I'm of two minds about this sequel to Patrick Wood's Electric Dragon. It's certainly ambitious and literate, but it's not nearly as crisp and energizing as its predecessor. It seems bloated in parts, and in fact it takes a fair amount of reading before we're returned to continue Dushma's story after the end of Electric Dragon. For many pages we could be seeing a different protagonist in completely different circumstances, almost as if a slimmer middle book had been skipped. Now, that criticism out of the way, Fireglass Machine does finally gather itself to provide a slam-bang finale that is of course open for another installment.

Electric Dragon (originally Viaduct Child, see separate review) followed "unregistered" non-citizen Dushma as she escaped from police scrutiny from her train viaduct home to the tunnels of the London underground. At the walled-off and forgotten Hitler Street station, she had met a small group of unregistered and somewhat unfocused young rebels, whose ranks she briefly joined. Pursued by the sadistic Inspector Rapplemann, however, her underground utopia collapsed in an explosion, Rapplemann was killed, and Dushma was left wondering why she's considered an object of interest, and by whom. When Fireglass Machine opens, the flashforward Prologue first disorients the reader, but Dushma's post-Hitler Street experiences are eventually filled in, including her stay in the pivotal St. Gotha's Cathedral, which is where she finds a certain lost manuscript. . . . Now she is under the guardianship of Marlstroy, an eccentric neurologist who has taken her in and sent her to school. Politically connected, Marlstroy has "registered" Dushma. And, almost as an aside, we learn that he monitors her brain in some vague regular experimental "sessions."

In the meantime, Dushma befriends a new group of misfits—these with green eco-terrorist aspirations. This near-future London is an amalgam of climate change-induced energy crisis and semi-Victorian solutions, as society reverts a bit to conserve fuel in a world where environmentalists are successfully blocking oil drilling at the mouth of the Thames. Marlstroy's government connection is the decidedly anti-environmentalist minister Ashpool, who pursues hard-nosed policies to solve the energy crisis without losing political control to activist greens and demonstrators. In the midst of all this, Dushma's friendship with street juggler and former "clinker monkey" Arbilow leads her to dangerous places, both literally and figuratively.

Why does Dushma sometimes feels a rumble beneath the earth, and heat radiating below her? Why does the aptly named Ashpool wish to buy her silence? And what did she see when the Bunker, a nightclub she and Arbilow visited, was destroyed by a "volcanic" eruption? Why is Marlstroy forced to sacrifice Dushma's comatose friend Alison Catfinger? And what secret lies in waiting beneath the earth—what strange new techno-religious force has been unleashed in the name of good, but with an evil outcome?

Partial cyberpunk and steampunk hybrid, partial Dickensian naming exercise, Fireglass Machine is also lightly dotted with the darkness of horror. It's a timely plot that's woven here, with real-world extrapolations of the environmental situation in which we currently find ourselves blended with a sort of alchemist's brew of the ancient and the modern. In Wood's not-quite-apocalyptic vision of tomorrow, climate change affects the entire world in increasingly unpredictable ways, and forces on both sides of the issue are poised to clash. It's the green perspective we will rally around, though until the explosive end it's a bit too remote, too detached, to grab us. Dushma's role still seems to be unfolding, but too slowly. As a protagonist, she's too naive, too untapped, too much like a character in a novel of manners. Perhaps intentionally, she seems to hover on the outskirts of the controversy, unaware of her importance. While all this works well enough, it could be more effective if rendered more crisply, with less tangential forays (such as the girls' school and the joyride sequence) and fewer pages. Fascinating in its scope and vision, Fireglass Machine seems written for a different audience altogether than Electric Dragon. Its political sub-theme may be somewhat too esoteric for younger readers, and some of the near-Victorian school side-plots may just be too sedentary. Rescued by a superb oil-rig destruction sequence and an intriguing (if too rarely on-scene) Frankenstein's "monster" whose childlike quality hides a fearful murderousness, Patrick Wood's own creation defies some conventions and ultimately succeeds in keeping the "green" flame vibrantly alight until the next volume.