The Half-Made World/ Felix Gilman

The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman fantasy, western, steampunk, adventure 480 pages

I have never found a title more appropriate for a book than Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World. Not only does this express the themes and setting of the story, but also manages to describe my overall opinion of Gilman's novel as a whole. Although there is some extremely interesting potential in Gilman's world, all the potential it carries falls out when Gilman fails to do anything with it.

Before tearing everything else about this book a new one, I must applaud Gilman on creating a world that is both diverse and fascinating. Gilman's world is split into thirds with the first third being a land that is only represented in the first few chapters of the book: the East. The East is a civilized and tamed land filled with academics and doctors seeking only to expand on their endless knowledge with further scientific research. This is the area where the story's protagonist, Dr. Liv Alverhuysen, is from. The East is mostly untouched by the violence typical of the rest of the world although we know that evil still exists because it is revealed that Liv's mother, a criminal psychologist, was murdered by one of her patients. Upon leaving the East, Gilman paints a picture of his most intriguing location: the West (ironically enough, however, it is actually the central location). The West is a mixture of traditional western and steampunk elements that is also the battleground of a war between two factions- the overwhelmingly industrial, technology-based forces of the Line and the ruthless, guerrilla agents of the Gun. The Gun and the Line are interesting because none of the people in the West are self-governed but instead governed either by the sentient train-esque demon leaders of the Line known as the Engines or the demonic beings that possess Gun agents through their weapons. Gilman had a lot of potential with the conflict between these factions but abandoned it halfway through the book to enter the final setting, the FAR West. The whole time the story is in the Far West, the storytelling gets annoying because it's clear that Gilman wants to express that nothing in the Far West is definable or similar to what the characters have seen before, so instead of saying "the characters saw a deer", Gilman writes "the characters saw a creature that resembled a deer yet was clearly not a deer for reasons that are unable to be identified." This gets annoying quickly and also, when the characters enter the Far West, the story loses its direction and becomes aimless and hard to finish.

When criticism even leaks out of my compliment section, you can begin to understand my beef with this book. It's clear Gilman wanted to focus not on the external conflicts between Line and Gun but instead on the internal conflicts between those caught in the larger war. While this is both ambitious and interesting, Gilman does it wrong which leads to a bunch of unnecessary psycho-babble about characters who the reader frankly doesn't give a crap about. Furthermore, when the major conflict of the story finally reveals itself, it ends up being something that is almost entirely disconnected from the stuff that drew in the readers to begin with. Gilman has this excellent world in the West with seemingly limitless potential but chooses to leave it halfway through the book to have her characters stomp through the mud in solitary contemplation.

It must also be noted that none of Gilman's characters are likable. Liv, the story's protagonist, is an indecisive, whiny, opium-addict who fails to get any sympathy from readers due to her endless complaining. Creedmoor, a reluctant agent of the Gun and the closest thing the story has to a male protagonist, tries to hard to be an antihero and ends up looking like a 1-dimensional shadow of a Clint Eastwood character with a few lame one-liners thrown in. Every other character in the book has more flaws than redeemable qualities, leaving any reasonable reader to think that this world would be better off if all the characters killed each other off and left some Deus Ex Machina god character to repopulate the world with more interesting characters.

While the Epilogue at the end of the book makes me assume that Gilman is prepping for a sequel, I would only pick that sequel up so that I could get disappointing answers to all of the questions Gilman poses in Half-Made World. Regardless of how intriguing the fictional world sounds, give this one a pass because the frustration it will force on you will not be worth the minuscule amount of interest the book producers.