“Storytelling—that’s not the future. The future, I’m afraid, is flashes and impulses. It’s made up of moments and fragments, and stories won’t survive.”
— Prospero Taligent
A Steampunk novel by Dexter Palmer, which extolls the virtues of Not Knowing against the pragmatism of Knowing Everything.
It takes place in the first half of the 20th Century, where mechanical men and inventive machines dot the landscape. The main characters are Harold Winslow, a (failed) aspiring writer who does greeting cards to pay the bills, Prospero Taligent, the genius inventor of all the machinery that now dominates the world, and his daughter, Miranda, who is a cultural icon. Other characters include Harold's ignorant sister, Astrid, who's an aspiring artist, Caliban Taligent, who's Prospero's secret son, as well as, well Those Two Guys.
This novel provides examples of:
- Acid Attack: One of the children wants to be a professional vitrioler. Harold encounters him as an adult carrying out an acid attack on behalf of a jilted lover. He loves his work.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Miranda wants her father to get her a unicorn (knowing that's one thing even he can't provide). She's Forced to Watch as her father gets a horse and drills a hole in its head to insert a horn.
- Classical Antihero: Harold Winslow is a stubborn form of this, to such a point that he's become a jaded shell.
- Cool Airship: The Chrysalis.
- Could Say It, But...: The cop to one of the vigilantes, suggesting he take the unguarded fire escape to the roof and kill Prospero who's apparently gone mad and threatening the world with death rays.
- Crapsaccharine World: Elements of this with the protagonist's work at the greeting card company, and the employees at the Taligent Tower marching to work singing proletarian songs.
- Creator Cameo: Dexter Palmer appears at an art show in the middle of the story. Doubles as Self-Deprecation.
- Damsel in Distress: Invoked Trope
- Defiled Forever: Miranda's father can't even stand to touch Miranda once she's lost her virginity. Ironically she'd lost it long before her tryst with Harold.
- Extreme Doormat: Harold has to be forced into the heroic role that Prospero has set up for him, given his lack of self-motivation.
- How We Got Here: Opens with Howard imprisoned on the airship with only Miranda's insane ramblings for company.
- Humanoid Abomination: Like his Tempest namesake, Caliban Taligent. He's made up of the various body parts of people who were masters in their fields.
- Idealized Sex: Averted; Harold and Miranda argue over which position to use, the first condom breaks, Harold comes too quickly and Miranda has to fake her orgasm while thinking of a previous lover.
- Ingesting Knowledge: An inventive example. Caliban has his own typewriter plugged into his head. Though Prospero claims it doesn't actually work; it was just done to Caliban to make him feel special.
- Jerkass Genie: Prospero promises the children who attend his daughter's tenth birthday that he will give them what they most desire. Years later Howard meets the boy who sat next to him at the party, now a morphine addict who gets a crystal bottle of morphine delivered to him every day. Prospero also mentions hiring hitmen to fulfill several desires.
- Knowledge Broker: Prospero Taligent, to a ridiculous degree.
- Living Macguffin: Miranda Taligent, much to her chagrin. She ends up becoming the Perpetual Motion Machine.
- Mad Artist: Astrid who has herself bronzed, the sculptor hired by Prospero to make endless images of his daughter who cuts up Miranda to make the perfect version, and a literary professor even suggests that Prospero has arranged his entire life in imitation of The Tempest.
- Madonna-Whore Complex: Prospero is unable to cope with his daughter growing up and having sex and becomes obsessed with returning Miranda to a "pure" and unchanging state.
- Mad Scientist: Prospero; it's agreed by all concerned that he is mad by the end, yet he also uses the trope deliberately when he threatens to Take Over the World with his Death Ray-armed zeppelin — it's actually just to get Harold moving.
- Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Miranda
- The Magic Goes Away: The Age of Miracles (which had angels and demons walking around) is replaced by one of Science.
- Mind Screw: A common theme of the story is the Joy of the Unknowable vs the Tedium of the Knowable, so it's kind of expected.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: Miranda's playroom; Prospero can't understand why she'd ever want to leave this Gilded Cage he's made for her.
- On Second Thought: Prospero and Astrid arrange works of art that require their deaths. They both have doubts at the last second, but it's too late.
- Perpetual Motion Machine: Prospero claims to have built one to power his airship, but Harold knows it's slowly losing power and the airship will one day crash.
- Shout-Out:
- Caliban Taligent is made up of the body parts of various people, just like in Frankenstein.
- Rebels against the advent of all this technology paint themselves silver and wear funnels on their heads.
- As a young boy, Harold gets to travel with a large group of children into the corporate headquarters of a reclusive genius.
- Not to mention that all of the principal characters get their names from The Tempest.
- Science Marches On: Invoked by Harold's father and others with much pathos.
- Sophisticated as Hell - Palmer's writing in and of itself. He has a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, so it's rather hilarious to see how succinctly gutter-mouthed his characters and prose can be.
- Their First Time: Subverted; it's Harold's first time, but Miranda's thoughts show she's already lost her virginity with a coalshoveler down in the boiler room (who was a lot better at sex than the inexperienced Harold).
- The Tower: Taligent Tower (making Miranda a Girl in the Tower).
- True Art Is Incomprehensible (In-Universe): According to Charmaine Saint Claire, why Astrid shouted "Hot buttered spleen" and not "Turn off the machine!" while being lowered into a bath of molten bronze for her final work of art.
- Unfazed Everyman: A rare example where all of humanity has become this in the face of scientific progress.
- Unreliable Narrator: Harold's father gives a different version of his mother's death every time.
- The Unreveal: What was done to Miranda to turn her into the Perpetual Motion Machine.
- Wetware CPU: It's revealed at the end that Miranda is the Perpetual Motion Machine.
- You Need to Get Laid: Or as Astrid puts it, "AC:DC".
