Review: The Philosopher's Flight

The Philosopher's Flight by Tom Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Author Tom Miller's debut novel The Philosopher's Flight is a genre-bending steampunk wild ride. In this world, witches or wizards are philosophers and all the best ones are female. In spite of their amazing prowess in military campaigns, philosophers are feared. Trenchers, a sort of evangelical set comprised largely of men who fear and despise these powerful women, continually oppose and threaten the philosophers in ways both physical and legal. The harrowing opening passages evoke lynchings and the witch trials, while throughout the book we see Trenchers attack these women for everything from their use of birth control to their refusal to bow to the patriarchy. (We also see that these women are vulnerable to mistreatment by a military that quite literally exploits them.)

Set during World War I, the story follows a rare male philosopher, Robert Weekes, as he is taken on as a contingency student at Radcliffe College, one of only a few token men training with women. Most of the men are merely theoretical philosophers, but Robert, or Boober, as his Montana family lovingly calls him, is an empirical philosopher, raised to fly. Encouraged and cajoled into his skills by his mother and older sisters, he is a truly unusual man and not just because he's an expert sigilist.

Giving us the experience of role reversal, with a sole male prodigy among women encountering the derision, discrimination, and abuse that was usually heaped on women entering largely male educational settings during this era and too long after, Miller offers an accessible story about gender constraints perceived about talent and wrongly placed on education.

All of that sounds almost preachy and this book was anything but that- it was great fun to read. We have a wonderful set of secondary characters and a lot of humor to soften the blows of Robert's progress in the philosophical ranks. A renaissance man himself, Tom Miller is a practicing ER doctor with an MFA in writing. He's also going at the top of my Campbell Award nominations next year. A wonderful new voice.

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