The Alchemy of Stone (2008)

The Alchemy of Stone is the newest novel by Ekaterina Sedia, author of The Secret History of Moscow, who was also kind enough to provide the story Amber Ships for us here. According to the publisher's blurb:

Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets - secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. However, this doesn't sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart - literally!

If you read the aforementioned Amber Ships, then you already have an appreciation for Sedia's thick and descriptive writing style. Little escapes detailed notice in her heavily textured and atmospheric world. There is an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia in her city, pushing in on the reader with its scents and lingering, musky, smokey stimuli.

Within the city, Sedia covers a great deal of dramatic ground. The Alchemy of Stone is ultimately a web of allegories for the perfectly ordinary lying beneath a fantastic world of living gargoyles, alechmist automatons, men who capture ghosts within themselves and the giant contraptions of mechanic-kings. She charts the transition of a society from a hereditary aristocracy through revolutionary ferment while, via the political intrigues between mechanics and alchemists, the passing from a more romantic, rural age of traditional wisdom to a modern age of heavy industry and its deleterious effects on society.

The most potent moments for this reviwer were those that dealt with issues of prejudice and descrimination. The heroine Mattie has made good (or was made good) as an emancpiated female automaton, and that position allows her to experience and observe the dynamics of racism. On the one hand she is filled with revulsion at the mindless automatons who go about their slavish labours while on the other she objects to the racial epithet "clunker" being shouted at her. Mattie is accepted within both the alchemist and mechanic parties, but only because she is seen as inconsequential. She is savvy enough, however, to use the prejudice to her advantage when straddling the social order between the elite and the underclass of women and workers.

The universality of her allegory provides the only meaningful fault with Sedia's novel, being that the setting is itself inconsequential. The imaginative "Steampunk" world isn't really made use of. The automatons, the gargoyles, the lizard-wagons, the Soul-Smoker, the alechmists end up being window dressing to a story that could be told with a minimum of change in any society, real or fictional, mirroring the last two centuries' political, social and economic upheavals.

There is certainly a fine line between crafting a timeless tale and making use of a genre in such a way that the story couldn't be sensible in any other setting. If we take The Alchemy of Stone as an attempt to weigh in on the question, it would seem that Sedia threw down with timeless universality. However, there is certainly no shortage of novels, especially in Science Fiction, that are so genre-specific that they become incomprehensibly mired in jargon and abstractions. As a story of racial descrimination and the effects of technology on the worker, it is a worthy and richly descriptive novel.