Name: The Dream of Perpetual Motion
ISBN: 9781429959179

Dexter Palmer

Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. As Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda's life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion

A debut so magical… so extraordinary… it has to be read to be believed…. Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, the greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. The tale of Harold’s life is also one of an alternate reality, a lucid waking dream in which the well-heeled have mechanical men for servants, where the realms of fairy tales can be built from scratch, where replicas of deserted islands exist within skyscrapers.. As Harold’s childhood infatuation with Miranda changes over twenty years to love and then to obsession, the visionary inventions of her father also change Harold’s entire world, transforming it from a place of music and miracles to one of machines and noise. And as Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda’s life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.

Cindy Lieberman

Some interesting Steampunk moments and some inspired, amusingly awkward scenes. But 3/4 of the way through the book I have given it up for being too long, too slow and too much work. None of the human characters is the least bit likeable, so I was not invested in the outcome.

Phil James

I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book, which I would have been interested enough to seek out anyway.

It suffers slightly by comparison to another steampunk sci-fi favourite of mine, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82... 
but it is well worth the tour of this debut writer's dark imagination.

Even though I felt it was, at first, a gothic horror version of Charlie and the Chocolate factory crossed with Angela Carter's "Nights at the circus" [leaving aside the obvious "The Tempest" and "The Wizard of Oz":] the plot soon grows into it's own unique creature.

Populated with mechanical men, monsters and wizards this is a fantasy world that is strangely like our own in it's noise and loss of faith in "the age of miracles"

The Dream of Perpetual Motion

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