Title: Mechanics
of the Past
Author: K.A. Ashcomb
Date: 2021
Publisher: Liquid Hare
ISBN: 978-952-69026-6-1
Length: 367 e-pages
Quote: “Philosophy is now become very Mechanical.”
And here is a comically philosophical adventure
story about a gruesome necromantic version of the Finnish sampo, a magical grinder that produced its own wheat. Out of what? In
folktales “out of nothing” is an acceptable answer, but in this novel Otis and
Levi build a machine that seems more to print out whatever they like, using energy
taken from trapped, tormented souls.
Otis and Levi are a working team, not a couple.
They have girlfriends, Evelyn the empty-headed servant and Margaret the
unattractive but brilliant assistant.
They are, like several people in a fast-growing
town called Threebeanvalley, “specials.” The “specials” have magical powers.
Some of them are traditional humanlike horror figures (Margaret identifies as a demon, and vampires are known to live in the town). Others are nearly-normal
people with special abilities, like Siarl, a short young man often mistaken for
a boy, and Sigourney, a small young woman. Siarl can see other people’s point
of view, which is how he’s managed to bond with neurotic Sigourney. Sigourney can
make herself and anyone she touches invisible. A world where such people coexist seems to need a
general agreement that value judgments are subjective, that demons and vampires
have as much right to live as anyone else has, and nobody would be so barbaric
as to think of killing Levi merely because he’s killed other people.
If you were born with a sense of right and wrong,
perhaps the easiest way to wrap your mind around this kind of philosophical
position is to imagine how it works in a steampunk sort of fantasy world.
Threebeanvalley has “gods” whose especially formidable talents are explained as
born out of people’s collective imagination, but they’re among the weaker
characters in this story. Sigourney wants to rescue Levi, who is apparently her
much older brother, even though Levi may have been trying to kill her. The
goddess of Justice develops raging post-traumatic stress disorder and is
threatened with a gruesome early psychiatric treatment that actually worked in
some cases of head injury and was technically known as trepanning or
trephining.
Funny? Like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld? Well,
sort of. Though the plots of Discworld novels aren’t limited to comic
misadventures and absurd possibilities either, I laughed out loud more often
when reading them than I did when reading Mechanics
of the Past. The plot of Mechanics gets
weird enough to seem more like Stephen King than like Pratchett. On the other
hand, I got the impression that Pratchett was actually trying to believe the
nihilistic philosophy that his novels often seemed to express, if taken as
anything but elaborate comedy sequences. In Mechanics
of the Past I kept thinking, “Yes, this absurdity is where a ‘non-judgmental’
approach to life leads us, if it’s taken too seriously.”
I believe we should be aware of the subjective and
imperfect quality of our value judgments. All but the most degenerate human
societies have always agreed on a general moral law that condemns violence,
encourages benevolence, recognizes family obligations, and so on. People have
managed to disagree on the details. Probably every American reader of Huckleberry Finn has always felt that
for Huck to help Jim escape from slavery was a virtuous act, but reading Huckleberry Finn in
college is supposed to help us understand that it was possible for decent human beings to
believe that helping Jim escape was a sin. But if you try to disown your sense
of right and wrong altogether—as Sigourney does, as part of her reaction to traumatic stress—you end
up defending serial murderers’ “right” to murder.
The Amazon blurb for this book promised “introverts,”
plural, and that the story delivers. People still need to be reminded that poor
social-phobic Sigourney is not the only introvert in the story, or the most
typical one. She’s a very young introvert recovering from emotional traumas. Sigourney
alternates between compulsively seeking attention (she is adolescent) and hiding, glorifying herself as having the power
to forgive or help her brother and condemning herself for being selfish enough
not to want to be fed into “the machine.” Siarl, who seems to Sigourney in one
of her bitter moods to like crowds,
doesn’t crave social stimulation either, and does have a good healthy sense of
right and wrong. Then there’s Rose, the independent solitary banker. Lepus, the
“rabbit god of luck,” is hard to classify: is he an extrovert who’s positively
seduced into giving up his rational mind and supernatural power, or an
introvert who’s driven to that, when he’s given too much food and worshipful
attention?
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