Readers of Gilman’s previous forays into the world of the Unmade West will not be surprised by the self-aggrandizing picture that Ransom paints of himself, though his earnest intention to tell the truth (albeit a truth coloured by his own perceptions and beliefs) is genuine. The set-up for the novel is that it is a cobbling together of letters and drafts from Ransom himself by the editorial hand of one Elmer Merrial Carson, a raconteur, journalist, novelist and sort of Mark Twain figure in Gilman’s world. To call Harry a con-man would be unfair, to call him a scientist would be inaccurate, to call him an inveterate dreamer would probably be just about right. The most important of these is our narrator and ‘hero’ ‘Professor’ Harry Ransom, Lightbringer, etc., etc., discoverer of the Ransom Process, creator of the Ransom System of Exercises, businessman, inventor, and visionary extraordinaire. It shares the same genre-bending alternate weird-weird west world of its predecessor as well as several key characters. _The Rise of Ransom City_ is a sequel-of-sorts to the thoroughly excellent The Half-Made World. Finally his characters have complexity and their own voices and never come across as dull or flat. He also writes fairly dense (or at least long) texts, but they never seem to be weighed down by their size things move along at the pace they need to move at, whether that be faster or slower at any given point, and they reach their destination in ways that satisfy.
I generally lump him in with those writers I consider “prose stylists” though he’s not showy in any way, rather he just seems to know how to effectively turn a phrase. He’s definitely a writer on my watch-list (not in a sociopathic way of course), and there’s something about his writing that I find both enjoyable and satisfying. And it all starts with the day that old Harry Ransom crossed paths with Liv Alverhyusen and John Creedmoor, two fugitives running from the Line, amidst a war with no end.įelix Gilman is good. Well, here is its story, full of adventure and intrigue. You might be standing on its sidewalk and not wonder in the least of how it grew to its current glory. If you’re reading this in the future, Ransom City must be a great and glittering metropolis by now, with a big bronze statue of Harry Ransom in a park somewhere.
He often went by Professor Harry Ransom, and though he never had anything you might call a formal education, he definitely earned it. Or you may have read about how he lost the battle of Jasper City, or won it, depending on where you stand in matters of politics.įriends called him Hal or Harry, or by one of a half-dozen aliases, of which he had more than any honest man should. If you know his name it’s most likely as the inventor of the Ransom Process, a stroke of genius that changed the world.
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