Arjeanette Vivero Vivero itibaren 22720 Hecho, Huesca, Spain itibaren 22720 Hecho, Huesca, Spain

Superb debut; after reading the free fiction set in Veridon on the author's site a while ago, I kind of forgot about this marvelous setting until I read the short story “A Soul Stitched to Iron” featuring Jacob Burn the dispossessed nobleman, "steampunk cyborg" and former pilot working for organized crime which was a highlight of the superb Solaris Sf 3 for me. The novel is written in first person with Jacob as a narrator and has a superb opening paragraph that cannot but hook you: "I was on the Glory of Day when she fell out of the sky. I rode the flames and shattered gears down into the cold, dark Reine, survived because I was only half-alive to begin with. Two times I’ve been dragged out of the wreckage of a zepliner, two times I’ve walked away. This time I was just a passenger. The first time I was captain, Pilot, and only survivor. The sky doesn’t like me much." Veridon is a conflicted city between the old aristocracy, the new rich, and the Church of the Algorithm that made zepliners and other "steampunk tech" possible Jacob Burn is a scion of the oldest nobility thrown out of house by his father Alexander after his failure as Pilot, later employed by cogwork underground wheeler-dealer Valentine and his right hand Cacher, while having a crush on Emily the "independent" operator who is Cacher's official girlfriend. When he is entrusted a mysterious object on Glory by a dying associate, Jacob becomes a marked man and the center attention of various factions, one more sinister than other, so much so that Valentine does an "Alexander" on him and "disowns" him too; business as he puts it... On his own Jacob finds two stalwart partners in Emily and a mysterious "bug-man", the "Anansi" Wilson, former engineer and savant until the Council cracked down on his Artificer order, and tries to figure what is the mysterious object and how to get of the mess alive. A standalone with a definite ending but promising more in this great setting, Heart of Veridon is just superb and highly, highly recommended. I truly hope that there will be more Veridon novels.

If you like A Confederacy of Dunces-- the hilariously zanny and interesting characters-- you will LOVE this book. It is a mystery full of characters JUST like Ignacious. It looks big and intimidating but I was really mad when I finished it because there was no more left to read.

Another book picked off the new book shelves. I had read good but vague things about this. It was unlike anything I'd read before, which turned out to be a good thing. The writing style seemed a bit odd at first (its translated into English) but the story is well-paced. Like Intuition (Allegra Goodman), another book I really enjoyed, this is a book nominally about science and primarily about people trying to make sense of intangibles.