Welcome to the Lair!
Exploring dark alleys. Discovering new nightmares.
Revisiting the masters.
Joel has spent the last five years building maps of an imaginary city to deal with his grief. Or at least he thinks it's imaginary, until someone writes to tell him they used to live there. To Joel, it's just a hobby - a way to blank his mind until he figures out how to move forward to his life.
But then things take an increasingly strange turn - and a dark one.
Scienceville by Gary Gibson is a fascinating sci-fi fantasy short story, with traces of steampunk fiction here and there. Absolutely brilliant. The author needs to either create a short story series or write a full-length novel. The concept of Scienceville - the metaphysics behind it - is just too damn interesting to leave inside one story.
It has been decades since a story evoked these kind of emotions within me. Do you remember the first time you read some really grand fiction that wasn't part of a school assignment, and you fell in love with reading as a consequence? Do you remember the joy of having worlds revealed to your imagination through the printed word? Granted, I read this on my Kindle, but that same "Oh, I remember why I love fiction so much" feeling came rushing back.
If you've been feeling burned out on genre stories, or feeling like you've read the same themes over and over, you need to read Scienceville!
As always,
AstraDaemon
Cast out of the craft hall in his prime and bitter from his many losses, a blind artificer has taken on an apprentice to make what he no longer can: a device that will enter him into the Grand Competition.
The Artificer’s Apprentice is a short story set in a medieval city where magic and technology blend seamlessly and the Artificer guilds make handsome profits keeping the city's systems running. The leaders of these guilds have complete control over their members, but one man is about to challenge that authority.
The Artificer's Apprentice by DJ Edwardson is a short story with a steampunk theme. Talomai has had his life ripped apart by the guild, only to lose his eyesight as well, but he retains his incredible skill nonetheless. He's bound and determined to exact justice for the wrongs done to him and, instead, exacts something far more valuable.
While the ending is fantastic, I felt like I really had to work to get there. I understand wanting to describe the inventions, but there is an overabundance of descriptions, taking away from the personal aspect of Talomai's conflict. I think this would have been better as flash fiction piece, with more focus on the characters instead of the objects.
As always,
AstraDaemon
