fantasy book reviews science fiction book reviewsThe Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman fantasy book reviewsThe Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman

If Horatio Alger, rather than Mark Twain, wrote the sequel to Huck Finn (though keeping Twain’s wry humor) after he lights out for the territories, and if Huck were possessed by the spirit of Nikola Tesla, and if the Wild West were the Wild West except that the trains and guns were all hosts for demons battling for supremacy while haunting both sides is the possibility of a sort of doomsday device, well, then you just might be close to approximating Felix Gilman’s The Rise of Ransom City, a kinda-sorta sequel to his The Half-Made World, which I had on my top ten list the year it came out. The Rise of Ransom City might not be quite that good, but it doesn’t fall far short.

In The Half-Made World, we were introduced to a West being ravaged by a war between The Line (incorporeal and seemingly eternal spirits hosting in locomotives) and The Gun (similar spirits inhabiting, um, guns). The Line is a sort of order-obsessed, fascist, industrial state while the Gun epitomizes chaos and a kind of anarchic independence. John Creedmoor, an Agent of the Gun, turns on his masters and with Liv Alverhuysen sets out for a fabled secret weapon with the agents of both the Line and the Gun in pursuit. And that is pretty much where we left them at the end.

I said The Rise of Ransom City is only a kinda-sorta sequel because while it does continue Creedmoor and Liv’s story, they are mere tangents in this slant-wise sequel. Rather than give us your typical pick-up-where-we-left-off follow-up, Gilman chooses instead to give us the story of autodidact Harry Ransom, creator of the unpredictable Ransom Process (bringing light to the world!), slayer of spirits, leader of Jasper City, fugitive from both the Line and the Gun, changer of history (at least four times he tells us), founder of the utopian Ransom City, and composer of this autobiography we’re reading. But Ransom’s story itself comes to us slant, filtered through the lens of a journalist named Carson who once met Ransom and who has spent years compiling the various pieces of Ransom’s autobiography (with only partial success) and tracking down stories about him. So what we end up with is an unreliable manuscript (unreliable because it is not complete) composed by an unreliable narrator.

Gilman obviously is taking a big chance here, changing his character focus, his structure, his style, and his tone in a sequel that one assumes is aimed at readers familiar with his prior book. It’s a chance that, I’m happy to see, completely pays off. The largest reason for his success is the first-person voice of Harry Ransom, which is wryly humorous, folksy, sometimes self-deprecating and other times just a bit arrogant. It’s a folksy, warmly conversational voice that carries you through the novel quickly and smoothly, the kind of voice you’re more than happy to pull up a chair next to and listen to for a few hours. And because he’s telling his story looking back, it’s also at times teasingly suspenseful (“I’ll have more to say on that later,”) and poignantly rueful (“Maybe then things might have gone differently with Adela.” Gilman pretty much had me from the get-go with Harry’s voice and he never lost me. When we do finally meet Creedmoor and Liv, it was nice to check back in and see what had been happening with them, and to follow them for a while, but to be honest, I would have been fine without them.

While Henry is a compellingly winning central character, the side characters vary somewhat in their depth. Mr. Carver, Harry’s partner, is surprisingly captivating considering how few words he speaks. Adela, whom Harry meets when she challenges him to a duel, is another strong character, while several who have many fewer pages come to life equally vividly, including Mr. Carson, a magician’s wife, and a few others. Liv and Creedmoor, on the other hand, are surprisingly flat considering our experience with them in the prior novel.

The plot of The Rise of Ransom City is picaresque in nature. We follow Harry form rim town to rim town as he tries to sell the frontier people on his Ransom Process, an unpredictable, quasi-science, quasi-magic bit of work (he calls it “The Apparatus”) that creates seemingly free light but also messes around with gravity, magnetism, and who knows what else. His competition is the mercenary Northern Lighting Corporation, headed by his rags-to-riches idol Mr. Albert Baxter (similar to Tesla’s battle with Edison). And behind everything lies the great war between the Line and the Gun, which Harry eventually gets caught up in. Once when he meets Creedmoor and Liv, later when his apparatus turns out to also have appallingly destructive capabilities as a weapon, still later when he becomes part of the Battle of Jasper, and finally when he is present at one of the last great conflicts of the war. Throughout it all, Harry would rather just work on his process, bring free light and energy to the hard lives on the frontier, and spend some time with a girl he becomes romantically entwined with. But as his autobiography makes clear, our lives seldom go the way we wish, and he is not always the master of his choices; when he is, he doesn’t always choose the “storybook” ones; and even when he does, they don’t always get the storybook results.

The Rise of Ransom City, therefore, does not shy at all from darkness; murder, mayhem, betrayal, cruelty, slavery — they all rear their ugly heads. There’s also a nice helping of politics, economics, sociology, and philosophy, adding depth to the already thought-provoking premise — the metaphors of the Engine and the Gun, their primal dichotomy and everlasting war with one another, metaphors carefully constructed so you can read into them just enough to feel grounded but not enough so that they feel restrictive or overly didactic.

As much as I absolutely loved Harry’s voice, I will say that the first-person narrative did feel a bit restrictive when we reached the latter stage of the book, as perhaps a little too much happens off-stage and events come hurtling at us a bit too quickly. But we’re talking only a few dozen pages maybe, making this a relatively minor complaint. Some might find fault as well with how Gilman leaves a lot of points up in the air — exactly what was the Process, exactly what are the Line and the Gun, what exactly happens after the war, what exactly happens to Harry?  Personally, I thought this level of uncertainty fit right in with this sense of the edge of the world where people are still making and re-making themselves, where towns and countries are still creating themselves and finding their identities, a world and people still raw and unformed and in flux. A true frontier in other words.

Revisiting the same world, The Rise of Ransom City couldn’t be as strikingly original as The Half-Made World, but it’s original in a different fashion, creating a wonderfully inviting character. As I said, I was with Harry from the very first pages and I was sorry to leave him behind at the end. I don’t know if Gilman will come back to this world of his (it is, after all, only half-made), but if he does so, I’ll happily sign up for the return trip. I heartily recommend you hop aboard as well.

The Half-Made World — (2010-2011) Publisher: A fantastical reimagining of the American West which draws its influence from steampunk, the American western tradition, and magical realism. he world is only half made. What exists has been carved out amidst a war between two rival factions: the Line, paving the world with industry and claiming its residents as slaves; and the Gun, a cult of terror and violence that cripples the population with fear. The only hope at stopping them has seemingly disappeared — the Red Republic that once battled the Gun and the Line, and almost won. Now they’re just a myth, a bedtime story parents tell their children, of hope. To the west lies a vast, uncharted world, inhabited only by the legends of the immortal and powerful Hill People, who live at one with the earth and its elements. Liv Alverhyusen, a doctor of the new science of psychology, travels to the edge of the made world to a spiritually protected mental institution in order to study the minds of those broken by the Gun and the Line. In its rooms lies an old general of the Red Republic, a man whose shattered mind just may hold the secret to stopping the Gun and the Line. And either side will do anything to understand how.

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Author

  • Bill Capossere

    BILL CAPOSSERE, who's been with us since June 2007, lives in Rochester NY, where he is an English adjunct by day and a writer by night. His essays and stories have appeared in Colorado Review, Rosebud, Alaska Quarterly, and other literary journals, along with a few anthologies, and been recognized in the "Notable Essays" section of Best American Essays. His children's work has appeared in several magazines, while his plays have been given stage readings at GEVA Theatre and Bristol Valley Playhouse. When he's not writing, reading, reviewing, or teaching, he can usually be found with his wife and son on the frisbee golf course or the ultimate frisbee field.