It is bananapants bizarre, and highly entertaining.Įssentially, the two factions warring for control over the 'wild west' are searching for one old man, whose fractured mind may hold the key to definitively ending the war. There's barbed wire tangles that blow like tumbleweeds, horses, demon-powered machinery, and weapons that control their bearers. Kind of (and just kind of) like dropping competing bands of jaded murderous hobbitses on the dusty trails, with Mordor existing as a purgatory of land that has not yet been fully created.

A high stakes quest fantasy set in a magically half-made wild west.

It's a tricky business trying to describe the strange meshing of genre and tropes going on here. This book feels wonderfully fresh and innovative. In The Half-Made World Felix Gilman comes at the familiar with a wealth of imagination that turns expectations sideways. And either side will do anything to understand how. In its rooms lies an old general of the Red Republic, a man whose shattered mind just may hold the secret to stopping the Gun and the Line. Liv Alverhyusen, a doctor of the new science of psychology, travels to the edge of the made world to a spiritually protected mental institution in order to study the minds of those broken by the Gun and the Line. To the west lies a vast, uncharted world, inhabited only by the legends of the immortal and powerful Hill People, who live at one with the earth and its elements. Now they're just a myth, a bedtime story parents tell their children, of hope. The only hope at stopping them has seemingly disappeared-the Red Republic that once battled the Gun and the Line, and almost won. What exists has been carved out amidst a war between two rival factions: the Line, paving the world with industry and claiming its residents as slaves and the Gun, a cult of terror and violence that cripples the population with fear. A fantastical reimagining of the American West which draws its influence from steampunk, the American western tradition, and magical realism

The half made world