Migration. It's for the Birds.

Traveling on business, leaving home so that I can spend my days in an unhappy cubicle and my nights in a mid-budget closet with nice bedding, starts to wear on my soul even before I touch the ground. This particular trip has been especially grueling, coming down as I am at the tail end of a cold. Today seems to be the last of it, so I hope, because my throat feels almost clear today and I have my usual energy levels, or at least the energy levels I normally achieve when I haven't been allowed to work out for three weeks.

Because of the cold, I poured myself into bed at the end of Monday; Tuesday I managed to have enough energy to go out to dinner with WhipArtist at a small Greek restaurant, gelato and bookstore hunting for a while. I read for a little bit before I poured myself back into bed.

It's been a lot of that. I've seen the short strip of El Camino Real between my hotel and the office, the inside of a Starbucks and a Whole Foods, and that's about the whole of it. Don't tell Omaha, but there's a Sees Candies across the street from my hotel.

Unfortunately, it looks like my week here isn't going to be productive in any grand fashion either. Several of my co-workers are also down with colds, and others are at Disrupt (see JWZ's post for a fun take on it). So other than thinking about how to "up my game" for a certain technological issue, I'm just... here.

The hotel room has a two-coil range top and a microwave oven, but no fire extinguisher or first-aid kit.

I miss my family. The bed is large. When Omaha and I sleep together, from time to time at night we'll both reach up for the other's hand for familiarity and comfort. It's not there, and I miss her terribly. Storm and Kouryou-chan too, although Storm is at that teenager age where she'd never admit she missed me, and Kouryou-chan is on a camping field trip with her school, so I'd be missing her anyway.

At least I've been eating well. Whole Foods and good Greek dinners; the lunches at the office are suitable, if one is careful; and breakfast has been "continental breakfast"-provided hard boiled eggs (so hard boiled I suspect they're a new state of matter) and a big bucket of sliced fruit. I won't get rickets, at any rate. Drinking, on the other hand, has been an exercise in self-discipline: the coffee down here sucks, and at the office there's soda pop in every cooler on every floor.

Andrew P. Mayer's The Falling Machine (The Society of Steam, vol. 1)

Andrew Mayer's The Falling Machine is a strange and lovely book. It starts with a great idea: The Avengers, only steampunk, and now old and decrepit. The Paragons are a team of superheroes, and all of their equipment is driven by tiny energy sources only one man in the world knows how to make: Cells of Fortified Steam power The Submersible's suit, as well as Iron-Clads armor and The Industrialst's weapons. With one exception-- The Sleuth, who's a suave martial artist now in his mid-60s-- the Paragons depends upon various forms of Fortified Steam to operate specialized powered armor.

That one mad scientist is Dr. Darby, who is killed in chapter one. The Industrialist's daughter, Sarah, loved him as an uncle, and is determined to both free his greatest creation, a sentient robot known as The Automaton, and to figure out why he died. The Paragons are in disarray because, while they can operate the machine that makes Fortified Steam, they don't know if they can reproduce the secret it if and when it fails, and they know that someone else, The Eschaton, is after that very secret. And when things start to go very wrong, it looks like the Automaton may be a killer in their midst.

Only Sarah knows the truth.

The book ends on a cliffhanger, there is a Volume 2 out already, and I do intend to pick it up soon. It's brilliant in a special way, especially in its depictions of a 19th century New York with a very small handful of recently emerged super-powered crazies, both just and unjust. Mayer's writing style is revealed in a merging-plotlines way that I find off-putting. Chapters will end with characters suddenly showing up to save or complicate the day, followed by another chapter that explains how and why that character happened to be there.

Mayer does do a very good job of showing Sarah beating on the walls of the cage created by gender expectations in 19th century Americana, and how surprised Sarah is when she finds the walls are made of wet cardboard, and how uncomfortable she is walking through the hole she just punched through one, and for that he deserves a lot better attention.

A lot of the Steampunk milieu bows to the imperialist fetishism of 19th century eurofantasy steampunk by playing up London or Paris as a setting of choice, probably due to watching one too many Guy Ritchie films. The Falling Machine avoids that entirely, and is a welcome addition to the steampunk shelf if only for that reason alone.