I just finished reading Mainspring, by Jay Lake, and I thought I'd post a review here.

It's very rare anymore that I come across a book at Dreamhaven Books, or Uncle Hugo's, or one of the "B" stores, and I think, just from reading the back cover blurb, Ooooh, that's a neat premise, I gotta got this one!  Both of Richard Garfinkle's novels, Celestial Matters (which takes place in a Ptolemaic universe, in which the sun, moon, planets, and stars all revolve around the earth, food is produced via spontaneous generation, and metal ships travel on "rarefied air"), and All of an Instant (which takes place for the most part in the Ocean of Time, where, in addition to the usual directions of forward, backward, left, right, up, and down, there are also pastward and futureward -- I recommend both these books) fall into this category, and while Garfinkle's characterizations and character interactions leave something to be desired, the premises alone, and what he did with them (he really went downtown with both books) were enough to keep me entertained (I can only hope I am as successful with my novel, The Scacchian Archipelago).  With Mainspring, Jay Lake has taken a similarly outlandish premise, and used it to craft a very well done quest novel.

The premise of Lake's book is that the universe is a great big ticking clock, constructed by God Himself, and that the earth rolls around the sun on a great brass track (there is a hundred-mile-high wall that spans the entire equator and provides the gear-teeth that mesh with the track).  Well, what happens with clocks?  They run down and need rewinding, right?  That is the germ for this novel's plot.

The story begins in an alternate Victorian-American Connecticut, around the year 1900.  The American Colonies are still colonies (there never was a Revolutionary War apparently; what happened instead is never elaborated upon), and Brittania still rules most of the Northern Hemisphere by means of its fleet of hydrogen-buoyed airships.  In the town of New Haven, apprentice clockmaker Hethor Jacques is confronted by the Archangel Gabriel, who informs Hethor that he, Hethor, must rewind the Mainspring that keeps the Earth in motion, using the Key Perilous, lest the Earth stop moving, and all life on it cease.  In due course, Hethor goes off in search of the Key Perilous (he pretty much has to, thanks to the backstabbing sons of of his master Bodean, who get Hethor kicked out of his apprenticeship).  In his quest, he gets press-ganged upon one of the aforesaid airships, goes into the heart of Africa, climbs over the Equatorial Wall, and eventually winds up in Antarctica.

I won't spoil the story for you; suffice it to say that Mr. Lake tells a very entertaining story (it is also, I am glad to report, a self-contained story; there is a sequel out in hardcover called Escapement, but Mainspring comes to a complete end, and can be read on its own).  Speaking strictly for myself here, I had only two quibbles.  One regards the nature of the Earth's orbit around the sun:  it's well established that the Earth has an axial tilt.  It tilts toward the sun to put the Northern Hemisphere in summer, away from the sun to put the Northern Hemisphere in winter.  To accomplish this with Lake's premise (he does refer to yearly seasons in the book), it would be impossible to have a direct interface between the Equatorial Wall and the Earth's orbital track -- there would have to be something in between.  Perhaps Mr. Lake hoped no one would notice.  Alas.

My other quibble is that not every aspect of the story springs naturally from the premise.  The Archangel Gabriel is to be expected in a universe that is obviously created by God (question: where is Lucifer and his army of fallen angels in all of this?), but there are also a species of mortal winged beings (which Lake refers to as "winged savages") that took me out of the story when I came across them.  They did not extend logically from the premise of Universe-as-clock, so they felt out of place to me.  Also, after Hethor crosses the Equatorial Wall, he falls in with a native tribe that calls itself "the correct people" who are basically Ewoks (Lake describes them as small and furry).  This in itself made me look on askance.  But then Hethor gets, shall we say, romantically involved with one of them.  And I found that very difficult to take seriously.

But that was a very small part of the book, the majority of which I liked very much.  I look forward to reading Escapement whenever I get it.

Jason