What this book (nay, these books) might have been, or could have become, surely would have been magic such as we have rarely been fortunate enough to read let alone witness. One can’t help but appreciate the mysteries that were lurking between the dialogue sequences, the hints that science may have been stunted by humanity developing inadequate/cumbersome math that had to compete with sorcery for relevance, and the love stories of separation and duty necessitated by the inexorable progress of violence, corruption, and self-interest where resource allocation is concerned. So many things were happening! What might we have found in all the many Dark Rooms, how was photography to shape a world where sorcerers could manipulate the weather, why did a multi-nation world so violently reject Empires even as they all seem willing to relent to another one if they could be a part of it? Given what we read in these pages, there would have been nothing obvious about the world Ford was crafting or the characters he was creating for this world. You certainly can respect that an incomplete narrative should ultimately inform whether or not a book is “good”, but I think it’s arguable that, here, it’s a blessing in disguise precisely because we don’t know what Aspects was going to be when it was done but what Aspects is is wonderfully weird and different. It’s a romance, a political drama, a commentary on technological and political progress, and a tale of magics and mundanities mingling and clashing in a world so certain of being uncertain that you as the reader can certainly turn the last pages and imagine more for yourself.
I was genuinely enraptured and thrilled by this book. It is a page turner, and it is in many ways one of the most exciting things I’ve ever read. Personally, I appreciate it when exposition doesn’t hand everything to you, or when the writer can tell you things about certain characters through world-building or costume or speech patterns. That’s not the kind of book everyone is going to be into, and that’s fine, of course. So anyone going into this book expecting a) a complete novel or b) not to have to do a little backtracking to reread a particular scene as it transitions into something else is going to be unpleasantly surprised. And that’s the what of it: use your imagination and all of these aspects may come together for you.