful enough to bring prominence to the small state in which it is secretly constructed.
Souls in the Great Machine builds on well worn science fiction ideas in an original manner, and by centring on the Calculor itself becomes fascinating (at least for the first two thirds; the last two hundred pages of this novel, describing desert warfare, is more commonplace and not so interesting). The scenario is influenced by writers like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling - despite the massive differences in the technology depicted, the closest novels in tone to Souls in the Great Machine that I can think of are [b:The Diamond Age|827|The Diamond Age|Neal Stephenson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320415915s/827.jpg|2181158] and [b:The Difference Engine|337116|The Difference Engine |William Gibson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327891675s/337116.jpg|1806578] - as well as post apocalyptic novels, particularly [b:A Canticle for Leibowitz|164154|A Canticle for Leibowitz|Walter M. Miller Jr.|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329408540s/164154.jpg|250975], which also deals with the relationship between technology and religion. The desert warfare could come from Dune (which also, of course, has a religious prohibition on the development of computing machines), or a number of fantasy novels and the use of railways is (perhaps more superficially) like Pavane or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Out of such influences, McMullen has forged a novel distinctively his own.
Souls in the Great Machine has flaws; as mentioned, it tails off in its final third; and it is also lacking in characterisation. It is as though the nature and effects of the Calculor are not just the main interest of the novel, but so much its focus that everything else not directly related to the topic is underwritten. For a genre novel, it is dense and that makes it a slow read, and the effect of the poor end segment is to make the reader wonder whether the effort has been worth it. I would say that for the earlier parts of Souls in the Great Machine, the whole is just worth it; enough for me to look out for his other books, some of which are also set in the same world.
There are plenty of post-apocalyptic novels, and plenty of science fiction about computers, but Souls in the Great Machine is the first story I have read which combines the two. Set about seventeen hundred years from now, following a nuclear winter, Souls in the Great Machine is about the effects of the development of a new form of a religiously proscribed machine, the computer. Because electronic equipment has become unusable (due to still functioning military satellites which destroy any detected electrical circuits), the components are men and women who perform the operations basic to the electronic computer of today by hand. The machine is slow compared to one using microchip technology, but powerful enough to bring prominence to the small state in which it is secretly constructed.
Souls in the Great Machine builds on well worn science fiction ideas in an original manner, and by centring on the Calculor itself becomes fascinating (at least for the first two thirds; the last two hundred pages of this novel, describing desert warfare, is more commonplace and not so interesting). The scenario is influenced by writers like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling - despite the massive differences in the technology depicted, the closest novels in tone to Souls in the Great Machine that I can think of are [b:The Diamond Age|827|The Diamond Age|Neal Stephenson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320415915s/827.jpg|2181158] and [b:The Difference Engine|337116|The Difference Engine |William Gibson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327891675s/337116.jpg|1806578] - as well as post apocalyptic novels, particularly [b:A Canticle for Leibowitz|164154|A Canticle for Leibowitz|Walter M. Miller Jr.|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329408540s/164154.jpg|250975], which also deals with the relationship between technology and religion. The desert warfare could come from Dune (which also, of course, has a religious prohibition on the development of computing machines), or a number of fantasy novels and the use of railways is (perhaps more superficially) like Pavane or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Out of such influences, McMullen has forged a novel distinctively his own.
Souls in the Great Machine has flaws; as mentioned, it tails off in its final third; and it is also lacking in characterisation. It is as though the nature and effects of the Calculor are not just the main interest of the novel, but so much its focus that everything else not directly related to the topic is underwritten. For a genre novel, it is dense and that makes it a slow read, and the effect of the poor end segment is to make the reader wonder whether the effort has been worth it. I would say that for the earlier parts of Souls in the Great Machine, the whole is just worth it; enough for me to look out for his other books, some of which are also set in the same world.
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