Review: Intriguing
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 7, 2012
This is a short story set in the Lacuna universe. The beginning of this story weaves the tale behind the legend and lore of golems made from sand that could become animated using dark magic. These golems were slaves to their masters and could not disobey. Then jumping to the future the golems are now constructs which are animated to perform specific tasks. After all of the background and technical jargon on how the golems were created in the past compared to how constructs are created in present day we meet a construct that is coming off the assembly line to pass inspection and be cleared for duty and get to hear his thought processes as well as see things from the perspective of the woman performing the inspection interview.This story is very well written and easy to follow along and understand what is happening, even with no prior knowledge of the Lacuna universe. David Adams makes the discussion of history and technical aspects behind the constructs into a very intriguing read pulling you into the story bit by bit. Overall, I really enjoyed reading about the concept and would love to read a longer work concerning this plot line.Despite all of the things I enjoyed about this story there is one thing that really bothered me, the ending. The author describes this piece as a standalone story, yet on that point I am going to have to disagree. After reading through and seeing "The end" at the bottom of the page, my first thought was, this must be wrong, where is the rest? While, I understand this is a short story and it is supposed to go by quickly, upon reaching the end it really felt more like a prologue or excerpt from a larger work rather than a story that could stand alone. Perhaps if I was more familiar with some of the other works written in this world I would feel differently, but as I said before it was very intriguing and I would be very interested to find out more about this "imperfect" construct as a longer work.