Sometime in the 17th century, Dutch scientist Christian Huygens made a remarkable breakthrough: through a combination of horology and alchemy, he created a clockwork robot imbued with incredible strength, speed, and an artificial intelligence hardly different from that of a human. This discovery changed humanity.



Politically, the Dutch quickly latched on to the discovery, barred anyone outside their nation from any access to the secrets of Huygens' breakthrough, and went about creating ever more elaborate machanicals (colloquially called Clakkers) as servants, soldiers and police force. The Clakkers were created with a burning need to fulfill the demands of their human masters - the geasa. Not carrying out a geasa carried withit unbearable pain. Pre-programmed with an intricate set of metageasa (a cruel parody of the Asimov's Rules), they were enslaved for centuries to the Dutch queen and whoever she leased them to. With this power, the Netherlands became an Empire. The British never stood a chance. The French king was driven into exile in Quebec, in Marsailles-in-the-West (our Montreal). The French barely held on to their freedom through their chemical ingenuity that allowed them to hold off Dutch Clakker attacks, from the Dutch settlement in the new world, New Amsterdam (our New York, complete with a Broncks River and a Bruckelen).
Religiously, the creation of intelligent robotic slaves created a new rift between Dutch Protestantism and French Catholicism. The latter believed that the machines have souls, and are therefore equal to men and must be freed of their slavery. The former believed that the machines had no souls, and their enslavement is therefore just. But this belief soon demanded more changes to their belief system. If the Clakkers had no real free will, what makes them different from humans? Inevitably, the conclusion must be that humans have no real free will either. That humans do not have a soul.

Jax is an impossibility in the worldview of the Dutch: a rogue Clakker with free will. He's rare, though far from the first. His freedom was won by accident, as he was embroiled in the secret machinations of French espionage against the Dutch and Dutch subversion of the French regime, in the early decades of the 20th century. He wishes to escape to the far north, where rumor has it that free Clakkers live (they arrive there, often, through a network called "the underground railroad" - yes, subtlety is not one of the books strong suits), but finds himself instead drawn back to the centre of New Amsterdam, accompanied by the disgraced head for the French espionage network, out to clear her name and avenge her dead husband.

The book is uneven, at best. A long exposition almost lost me with numerous Dutch terms and places that I found hard to follow. Then the action picks up a bit but keeps being slowed down by really ham-handed philosophical discussions on free will, slavery, the soul. At one point the book screeches to a halt to actually have a discussion on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. But after the halfway mark the books starts picking up in earnest and becomes an enjoyable (well, not sure that's the right word, but still) adventure filled with tragedy, horror, triumph, and failure.

And then it stops, because these days books don't end with an ending, they end with a cliffhanger. So here we stand, and I hate series where the books don't stand on their own because I honestly feel if I trudged through over 400 pages of book, I deserve some minimal sense of closure, and not just a "to be continued". Grumpf.