Tuesday, October 01, 2024

2024/146: Still the Sun — Charlie N Holmberg

“Good night, Pell.”
The words are hard, final, but they give me pause. “What does that mean?”
He glances at me, bright eyes hard. “What does what mean?”
“Good night,” I repeat, letting go of the knob. “What’s ‘night’?” [loc. 2119]

Pell is a metalworker and engineer living in Emgarden, a small village which may be the only settlement that exists. Nearby is an old fortified tower, and an amaranthine wall which can't be crossed. There are thirty-eight people living in Emgarden: no newcomers, no births -- and Pell keeps losing her train of thought when she tries to think about that.

The villagers live in a cycle of sun and mist: eight hours of sun, five of mists which cloak the land. One cycle, a stranger appears at Pell's door during the mists. He says his name is Moseus, one of the two keepers of the tower, and he promises Pell plenty of scrap metal if she can help him get the machines in the tower working again. Pell, who frequently has to relinquish her tools to make farming implements so that they don't all starve, accepts with enthusiasm. But when she's amid the Ancient machines, working out their mechanisms and how to restart them, she experiences visions that could almost be memories -- and that seem to be connected with the other inhabitant of the tower, the mysterious Heartwood.

Pell is confused for much of the novel. Every time she begins to understand something, she discovers another mystery, and some of those mysteries have to do with her own sense of incompleteness, and her increasingly unreliable memory. When she finally discovers her connection to the tower, to Moseus and to Heartwood, it's almost an anticlimax except that it is extremely, gigantically Epic.

I enjoyed the engineering, but despite her first-person narration I didn't really warm to Pell, and the romance didn't convince me. There was very little world-building, though there is a rationale for that: still, I'd have liked more than desert, flowers and machinery.

An Amazon First Reads offer in June 2024.

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