Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson: Glorious World Building muddled up and squandered.
One of the latest release from the consistently impressive Tor books stable, Unwrapped Sky is stunningly realized fantasy novel – written in lush, evocative prose, Rjurik’s debut pushes the boundaries of this genre purely on the basis of his vivid fecund imagination that knows no bounds and has translated into this weird city of Caeli-Amur. Possibly a worthy successor to the New Weird champions in China Mievelle or Jeff Vendermeer, Rjurik’s imagined city of Caeli-Amur sparkles and entices, apparently running on steampunk technology (Local trams for conveyance?) mixed with ancient magic (the unexplained forces that thrive on the Other Side, the brilliantly wrought up magic system of Thaumaturgy that combines mathematical equations with ideogram puzzles) universities vying for space with weirdly shaped palaces and most of all, the myriad mix of different races that populate this city. The ancients called Elo-Taverns with their immortality and weirdly long spider-like...