By Duncan Lunan

Neil Williamson, “Queen of Clouds”, pbk, 296 pp., £12.99, signed edition £35, NewCon Press, 2021.

Queen of Clouds begins in woodland, where an apprentice named Billy aids an old man named Kim, a woodworker who shapes different types of wood into humanoid shapes called ‘sylvans’.  Once mature, they become mobile and sentient, working for their makers, communicating telepathically with Billy, and merging eventually into the groves of the surrounding forest.  In the distance is a city called Karpentine, and a visitor from there arrives with a summons for Kim to supply a sylvan for inspection by the Guild of Constructors in the city.  The letter is described as ‘compelling’, though Kim burns it at once.  Billy must take the newly finished sylvan, speak to nobody, take no-one’s money and come straight back.

We all know what happens with instructions like that in Jack and the Beanstalk;  the fairground scenes, and the ease with which Billy is robbed, are very familiar.  But this isn’t Fairyland, or the version of England, frozen in time before the Black Death, which has become so familiar since publication of Game of Thrones.  This society has motorcars, though they’re individually built and mostly for show;  they have flying machines, though they’re dirigibles and can carry just two people.  They have typewriters, paper and print, more so than they might wish, as witness the compulsive effect of Kim’s letter.  They have newspapers, as bad as our tabloids but with the ability to make you believe what they print.  On that level, the whole book can be seen as an allegory of the power of the printed word.  Those powerful guilds are competing to gain possession of the sylvan, though their interest is less in his sentience than in discovering what powers ink made from his ashes might have – and they get their wish when he’s struck by lightning, apparently purposive, though the Weathermakers Guild deny all knowledge.    

This is a world which has renounced thinking machines, which had all but sidelined humanity before the Law of Man reasserted human primacy.  But those weren’t the computers of Dune’s Butlerian Jihad, nor the sentient Drones which are banned and destroyed in parts of Iain M. Banks’s Culture.  When these machines were smashed, the Motes of which they were composed were released to permeate the world, and sentience reappears where they are concentrated.  Hence the emergence of the sylvans, and the new appearance of consciousness in the clouds, at first infantile and petulant, but becoming hostile and destructive as it matures – and hence its resentment of the sylvans and eventual attack on humanity, first on the outskirts and then in the city itself.  Thrown into prison on the pretext that sylvans violate the Law of Man, Billy discovers that worse things are happening there  (think Soylent Green with ink instead of food), but before he falls victim he’s paroled by the Weathermakers, who are interested in the sylvans without realising their true significance.

He discovers what’s really happening to the weather with the help of Paraphernalia Loess, a pilot and heiress of the Weathermakers.  Driven by a desire to help the poor and disadvantaged, she is perhaps too good for this world, and certainly too good for Billy, who estranges her in his clumsiness and inexperience, despite her efforts to raise him to her level.  She is destined to marry the son of one or other of the Great Trades, and despite the fling that she has with Billy early on, you just know that he’s not going to get the girl in the end.  As they make their ways around the crumbling tiers of the city, meeting an astonishing array of self-centred weirdos worthy of Gormenghast, the conflict between the sylvans and the clouds becomes ever fiercer, and the city succumbs to fire and finally flood like the ending of Barbarella, except that the destruction comes from above rather than below.  With Billy, I kept thinking of the brave but clueless English twit who loses Sarah Miles to the American barnstormer in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.  Billy doesn’t have the sophistication of the twit or the charisma of the barnstormer, and when Para flies off with a bomb to save the city, like the hero of the 1968 film Panic in the City, instead of flying herself and him to safety as in Barbarella, he is powerless to intervene.

The most enduring image in the book is of the printed or inked communications which can’t be ignored or disobeyed – with echoes of Hal Duncan’s Vellum and Ink, though the metaphors are differently used.  I’ve mentioned the power of the press, with the papers printing whatever slanders they choose, and automatically believed.  For another instance, the inmates of the prison are made to read the rules several times on the way in, and by the time they get inside, they’re content to be there, despite the fate that awaits them.  The true moral of the story is caveat lector – which has nothing to do with cannibalism, but is best translated, ‘Don’t believe all that you read’.