Lee's POV characters also have a way of slipping humor into tense moments that is refreshing, deeply humanizing, and impressively varied based on who's doing the joking, with whom, and under what circumstances. While Chiang outpaces Lee in terms of raw emotional heft and impact- in some ways an unfair comparison, I'll admit, as shorter-form fiction tends to have denser and more walloping emotional beats than longer fiction- Lee, like Chiang, has a talent for writing prose that seems cold and cerebral at the outset, only to sneak up and knife you with poignancy and sharp emotional clarity at unexpected moments. Chiang is a science fiction author you probably know best as the person who wrote the novella that was the basis for the film Arrival (That novella, Story of Your Life, is absolutely brilliant, by the by. If there's an author that Lee most immediately reminds me of style-wise, it's Ted Chiang. No specific spoilers are forthcoming, so pardon me if I get slightly vague, but I think this is a trilogy best experienced as unspoiled as possible. I would offer respectful dissent to this school of thought, on the grounds that the writing style of Lee's trilogy stays perfectly consistent throughout: the reader is simply familiar enough with the setting, characters and stakes by the climax of the series (as they should be) that nothing is shrouded, ambiguous or purposefully obfuscated anymore.īasically, if you can anchor yourself to the intriguing characters in book one and focus on seeing and understanding the world through their perspective, rather than trying to guess ahead of the story and figure things out ahead of time, the flow of the narrative works quite smoothly in the first book and beyond.Īnyhow, to get to the meat and potatoes of the trilogy: its style, themes and characters. One thing I've seen mentioned fairly consistently across discussions of the Machineries Trilogy is that the first book is in medias res rough-and-tumble immersion in the style of Malazan- you're shoved headfirst into a complex world and are forced to keep up with a barrage of fast and furious details, both obvious and subtle- while by the end of the trilogy, things get spelled out in disappointingly straightforward fashion. Before we get started, I feel obligated to include a disclaimer that, while Yoon Ha Lee's trilogy is technically sci-fi, I've seen these books mentioned here often enough that I feel like this review is kosher.īut just to be safe, I'm going to kick this thing off with an allusion to Malazan: The Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson.
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