The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a steam punk version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Princeton Professor Dexter Palmer, who lead the first Ivy league academic conference on video games.
The time is the past but there are robot servants and shrinkcabs, taxis driven supposedly by psychotherapists, but really they’re trained in looking attentive.
Harold Winslow works as a sad, greeting card writer and is currently imprisoned in a zeppelin (he believes) is doomed to crash into the earth. Harold is imprisoned by his childhood love Miranda Taligent, who’s gone crazy, and the cryogenically frozen body of genius inventor father Prospero, who created the world they live in today, in his black obsidian skyscraper that towers over the city.
Harold tells how his bright future turns into a nightmare and how it all started with Miranda’s fated childhood birthday party in which Prospero predicts the future in the children and gives his daughter a unicorn.
This is an exciting and imaginative book that reminded me of Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis and the work of postmodernist Thomas Pynchon.
–Reviewed by The Lit Guy
