The Waking Engine
Imagine Cooper’s confusion when he wakes up in what appears to be a foreign city. Imagine his surprise when he’s told he died, and this is the next step on his journey, the same journey every person takes, dying and living for thousands of years on thousands of worlds. Imagine his mind-boggling shock when he’s told that the place where he’s awakened, the City Unspoken, is usually a person’s final stop; Cooper seems to have skipped right to the end of his own journey. There are more surprises in store, too, in this imaginative SF novel, in which everyman Cooper is positioned as the (possible) savior of the rapidly disintegrating City Unspoken. The author unavoidably covers some of the same ground as Philip Jose Farmer’s classic Riverworld series (in which people are repeatedly reincarnated along the banks of a seemingly endless river), but it would be a serious mistake to think of this as a retread. Edison breaks some new ground here, and even when he’s in familiar territory, he finds his own way of exploring it. An impressive debut. --David Pitt