Escapement

In his novel Mainspring, Lake created an enormous canvas for storytelling with his hundred mile high Equatorial Wall that holds up the great Gears of the Earth. Now in Escapement, he explores more of that territory. 

Paolina Barthes is a young woman of remarkable intellectual ability – a genius on the level of Isaac Newton. But she has grown up in isolation, in a small village of shipwreck survivors, on the Wall in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She knows little of the world, but she knows that England rules it, and must be the home of people who possess the learning that she so desperately wants. And so she sets off to make her way off the Wall, not knowing that she will bring her astounding, unschooled talent for sorcery to the attention of those deadly factions who would use or kill her for it.

Praise for Mainspring

 

"Theological steampunk set in a mechanical universe -- the debut novel from a noted short-story writer....Good elements -- intriguing alternate history, solid characters, briskly moving plot."  --Kirkus Reviews
 
“Could Mainspring be the opening canto of a metaphysical magnum opus in the vein of Wolfe? Yes, very plausibly. The language is lyrical and perfectly calibrated, the symbolism is profound, the intelligent mystification is just at the appropriate level. With this novel, Jay Lake has ascended from journeyman to Master; let the Masterwork now unfold.” --Locus
  
“A dark, wild mix of machine and magic—an impressive debut novel from short story maestro Jay Lake.” --Greg Bear
 
"From the sweeping mechanisms of his clockwork world, down to the subtle movements of his characters, all drawn with a clockmaker's eye, Lake gives us a story both grand and intimate, smart and savvy... and a whole lot of fun to boot."  --Hal Duncan, author of Vellum
 
"In Mainspring, Lake has created a grandiose, thoroughly engaging blasphemy. This book blends the best of nostalgic adventure fiction with a genuinely fresh voice and ideas. An instant steampunk classic."-- Cory Doctorow
 
"As if Edgar Rice Burroughs had collaborated with Adam Roberts, or as if Robert Louis Stevenson had partnered with Gene Wolfe, Jay Lake, in his new novel Mainspring, delivers a mad, brave, compellingly readable tale of an alternate universe where the gear-stuffed Earth literally rolls through the Heavens on a brass track. Lake, with the artist's instincts for narrative and character over dogma, takes this conceit and runs with it in postmodern fashion toward a conclusion both shattering and redemptive.  Lucent, tactile, deeply inhabited, the world of Hethor Jacques is a marvelous subcreation stuffed full of miracles, both cosmic and domestic.  In Hethor's world, one can hear the midnight meshing of mystical gears.  I imagine they sound somewhat like the subliminal hum of this book." --Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy

"The gears that propel this story run -- yes -- like clockwork. The world Jay's created here is one of the best wind-up toys a reader could ever want."  --John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War

 

Jay Lake lives and works in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of over two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with several novels. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.