Marla Mason is not a people person. She’s too suspicious of people’s motives to have friends, she doesn’t enjoy casual chitchat, and she considers the fact that people want to kill her a plus, since death threats ensure she keeps her job skills current.
Her job as chief sorcerer of Felport, a city in an alternate world much like Earth, is the one thing Marla does enjoy, and she takes her civic responsibilities very seriously. So when Marla shows up in San Francisco in pursuit of a magical artifact that will help her prevent Felport’s imminent destruction, she has no intention of going to parties or seeing the sights.
That was before she got dragged into the baroque power struggles being fought amongst San Francisco’s sorcerers, before the crusade of a fanatic dedicated to reviving a long-dead Aztec goddess became personal, and before an ancient snake god declared her to be his mortal enemy.
What with so many things trying to kill her, the city by the Bay is beginning to feel a lot like home for Marla.
Blood Engines is the first book in a new urban fantasy series by Tim Pratt (writing under the name T. A. Pratt), although Pratt’s take on urban fantasy also includes strong overtones of both noir and steampunk. Perhaps it is Pratt’s obvious love of the movies, but the darkly witty dialogue is like what a reader might expect if Howard Hawkes had written urban fantasy, where the only way to tell the good guys from the bad guys is that the good guys get even sharper dialogue. In addition, Pratt plunders a plethora of pantheons and perspectives on magic, ensuring that the magical San Francisco is just as diverse as the non-magical version, counting amongst its citizens silicon mages, biomancers, and metalworking artificers, not to mention shamanistic sex magicians, (who are well worth mentioning).
The magical noir underworld of Blood Engines is reminiscent of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel in its preoccupation with using the mysterious and marginalized liminal spaces of the city to reflect the shadowy inner landscape of its cynical and secretive protagonist:
Marla inhaled, deeply, taking in the scent of piss and spilled beer, and, yes, she could have been in Felport, in the darkest part of the urban core, where she lived alone in an apartment building that would have been condemned if not for her influence. This was the neighborhood of easily gratified baser appetites, where sex and booze and drugs were just a quick cash transaction away, where the distance between want and have and have-not could be cut down to nothing in a moment. Every city had places like this, though some cities took pains to hide them. Marla liked it here. She understood its logic and its brutal grace.
Despite its often noir sensibility, however, Blood Engines never becomes grim or hopeless, due in large part to the two characters who consider Marla a friend (even if Marla herself is reluctant to acknowledge such relationships): Rondeau, a friend of Marla’s from Felport with a weakness for pop culture, and B, a former movie star with a mysterious talent for seeing the future. And the longer Marla stays in San Francisco, the more friends she is going to need, because if there is anything more dangerous than Aztec priests who want to open the gate to the underworld, it is the possibility of losing track of your own humanity until you are no longer certain whether you are one of the guardians or the monsters.
While I would recommend Blood Engines to anyone who loves a fun and fast-paced fantasy adventure, I would particularly recommend it to readers who enjoyed Jenn Reese’s Jade Tiger, as the descriptions in the martial arts scenes reminded me of Reese’s book even before I read Pratt’s acknowledgements at the back of the book which thanked Reese for the martial arts advice.
Blood Engines represents the first of four stand-alone books involving continuing characters.
These days, Pratt can be found at TimPratt.Org.
(Bantam Spectra, 2007)
