The Waking Engine
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4.6 • 9 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late Cooper, once of New York City, is surprised to find death a temporary condition, each life a brief stop in a nearly endless chain of existence. He awakens from his brief demise in the vast and ancient City Unspoken, a community dominated by cruel elites, where a fortunate few may perhaps find total oblivion. Marooned in the decaying city, surrounded by debauched Death Boys and Charnel Girls, Cooper, who has only died once, finds himself a curiosity in a realm where death itself rarely offers final release. Edison's rambling secondary-world science fantasy tale, firmly anchored in the more amoral end of the New Weird, plays out in lavish prose, meandering through squalid slums and grand palaces, more interested in tourism than plot. The characters don't object much to sadism and brutality, save when they do not themselves get to dole it out; readers who dislike graphic depictions of casual beatings may want to give this one a pass.
Customer Reviews
Odd but lovely
A convoluted world on the back of a turtle where death has come to die.