Review: “Whitechapel Gods” by S. M. Peters

Summary: The Whitechapel section of London has been taken over by two mechanical gods who rule from a giant monolith called the Stack, which billows up endless smoke into the ever-darkened sky. Cut off from the rest of England, the people in Whitechapel suffer under the oppression of these machines and their monstrous creations. They are recruited to work for either the rigid Grandfather Clock or the ferocious Mama Engine, toiling away their lives on the Great Work. But England wants Whitechapel back. And the Queen has sent her agents to infiltrate the iron and coal city of the Lord and Lady to find a way to kill its divine abominations. The method has been written but is now lost, and whoever finds the formula holds the future of the city in their hands.

Commentary: Up until now, steampunk has been, for me, an aesthetic. It makes the great heroes of my childhood even cooler. And it makes for computers that are beyond sexy. Something in the synthesis of technology and analog mechanisms strikes just the right chord with me. It’s like the most elegant Rube Goldberg imaginable, with style. And yet, I had never read anything from the genre that inspires these creative works of fabrication fancy.

Until now.

It was time to see if a steampunk setting could be everything I thought it should be, without losing the story somewhere between the giant clockwork robots and the weapons with far too many gears and levers to ever actually work.

In S. M. Peters’s hands, it does.

One criticism I have often heard of the steampunk genre in general is that it is heavy on the steam, light on the punk. Cyberpunk stories were all about the dysphoria created when new technology changes society. Some people don’t adjust well to change. Some get left behind. Some simply can’t find their place in the new order. While technology has advanced, people’s lives are not better, safer, or happier. And they know it. These are stories of struggle and, sometimes, revolution.

In Whitechapel, there is plenty of oppression, fear, and hopelessness created by Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine’s new world order. The people live in a black city of iron and smog. They have never seen green, nor basked in the sun. They do not smile.

Grandfather Clock exists in a place called the Chimney. It is, essentially, an analog Matrix. People are strapped into chairs, jabbed with wires, and left to rot while their spirits feed the mechanical god of logic and order. It is the worst kind of punishment, because they are never allowed to die. Readers will find that much of the story is borrowed from The Matrix (the first and only), but something in the nature of the steampunk setting makes it all the more creepy and horrific.

Mama Engine is the masochistic fire of creation. For the love of her, people sacrifice their beating hearts for coal furnaces. They have their limbs torn off and replaced with mechanical copies. They become wraiths in black cloaks, tending the fires of the Stack that supply her with molten metal. She is the wild abandon that has thrown up skyscrapers half-completed, their skeletal I-beams jabbing into empty space. She will consume the world, as any raging fire wants to do. She will burn up her followers in pursuit of her madness.

This is Oliver Sumner’s Whitechapel. And while to him the stories of the London beyond the wall are fairy tales, he believes that the machines must be destroyed. Whatever the world would be like, it must be better than the way it is. Not only are people forced to labor for the machines, they are infected with the clacks—a mysterious illness that turns a person’s very flesh into metal, their very blood into oil. Humanity is being eaten alive by the machines, their bodies stolen. And with their bodies goes their ability to die. So although Oliver has no allegiance to nor love of the Queen, for the freedom of everyone he knows, he will fight. For the right to die like proper men, he will fight.

And his willingness to fight has made him the hero of the Underbelly, the poor district in which Oliver and his band of thieves find shelter. He was the leader of a revolution once. A failed one. But the people remember, and they look to him for a sign that the time has come again to show the machines that the humans do not surrender.

There is much more to this story, more than I could summarize nicely in a review. And there are characters who are real, heartbreaking, and contemptible in turn. When you meet Tom, just try to tell me that he doesn’t seem strikingly familiar.

But for all that, there are some items that could have used a more deft treatment. It is never quite explained, at least to my satisfaction, where these gods came from. The suggestion is that they have always existed but could not be expressed before a creature developed the technology capable of expressing them. And the relationship between the physical aspects of the gods and their spiritual power was never made quite clear to me either.

Additionally, the great weapon developed to bring them down is never really explained. How does one destroy a metaphysical being? Well, you use . . . you know . . . stuff. I imagine this was the author’s problem as well and likely why so little is said about the nature of the weapon that will free humanity. Still, I would like to have seen a stroke of genius there at the end.

In all, a solid book. One that I thought from the outset should be done as an audiobook, which could only up the ante on this entertaining, sometimes horrifying, clockwork narrative.

Lora Friedenthal

Whitechapel Gods by S. M. Peters
Published by: Roc Books (February 5, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0451461932
ISBN-13: 978-0451461933
Genre: Fantasy