A Fall in Autumn by Michael G. Williams

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A Fall in Autumn by Michael G. Williams

Buy Link

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Blurb

WELCOME TO THE LAST OF THE GREAT FLYING CITIES

It’s 9172, YE (Year of the Empire), and the future has forgotten its past.

Soaring miles over the Earth, Autumn, the sole surviving flying city, is filled to the brim with the manifold forms of humankind: from Human Plus “floor models” to the oppressed and disfranchised underclasses doing their dirty work and every imaginable variation between.

Valerius Bakhoum is a washed-up private eye and street hustler scraping by in Autumn. Late on his rent, fetishized and reviled for his imperfect genetics, stuck in the quicksand of his own heritage, Valerius is trying desperately to wrap up his too-short life when a mythical relic of humanity’s fog-shrouded past walks in and hires him to do one last job. What starts out as Valerius just taking a stranger’s money quickly turns into the biggest and most dangerous mystery he’s ever tried to crack – and Valerius is running out of time to solve it.

Now Autumn’s abandoned history – and the monsters and heroes that adorn it – are emerging from the shadows to threaten the few remaining things Valerius holds dear. Can the burned-out detective navigate the labyrinth of lies and maze of blind faith around him to save the City of Autumn from its greatest myth and deadliest threat?

Review

A Fall In Autumn starts out slow. As a reader, you’re dropped into this world full of people who all fall into categories with slang you don’t understand, and you kind of have to figure out what that means as you go along. The main character comes off as initially abrasive, but that could be my modern feminist reaction to the futuristic variant of a hard-boiled private investigator coming through. There are a bunch of random things happening that have no connection to anything else, and all I could think of was, explain to me why I care again?

Think of it as an adjustment. For the initial few moments or chapters, it’s uncomfortable. You might want to stop. It is so worth it to keep going.

Williams has created a world that is stratified in a perfectly believable way, different from our own but still making perfect sense. Valerius goes from an abrasive antihero to someone with whom I think most of us will be able to identify, to someone we just want to wrap up in a blanket and take care of for a while. (Not that I’m sure he’d know what to do with that, but anyway.)

In the beginning of the book, I was militantly indifferent to Valerius’ fate. By the end, I was in tears. I wanted him to live. He was still fundamentally the same man he’d been at the beginning. He knew more, and I think in some ways his understanding had been deepened, but his personality wasn’t much different from what it had been at the start. Williams’ writing, the way he illustrated Valerius’ thoughts and feelings, definitely changed the way I responded to him.

How much did my feelings about Valerius change? Well, I just bought a copy and sent it to my dad.

It’s the kind of book that stays with you, even after you close it.