The Rise of Ransom City

This is the story Harry Ransom. If you know his name it’s most likely as the inventor of the Ransom Process, a stroke of genius that changed the world.

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.

Friends called him Hal or Harry, or by one of a half-dozen aliases, of which he had more than any honest man should. He often went by Professor Harry Ransom, and though he never had anything you might call a formal education, he definitely earned it.

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. You might be standing on its sidewalk and not wonder in the least of how it grew to its current glory. Well, here is its story, full of adventure and intrigue. 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.

“Vivid and accurate prose, a gripping, imaginative story, a terrifically inventive setting, a hard-bitten, indestructible hero, and an intelligent, fully adult heroine--we haven’t had a science-fiction novel like this for a long time.”
--Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Award-winning author of The Farthest Shore and The Left Hand of Darkness on The Half-Made World

"Great fantastical fiction has a way of suggesting metaphorical connections without insisting on them. . . . The Half-Made World, does this with an exhilarating level of self-assurance. Using the brutality of Westerns alongside steampunk gadgetry, Felix Gilman constructs a story that could be about how civilization forces itself onto a new frontier, about how industry and anarchy are both necessary forces which inevitably become corrupted when allowed too much power, or possibly just about monsters and demons and guns that never need to be reloaded."
--The Onion AV Club