Review of Queen of Clouds by Neil Williamson

There are two types of readers: the oblivious and the critical. An oblivious reader takes a story at face value, consuming it with a smile for what it is between the covers, nothing beyond. A critical reader is frowningly analytical throughout the experience, creating theories, drawing conclusions, holding things to (often subjective <wink>) standards, making meta-comparisons, etc. Ignorance being bliss, it’s the oblivious who are gifted real reading enjoyment, while the critical languish in building mental histograms trying to identify and taxonomize and categorize and label and ultimately parse a piece of text. Once you are a critical reader it's difficult to go back, and thus my thoughts felt like a feather buffeted on the wind reading Neil Williamson’s Queen of Clouds (2022). But I turned the last page smiling.

Queen of Clouds is the unintended adventures of Billy Braid. A humble, naive apprentice living deep in the mountains, he shows promise helping his master make sylvans (tree-like mannequins who do manual labor). His daily routine is turned upside down when his master receives a special request for one of the arboreal robots from the faraway city of Karpentine. Braid tasked with transporting it to Karpentine once complete, he finds the journey arduous, but nothing compared to actually delivering the sylvan to its intended destination inside the city. Duped by rogues and villians, Braid’s mission quickly unravels, leaving him deep in the mud of Karpentine internal politics. Around him are guilds, visible and invisible, vying for power and control in the city, and Braid constantly finds himself a country boy in the city trying to keep up. It’s only through bumbling luck he finally gets to the bottom of why the sylvan he was to deliver was so important, and just who exactly the Queen is.

So why is critical thinking such a pain in the ass sometimes? Karpentine, it’s steampunk, no wait, steampunk-ish, but then there’s the sylvans, and the, how should I call it, unnatural weather, and the magic ink… How does the magic ink fit within the whole? And the cat lady… I don’t know. I guess it’s just “fantasy”… But certainly not fantasy with elves and dwarves and magic swords. I can’t just call it “fantasy”. It’s such a specific piece of imagination yet without a proper niche… <Error> <Critical thinking failure> Message to self: just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Indeed, Queen of Clouds is a specific piece of imagination. I do it an injustice to compare to other writers’ works, but to give potential readers a rough idea, it’s possible to say the novel has the richness of imagination seen in Josiah Bancroft’s Babel series. Its authorial voice anything but staid, however, the novel also possesses a touch of the light-hearted humor and capers found in Jack Vance stories. And the remainder, the details of the world and the dynamic unpredictability of plot, are all Williamson—to be pleasantly discovered by the reader alongside Braid.

In the end, Queen of Clouds is a fun, fantastical adventure with strong splashes of imagination. The characters and scenes could have had their edges sharpened a degree to pop further off the page, the plot perhaps could have been truncated a touch as there are sections in the middle which struggle to maintain momentum, and there are some inconsistencies in tone. But for sitting back, relaxing, and enjoying the escapades of an innocent young man bounced around by the powers that be in a bewitching city whose ingenious layers are steadily discovered by Braid and the reader, it hits that sweet spot. Fantasy for the 21st century, Williamson offers readers something both unique and classic. Just don't think too hard about it.