"Only strange people want to be friends with a machine"
In a writing book called Rules of Thumb I came across the following "rule," and I think it's very very important for beginning writers to hear: "We can't care about sand mutants; if you do, or think you do, kill yourself." The book is comprised of various writing rules from various established writers, and this boneheaded quote is from Frederick Barthelme, and though it's maybe the stupidest writing advice I've ever heard, I do think it's very good to hear, because a sad truth is that no matter what you write, some people will think that it's worthless, and I guess hearing it put so bluntly just might be a good thing in a sort of band-aid tearing way.

To me, that's what the entire genre of fantasy is all about, the fun of it, the trick of it, the reason why writing good fantasy is not easy: it's making people care about sand mutants. Okay, so that might not be the only definition of fantasy, but for me, it's an important component. A failed fantasy is one where I don't care about the sand mutants. In a successful one I do.

In Ekaterina Sedia's book The Alchemy of Stone it was no sand mutant but a clockwork automaton I cared about. The basic bones of the story, artificial creature interacts with its creator, is a familiar one of course, Pygmalion and Galatea to Frankenstein and monster to Edward Scissorhands and Vincent Price's last mad scientist. So, as in most stories, everything rests on the particulars, and I liked them here very much. The setting is a city halfway between New Weird urban nightmare and fairy tale. I can best imagine it when I'm not reading it as a painting, bold strokes laid out in pastel greens and pinks, dark blues and golds, with sharp, sharp inks and etchings to provide the detail. The city doesn't have the feel of a real city, because it doesn't have the weight of history behind it, but it is the perfect city for this story. When I say weight of history I don't mean it doesn't have a past, because it does, just that the city's past isn't what sticks in my mind after reading. Instead it's the vivid present, with two fierce, colorful political parties at conflict, the mechanics and the alchemists. The constructor, Loharri, is a mechanic, and his creation, the clockwork woman Mattie, is an alchemist. Between those two factions is a nice distinction in philosphy, the one wanting to change the world through machinery and logic, the other through magic, poison, and sometimes explosives.

Why do I care about a clockwork woman? Because she's a person (Barthelme apparently doesn't realize that humanhood and personhood can be two very different things in a fantasy story), and though she's intelligent, she's also painfully naive in many ways, so that I worried for her, wandering among all those giant lizards and mechanical knights. Mattie is a wonderfully three dimensional character, with conflicting desires and a body that isn't quite robust enough to support them. When she's damaged, as happens several times over the course of the story, it's a not quite analogous to a human character getting injured--for one thing, she won't heal on her own, she always needs someone else to repair her--and I felt this pain for her, inexplicably more than when some guy gets punched in the head. Likewise, the story's closest thing to a sex scene is breathtaking.

The Alchemy of Stone moves with some of the softness and ease of a fable, but it's the solid details that make everything so memorable.

http://www.ekaterinasedia.com/alchemyofstone.html