With a face made of porcelain , a wind - up pith , and a talent for alchemy , Mattie is hardly a typical science fancied golem . While most novels about robots focalize on how these humanoid machines are stronger and smarter than humankind , Ekaterina Sedia ’s The Alchemy of Stone ( in bookstores this month ) explores the vulnerability of mechanical being who depend on humans for repairs and survival . Mattie is a rarified emancipate automaton in an industrial city hover on the edge of a workers ’ revolution . She ’s gone against the wishes of her Mechanic Lord and unite the ranks of the biochemist - mystic Alchemists , selling medicinal drug and perfumes to the city ’s middle grade . Sedia ’s novel captures the phantasmagorical strangeness of a urban center whose power structure is about to be toppled , and her centering on Mattie ’s kinship with her creator allows her to make do with the tiny mightiness struggles inherent in all human relationships — especially those between men and women .
Mattie ’s creator Loharri has fashion his automaton out of whalebone , metallic element , and porcelain , building the girdle shape of 19th hundred style into the very structure of her body . Instead of sexual activity organs , she has a keyhole in her chest . Her Godhead has the only key , which he uses to keep her powered up but also to contribute delight on her . He ’s also wired her to be obedient and number to him when she is in a bad way , and penalise her noncompliance by forcing her to overheat or by removing her heart . So the emancipated Mattie is well - aware that her exemption and even her very life are completely under Loharri ’s control unless he gives her the Florida key .
While the idea of a man owning the key to Mattie ’s centre verges on twee , Sedia generally makes good utilization of the metaphor . This is no simple faggot story about a woman wanting exemption . It ’s about a woman who have intercourse she ’s been regulate ( literally ) for servitude , who make out she can not ever totally escape her programming , and who therefore throws herself into a vast and complicated alchemy project that might give others the freedom she can never have . Most of the novel is about Mattie ’s endeavor to perfect “ the chemistry of stone , ” a project that will forestall a backwash of fauna call up the Gargoyles from dying of a disease that turns them to stone .
Though Mattie ’s chemistry experiments are antic , they have a kind of hyper - realistic feel to them : There are no incantations , or else there are simply repetitive experiment on gem , prove to see what elements it contains . Sedia is a plant life life scientist , and it shows : There is plenty of echt biogeekery here among the spirits and mechanically skillful dolls and mythological tool .
As Mattie nears a breakthrough on her Gargoyle project , the city ’s coal miners and other proletarian represent a gyration that leave huge parts of the city in smoke ruins . As the creation of an upper - socio-economic class Mechanic , who is part of the ruling Mechanic party , Mattie finds herself in a foreign position . She ’s a non - entity as an automaton , unable to vote and consider mere flake by most people , and yet she has the educational activity and income of what many of the subversive would view a bourgeois oppressor . To make matters more complicated , she ’s fallen in making love with a man who turns out to be one of the lead subverter .
sail up in revolutionary and antagonistic - rotatory conspiracy , locked into a tragical fight of wills with her creator , Mattie has to figure out where her loyalty lie . And all the while she never knows for sure whether the people she ’s helping see her as their equal , or just as a very delicately - craft tool . There are a number of brilliant moments when Sedia completely nail Mattie ’s foreign ambivalency , handle to tell a profound floor about muliebrity as well as what it ’s like to be mechanical . Here Mattie wonders about Sebastian , the rotatory leader who made love to her :
Was it a hoodoo of a mechanic enamored with intricate devices and easily prompted to show his heart the moment a gimmick resemble a girl , or was it something else ?
While it ’s military action - bundle , The Alchemy of Stone is most by rights understood as a character study . doleful and romanticistic , Mattie is the mechanical , winding - up doll so many gothy teenage girls reckon themselves to be . And her vulnerability haunt many adult women too : We may not have baleen corsets plant in our skin , but we all clamber to be comprehend as something more than pretty little tools . It ’s that battle that makes Mattie such a vivid , memorable , and ultimately human grapheme .
The Alchemy of Stone
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