The Weightless World asks the business man the question they’ve (hopefully?) never been asked: What do you do when your boss, whom has recovered from an illness, acts incoherently and wants to take you to India to bring back an anti-gravity machine? Well, thankfully from this delight of fiction, Trevelyan answers that for us.
Enter Steven, who departs from his ideal girlfriend, Alice, to accompany his boss, Ess, across the ocean and into the India that we’re not too sure of. Â One of the first highlights of this book is how it is not a novel about how wonderful India is, or how profound a discovery was had in this place. India is explored as a foreign place, but for the most part serves as nothing but a refreshingly different backdrop as to where the novel is set than the cliche plot devices a foreign country can often be in a piece of art.
The first third of the novel is essentially a set up. Once the action kicks off later on, a meeting in the desert filled with conflict, twists and turns and revelations, the novel truly finds its pace. Initially, this may seem a long-winded way to get to the destination, in retrospective it shows that it was a good pacing, casual development and not rushed at all. We are introduced to some of the fellow travelers of Steven and Ess, in their such for the anti-gravity device that just may save Ess’s failing company. Initially such a device may seemed silly, but as masterfully explained, in a world of electronic cigarettes, cloud storage and remote surveillance – is such a device truly fictional or just a matter of time until a genius creates it?
Well, we’re not sure, at least for a lot of the novel, and this is fine. The novel doesn’t depend on its big pay off to make it interesting, nor does it keep you hanging in cliffhangers like a writer who has just discovered the concept of Checkov’s gun.
The novel doesn’t delve completely into what a thing anti-gravity devices could be until the end. And rightly so, because a whole book could be dedicated to what a future industry this technology could hold. The novel plays around with flashbacks, which more often than not hinder the pace of the book than help it. While most of the flashbacks do indeed serve a purpose of providing context to the remarkably interesting Ess, and the less so remarkably Steven, they do not quite hold to the excitement that occurs in the current events in the novel – particularly when these events involve the laws of physics and people wielding guns.
I’m not sure what stopped The Weightless World being a great novel for me, but all I do know is it way always on the cusp. Perhaps I didn’t relate enough to the characters, perhaps the prose didn’t stand out for me, perhaps I secretly have an antigravitational device and this just hit a little too close to home for me.
Nonetheless, if you’re a fan of strange scenarios taking place in the world we know and inhibit, with a few twists, turns and suspense shakes on the way – then this novel might just be for you. If you don’t, why don’t you just float off?
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.
