Debris

[sawyl]

I'm way behind with my book thoughts, so I'm going to have a bit of an amnesty and limit myself to a couple of paragraphs in an attempt to catch up. So here, by way of a start are a few thoughts on Debris, Jo Anderton's post-steampunk maybe-fantasy about an architect who falls to Earth.

The story opens with Tanyana, brilliant self-made architect, falling 800 from a statue when the pions she's trying to manipulate turn against her. When she awakes after the accident, she discovers she has lost the ability to see pions but gained the ability to see it's opposite: debris. Implanted with a liquid metal suit, she finds herself forced to earn a living among the debris collectors, the people who make the city of Morvoc underclass. As the story unfolds Tanyana starts to come to terms with her life changing fall, slowing making friends with her fellow collectors and gradually realising that might be more to her accident than she realises.

My initial reaction to the book was mixed. I loved Morvoc, a post-technical pseudo-slavic city where gadgets have been replaced by the almost-magic of pion manipulation. And I loved the contrasts between the slick high society world of Tanyana's circle and the low-tech padlocks and gas lamps and home cooking of the debris collectors, reminiscent of the way that the class divide is often portrayed in Victorian literature. However I also struggled, in the early stages, to take to Tanyana, with her pride and her condescension. But as the story unfolded — and I noticed that I was zipping through it at quite a pace — I started to warm to her. I realised that her pride made sense, given the hard work required to climb from factory worker's daughter to master architect, and that I probably wasn't supposed to like her until she started to accept her own situation.