Charity, and admiration of Gilman's previous work, incline me to the second of these two readings, but I'm not certain that that purpose justifies the work-on the part of the author or his readers-that go into it. There is another reading in which Gilman's resistance to story, his deliberate evasion of it even as he builds the novel's world brick by brick, paragraph by paragraph, has a point, a goal, to it. There is one reading of The Half-Made World in which it is a 500 page exercise in worldbuilding, whose author might get around to writing a story in its sequel. Such suspicions afflict the novel, and the experience of reading it. In fact, the irony of bestowing such a title on a novel whose setting is as thought-out, as detailed, and as richly realized as the world in which Felix Gilman's third novel takes place is so glaring that one can't help but suspect Gilman of making a joke. There is nothing half-made about The Half-Made World.
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