All right, I am giving up on this book. I'm a quarter of the way in and still not engaged with the main character. The descriptions, while comprehensive, are heavy handed and verbose. I keep losing the plot in the midst of all the 'color.' I've been working at this book for two weeks now. That is more than it takes me to finish a book and I just can't get into it. I'm very disappointed, as I picked it up after reading a great review. Time to move on.

“She had the look of a once-treasured doll that had been left out in the rain.”Engaging concept whose prose failed to engage. Fifty pages in and I hadn’t been hooked. It isn’t bad; it’s just not good. Too many 0ther books unread.“… walled with spilled and sagging cliff faces of books, tiered with balconies.”

If this book had been a movie, I can imagine that the pitch session would have gone like this: Writer: Think: Great Expectations meets Germinal! Producer: Germa-what? Writer: It's this French novel by … Producer: Nobody's gonna wanna watch a French story. What are you? Crazy?Writer: But with magic, you know, like Harry Potter! But it'll take place in the Victorian century, and instead of coal we'll have this magic called aether, and instead of coal pits, we'll have aether pits. Producer: Now, yo...

Its really quite amazing that I finished this book (in 2021). Its one thats been sitting on the shelf with many others for more than a decade yet it kept calling to me due to Macleod's beloved short story BreathMoss I had read in Asimov's years earlier. So I chose this book from all the other to take to our new country cabin. Then, I proceeded to read it piecemeal over 7 months. The challenge, at age 60, was rememebering some characters and events when I came back to the book. I trudged on howev...

While comparisons to Pullman and Mieville are not off entirely off base for Macleod’s work of industrial fantasy it is a much slower paced but if you let it take its time it weaves a subtler and deadlier spell like its obvious model, Keith Robert’s Pavane(did Pullman also use this for a model?). Melancholy character and touches of the grotesque this novel details an alternative history were a 300 year industrial revolution(based on the substance aether) freezes progress leaving England in an ete...

'The Light Ages' by Ian R. MacLeod doesn't feel much like light reading, but it's an enjoyable story for the right reader. Think of Charles Dickens meeting up with an alternate England powered by a kind of magic crystal.The book follows Robert Borrows who was born on sixthshiftday in the grimy factory town of Bracebridge. His early days are accompanied by the sounds of the factory as it churns outpower for the wealthy. Shoom, boom. Shoom, boom. What's being manufactured is a byproduct of a magic...

Alternative history SF/F. I wasn't a huge fan of the style, but the story was solid and the ideas were great.

It was hard to really get into this book because despite being written fairly well and having an interesting setting, the entire thing pretty much read like an extended character sketch. Told from the first person point of view, it follows Robert Borrows all the way from his childhood to sometime in late middle age at the conclusion of the book.Now, don't get me wrong, I like character-driven fiction and I have nothing wrong with first person narratives. This one just suffers from a bad case of

What happens when you write a fantasy book but kind of forget to put any actual fantasy in it?Ian Macleod is certainly not a novice at fantasy, having already by this point written a novella that won the World Fantasy Award. Judging by the number of fantasy-familiar authors who populate the cover and inside pages with glowing quotes, other people with experience in this kind of thing also thought it was fantasy (as an aside, I always kind of worry when I pick up a book and the only pull quotes a...

Originally published on my blog here in April 2004.The small number of books that I would consider my favourite serious fantasy novels (E.R. Eddison's Mistress of Mistresses, Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time series, Jack Vance's Lyonesse, John Crowley's Little, Big) share one important quality - atmosphere. There are other novels with similar power that I don't actually like very much, notably China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, and at least one series that I suspect would

The good thing about this book, and what made me want to finish reading it, is that the writer has a gift for lyrical and fantastic imagery. There are a lot of beautiful ideas in this book. Unfortunately, the prose often became too purple and overwrought, at the expense of character development and action. There were many times where I felt as if a sentence or paragraph were missing, just because the author would describe certain things as if an action had taken place, without actually showing u...

Finishing this book was a bit like being hit by a truck. In the good way. The Light Ages has almost everything I love in a sf/f novel: a plot that drops me into the world and leaves it up to me to figure out what's going on; a mystery revealed piece by piece; social issues I didn't feel hit over the head with; opposing but equally "right" sides (no "these people are evil because the author said so"); a touch of romance...I could keep going on. There's a wee bit of aimlessness in the middle, but

In a way, this book reminded me of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, not in its subject matter but in the way the author approached hos work. This reads like good historical fiction, focused on a sort of alternative Victorian England. we see the same stultifying class structure, the horrible working conditions, and the awful, grinding poverty.I suppose this could be classified as urban fantasy of a sort. In this alternative history, industry, indeeed the entire economy, is based...

It’s a shame. I really enjoyed Journeys , but my first attempt at novel-length Ian R. MacLeod falls short.The Light Ages takes place in an alternative England where the ability to manipulate aether has jumpstarted steam engine technology somewhat. Other technologies, like electricity, have fallen by the wayside as too unreliable. The result is a grittier, dirtier, more magical and more chaotic industrialized England.My problems stem from the writing style. MacLeod doesn’t value the nature of

Theres a revolution in this book, but it turns out you need to care about the past for it's shattering to have any emotional or narrative impact. When one character accuses the protagonosts of trying to destroy her world, it means nothing, as we never got to have any real sense of her world and why it would matter to her. This is odd, given the slow, slow start and generally langurous pace, but this is all concerned with the rather tedious childhood of the protagonist and manages to never get ac...

I made it to page 132 out of 456 in The Light Ages.Strike one was the very slow plot.Strike two was the unwieldy prose that featured overly long sentences and too many commas.Strike three was the lack of intrigue or anything that captivated me. I just didn't really care what happened next.Maybe I missed out on something awesome. Hope not.

[grabbed from this site][return][return]This creation owes much to Charles Dickens. It also owes much to Mervyn Peake at least in a Gormenghastish way, but the writing is all McLeod. This is a sumptuous book, with a wonderful use of language. If you want a whiz-bang adventure story, well, sorry. This one won't do.[return][return]Robbie Brown was born in what we might think of as 1876 in England. But not our England. Note the day of the week he was born; Sixshiftday. As you read on, you find that...

Really fascinating piece of steampunk literature I haven't read it in ages so my memory of the plot isn't great but definitely worth reading

I have just picked up this book and the writing is wonderful. I have read six pages and only pause to hold myself back from devouring it in a rush of gluttony so I can savor the writing. I will have to read this slowly and reread passages so I can completely immerse myself in the prose. This is the most entrancing book I have read in a very long time. I want this experience to last.

I have only read the first book yet 'The light Ages' , it is an imaginative colourful book, rich in variety. Trying to put it in a genre is difficult enough as it combines elements from fantasy, sci-fi and steampunk to one vast story. While many parts of the book are a bit lengthy, I am glad that I stuck to it till its end. I think if one reads the whole book it will remove ambiguities, and small things that haven't attracted ones attention at first will shine in a whole new light. The imaginati...