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The Light Ages Online VwXTZ (Read and download) The Light Ages Online [VwXTZ.ebook] The Light Ages Pdf Free Ian R. MacLeod audiobook | *ebooks | Download PDF | ePub | DOC Download Now Free Download Here Download eBook #137082 in eBooks 2013-06-25 2013-06-25File Name: B00D668GF6 | File size: 61.Mb Ian R. MacLeod : The Light Ages before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised The Light Ages: 0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Five StarsBy Kindle CustomerGreat read1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A Dickensian tale set in an alternate Industrial AgeBy Wayne A McCoy'The Light Ages' by Ian R. MacLeod doesn't feel much like light reading, but it's an enjoyable story for the right reader. Think of Charles Dickens meeting up with an alternate England powered by a kind of magic crystal.The book follows Robert Borrows who was born on sixthshiftday in the grimy factory town of Bracebridge. His early days are accompanied by the sounds of the factory as it churns outpower for the wealthy. Shoom, boom. Shoom, boom. What's being manufactured is a byproduct of a magical crystal known as Aether. Robbie sees his father's hard life of working and his mother's odd ties to this aether. He also meets a strange young girl that he will run in to as he gets older.As he gets older, he rails against a system that uses men up and supplies the wealthy with strange and useless toys. He tries to fight the corruption he sees, and finds that his life is tied to the life he once knew and the strange girl named Anna.It's a large novel that feels somewhat like something from the 19th century. That's a complete compliment to the author. I don't know that I ever felt any connection to the main characters beyond a sense of pity. That might be where the book failed me, but I did enjoy the journey and this strange alternate take on the Industrial Age.I received a review copy of this ebook from Open Road Integrated Media and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. The magic goes away and forgets to leave a forwarding addressBy Michael BattagliaWhat happens when you write a fantasy book but kind of forget to put any actual fantasy in it?Ian Macleod is certainly not a novice at fantasy, having already by this point written a novella that won the World Fantasy Award. Judging by the number of fantasy-familiar authors who populate the cover and inside pages with glowing quotes, other people with experience in this kind of thing also thought it was fantasy (as an aside, I always kind of worry when I pick up a book and the only pull quotes are other authors describing how awesome this author is, as opposed to actual reviews . I can't put it into a definitive chart or anything but it seems that the number of people quoted is inversely proportional to how okay I find the book) and yet beyond an admittedly fantastic setting it's not really THAT magical.I should note that I'm not looking for elves and orcs and people swinging swords while declaring their personal histories through extraordinarily expository speeches. I've read books by all the people quoted here (Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, James Blaylock, Tim Powers) and have vastly enjoyed their works. In fact, I highly enjoyed for the most part the actual act of reading this book. But I do feel like what I was looking for and what it was giving me were two vastly different things.It's set in a sideways England where magic is something that you can mine out of the ground and thus entire towns are given over to giant operations where huge engines strip the stuff from the Earth. Since this is England, that dirty work is left to the working classes. And since even in alternate histories you can't escape the examples of actual history, life pretty much stinks for them while the rich folks who exist in guilds live pretty sweet lives thanks to all that magic the grubby commoners keep scooping from the soil.But since the book isn't approved by the estate of Margaret Thatcher, we mostly follow the life of Robert Borrows, a lad who has grown up in Bracebridge and eventually will do his best to bring about a new Age where the working classes will find a different way to be oppressed. Along the way his life intertwines with a girl he met exactly once as a child, Annalise, who may be more magical than she lets on. Together they'll eventually try to unravel the mystery of what exactly happened on a day before they were born when the mine stopped working.The opening sections of the book are quite good, as MacLeod does his best to pull us into the setting and get the ground rules laid out. Mining the magic (called "aether") is like any mining inherently dangerous and there are moments when people get too exposed to the magical radiation and instead of turning huge and green when they get angry they get called trolls or changlings and are often taken away to live out their lives elsewhere. These early scenes of the book when we're first getting used to the magical nature of things is where the tone succeeds best, especially when we see the dire effects the aether can have on people (someone close to Robert goes downhill pretty fast and its actually unnerving to witness) and how the society seems stacked against people like Robert's family who pretty much do all the work under less than ideal conditions.But as good as the prose is here (and its really marvelous, really immersing you in the scene without overplaying it, lush without bogging the story down . not as eloquent as a John Crowley but varied enough to make this a pleasure to read on a sensory level) the plot can't quite keep up with it, nor can MacLeod's world building. Asked to construct a sideways world where the aether has changed society, he appears to merely recreated a miserable England of the 1800s with some slight changes here and there. While magic is present we never get a real good sense of how its fundamentally altered the trajectory of the world and so it tends to fade into the background as we follow Robert moving off to London and becoming one of the proletariat, publishing a newspaper about the plight of the working classes while occasionally stopping to investigate what happened back home before he was born or pursuing a strange fascination with Annalise, who has entered into the upper crust of society and is now known as Anna Winters.The focus on Annalise to my mind really hamstrings the plot because despite all the ink devoted to how mysterious and alluring and magical she apparently is, she doesn't do all that much to justify everyone's fixation with her. Every other character in the book wants to either figure out the mystery of her or take her to bed (or do one in the process of the other) and after pages of the book trying to hammer that into you via all the characters constantly going ga-ga over her, she mostly avoids Robert and does her best to be as low key as possible. Meanwhile Robert gets to pull a Proust and hang out at all the fine rich parties but again . not much in the way of magic.And so the book drifts along that way, giving us page after page of luscious, glorious prose while also slapping us with a plot that's absolutely pedestrian. Sometimes it feels like MacLeod may have bit off more than he could chew, wanting to depict Robert's life Augie March style, or show us a society in transformation, or track the bond between Annalise and Robert, or even solve the dark mystery that could presumably tear society apart. But by trying to do all these things at once it succeeds in doing none of them so plots move to the fore- and background basically equally, without any sense of what's at stake here or even any real sense of urgency. With nothing taking real precedence we're left to gaze at the setting, which once you strip out the prose is basically every steampunk England you've ever seen.That might be my biggest quibble with the book . while it gets compared to China Mieville (especially "Perdido Street Station") what MacLeod seems to lack is Mieville's ability to paint with sheer strangeness, which can forgive a lot of sins in this genre (it kept me into "Perdido Street Station" while I watched that plot veer completely off the rails into a direction I was not expecting). By keeping it somewhat realistic he strips it of any lingering sense of wonder, which leaves us with a beautifully written novel about a boy hanging out with rich people, which has been done in literature before, and better.Even the big revelation that's supposed to rock society winds up basically being "what if Chernobyl happened to only two people", with consequences that don't seem to be reflected in the novel in any way, shape or form.
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