Maurice Africh’s Cello’s Gate is a Science Fantasy novel that is perhaps not quite greater than the sum of its parts.
Captain Grey has a problem. He’s a pirate, and a good one, but the local gendarmes are always dangerous and trying to keep his airship, The Trench, flying in the air, costs a lot of money and effort. That’s why when he is offered an extremely lucrative commission to go to an island no one can get to, in order to get a MacGuffin (the first in a series) that he doesn’t think really exists--he is willing to do it. Adventure is afoot on a journey to the island and surviving its dangers, from traps, to wildlife, to an immortal being that might have created all of magic itself.
This is the story of Cello’s Gate, by Maurice Africh.
For all of the crunchy worldbuilding in the novel, Cello’s Gate is a novel that runs very strongly on vibes. It borrows and slightly modifies a lot of those vibes and those parts and puts them all together, not always in an optimum configuration, leaving some of the interesting parts of the worldbuilding feeling like they don’t quite seem to comfortably work together or sometimes even at all. The book is a patchwork of these elements, sometimes going at cross purposes.
Let’s go for the high concepts and beats. Our main character, Captain Grey Shimada owns the airship the Trench as the ostensible pirate, although, like nearly all protagonist pirates I find in SFF, he’s not *truly* a pirate, or not very much so. He has a found family of fighters and rogues and outcasts of various types, including the Pilot being married to another crew member.¹ His father, who he is somewhat rebelling against, is an important admiral.² He is hired by a client, Dalia Auber, who insists on coming along with her muscle, to find the seven Stones of Indigo. These seven are the basis of all magic in this science fantasy world, but someone who gets all seven would have unlimited cosmic power³. Once on the island, the group has to deal with a variety of tests, challenges, and traps. Also, there is a rival group after the stones and a confrontation with their superior numbers and firepower is the real enemy.⁴
There’s plenty to this complicated world and the characters and their backstories. Aside from Grey we get a few situations where the backstory of one or other of the characters unspools and the world builds from that. The thing is, it doesn’t all seem to fit together. I can’t make real sense of Grey’s story to begging with, he starts off as a bit of a failson hanging out with childhood friends. An especially harsh punishment for their antics sends him off to military school and away from his friends. We then go to 17 years later, and surprise, not only is Grey now a pirate, his two childhood friends are suddenly on the pirate ship he has, and part of the crew. We don’t see his father on screen except in the prologue, but just how this relationship and world is supposed to work, especially since his father backed him getting a ship, is a little murky. And the book almost feels like it was originally written that there were no holdovers from the prologue to the actual narrative, but suddenly there was a chance and we get two of them.
Then there is the tech and the magic. The setting might have too much going on here--it’s a steampunk world with firearms, and airships, but also a complicated magic system, and also there are classes of people in that magic system. There are people who are Immortal, and people who are preternatural fights, Knights, and others. A revelation comes that there are even forbidden(?) hybrids of these as well. The author’s favorite must be the Crest Knight, since we have Dot, part of Grey’s crew, Rook, who is the bodyguard to the Immortal client, Dalia, and it turns out one of the antagonists on the island is a Crest Knight as well. Crest Knights fight so fast and so furious, that their fights are described in bullet time terms.⁵ The physical combats, and there are a number of such set pieces of various kinds, are well written and are a highlight of the book. But then there are people like the Immortals, who straight up come back from the dead when killed. It’s a painful and unpleasant process, but that is *their* magic. Minn, Grey’s childhood friend,and something that is not quite a crush, not quite a relationship (even after knowing her for two decades) is an Oracle and can get precognitive flashes of the future. There are other kinds of magic that we hear about but for the most part do not actually see in this narrative.
Speaking of Science Fantasy again, though, a more general thought. Science fantasy is a hard trick to pull off, to make both the science fiction and the fantastic sides of the equation equally interesting, useful, powerful and important. As noted above, there is a lot of magic in this verse, of a wide variety of kinds that seems tied to the stones. As far as science, there are airships, and jamming fields and a variety of technology. Magic, though, with one noticeable and big exception, seems to win any straight up conflicts with science and technology that we see in the book. I suspect maybe the author was doing a bit with this. It does seem that magic is by far the more dominant half of the paradigm.
Given that the novel is 600 pages, all of this worldbuilding and all of this wide variety of elements to the narrative does help fill up the pages. But for all of the invention in some places, the novels reaches for reference and allusion again and again and again, and the serial numbers aren’t always filed off well enough.
However, it should be said that novel doesn’t drag, and it does know how to breathe, although the timing of the changes in point of view were sometimes off, and the withholding of information at some points only annoyed me rather than amplified my interest. On the other hand, the novel does well with a queernorm verse, something that is becoming much more the default, and less something I need to highlight except for contra examples. And, of course, this is the first in a planned series, since Grey and his crew only reach the first stone in this novel, and there are six more to go afterwards.
Will I go on with the series? I am frankly not sure. With a lot of the heavy lifting of stuffing this world with its ideas in the first volume, it's possible that subsequent books will have a lot less of a gear shift issue than in this one. I hope so. Worldbuilding, as much as I love it, needs to flow from and to the plot and characters. The author here seems to have wanted to put in All the Cool Things into their worldbuilding, and many of them are cool, but not all of them, to me, feel like they should be in the same universe as each other.
The Math
Highlights:
Thick and chonky Science Fantasy
Not quite the sum of its parts
Good action and adventure beats.
Nerd coefficient: 6/10
Reference: Africh, Maurice, Cello’s Gate, Saga 2026
¹ So, in essence, channeling Firefly, even if the Pilot is the wife here. There is also some Guardians of the Galaxy as well.
² A Number of Anime have this father-son dynamic. It does make Grey more than a Mal Reynolds clone, at least, although I am not sure how it fits all that well.
³ Despite my Aladdin joke, it’s the Infinity Stones, naturally
⁴ Given all the traps and puzzles, there is an Indiana Jones feel to it all.
⁵ So the Matrix, with hand weapons.
⁶ Here is a bonus secret endnote instead of a footnote, since I couldn’t work this into the narrative of the review. I didn’t like the title at all. We don’t find out who or what Cello is until late in the novel, and it doesn’t tie in with the theme or plot of the novel at all. In my view, a book title is important to attracting readers--even today, Netgalley, when requesting a book, has “Book Title” as one of the reasons you are attracted to a book. And frankly, for me, Cello’s Gate doesn’t do that. The cover is very good, and does tell you what you are getting, right up to Dot’s not-quite light sabers. But the title? No. It fails for me. POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
