The Wall of Storms

Liu, Ken. The Wall of Storms (The Dandelion Dynasty #2). New York: Saga Press "An Imprint of Simon and Schuster," 2016. Also available as a Kindle book from Amazon.com and an audiobook from Audible. Goodreads lists other editions and translations.[1]

The "Silkpunk" weapons seen in Book 1, The Grace of Kings, reappear toward the end of Wall of Storms, but the Silkpunk aspect appears early in the plot: a kind of projector of silent movies and a holographic projector of a politically significant image. See the final section of the book (chs, 53 f., Part 3 of the audiobook download) for development in the Chinese scientific/technological tradition of a number of significant weapons — plus an DARPA-like program, including a full-scale laboratory dedicated to the development of those weapons. For the Silkpunk aspects, note especially

     * Submarines and lighter-than-air combat vehicles explicitly based on the anatomy and movement of fish, whales, and birds (ch. 55; audio 3.12; * compressed air fire-starting devices (ch. 54; 3.11); 
     * "machines" and devices of great military significance evolving from temple and street "magic" using "The Silkmotic Force" (title of ch. 55, 3.12): i.e., electro-static energy explained in terms traditional to Dara (the country parallel to early Imperial China), including a theological labeling of what we'd call "positive" and "negative" charges; * what we would call Leyden jars[2] expanded to military importance by using the guts of dragon-like creatures plus the skills of a patriotic street magician, criminals, and scholars (chs. 58-60, 3.16-17). Note very well the sophisticated expansion of the ideas of "machine" and "technology" and their relations to ways of thinking about a knowable Nature that bring together very literal, material mechanisms, scientific method, engineering as a discipline, poetry, cryptography, and even the formation of logograms — letters? — and ideograms.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 7-15 April 2017