Angelmaker

Harkaway, Nick (pseud. of Nicholas Cornwell). Angelmaker (German translation: Der goldene Schwarm). London: William Heinemann, 2012. Initial audiobook: Random House Audio, 2012 (we have used the audio book from Audible.com). For translation into German, awards, reviews, and later printings, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of April 2025, available here.[1]

Set largely in contemporary UK but with significant flashbacks to the World-War-II and Cold War eras, including in a country appropriate for rule by an "Opium Khan" supervillain — but with late Steampunk gadgets, often referred to generically as "clockwork," and with a key device having an "interface" (ch. 3). Joe, the central male character, is an artisan of the mechanical, in the tradition of John Ruskin, and grandson of a "horologist."[2] Issues of the artisanal, including the artisanal v. machine and mass production, are explicit.

See ch. 3 f. for a device that is a variation on a book and a mechanical computer in the tradition of Charles Babbage and (more so) Ada Lovelace,[3] and so cf. and contrast technology in The Difference Engine and The Diamond Age, OR, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

From the Synopsis on the Nick Harkaway webpage:

Joe Spork,[4] son of the infamous criminal Mathew ‘Tommy Gun’ Spork just wants a quiet life, repairing clockwork in a wet, unknown bit of London.

[...]

When Joe is asked to fix one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. The client? Unknown. The device? A 1950s doomsday machine. Having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator [...]. Joe’s once-quiet world is now populated with mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe. [...]

There are also "automaton monks" and "a weapon of mass destruction in the unlikely form of a skepful of clockwork bees" (i.e., enough bees to fill a skep, which is a kind of basket) — to quote the useful review in The Guardian — analysis that includes this very useful comment on Angelmaker's genre-mixing, and relevance: "What's more, for all the clockwork and locomotion, the thermodynamics and the Babbage technobabble, Harkaway can't be said to have hitched his bandwagon to the runaway engine of steampunk. In fact, with its lovingly hand-made 'Ruskinite' technology, there's something in Angelmaker that sets it apart from steampunk's usual fetishisation [sic: British] of industrial Victoriana. From its frantic oscillation between plausibility and fantasy emerges an odd, unique composite that deserves its own moniker. Arts-and-crafts picaresque, perhaps.[5] For John Ruskin and "The Arts and Crafts Movement," see here.[6]

+++++++++++++++++ Among much useful material — these:

Ch. 3: See for our first sight of mechanical bees (and references to the organic variety), and note motif discussed by Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich on "The Ovion/Cylon Alliance." See e.g. E. M. Foster's "The Machine Stops" (1909).

Ch. 5: Explicit references to Ada Lovelace and an armored and if not computerized, we can say computer-adjacent train, which see for our view of a Victorian-style train as an elegant but brutalist mechanism, cf. and contrast the trucks in the Mad Max movies, and more explicitly the featured one in the Mad-Max-ish WARLORDS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY / BATTLETRUCK. For trains, note SNOWPIERCER (2013) and the train movies cited at note here.[7]

Ch. 6: For a Descent motif and a rather literal underworld with steampunk-relevant sections, see trip to Night Market, a site for illegal or barely-legal trade. 

Ch. 7: Ruskinite submarine with a coding station (not developed here); cf. and contrast subs in The Wall of Storms. / The Opium Khan villain seeks total knowledge, linked to Ada Lovelace's "Apprehension Engine."

Ch. 8: See for sex enhancement by passing railroad train in a wall-mounted bed in a flat not far from the tracks (the most sexually useful trains are those moving fairly dangerous chemical waste). / The chapter includes a humanoid Ruskinite robot.

Ch. 9: Modern Ruskinite robot warriors "like bees, a swarm"; we're told that this generation can learn little, but they do learn. Also a Ruskinite submarine, well designed to start with but helped in withstanding depth-charge attack, and great depth, by the notable-woman genius who is carrying on developing Ada Lovelace's Apprehension Engine.

Ch. 10: Clockwork false teeth (seriously) mentioned, but the idea is not developed here. There is a recap of the history of Ruskinites and their relationship to mechanisms and the ideal of the revelation of Truth and truths about the world — and the possibility of an engine to move deep enough into Truth and truths to understand/apprehend God.

Ch. 11: See also for background history and the practical implications of the swarms of mechanical bees bringing an apprehension of truths to such a degree as to promise and threaten "No lies ever again"; cf. and contrast Robert Abernathy's 1956 story "Grandma's Lie Soap," bibliographic information as of May 2025 available on Internet Speculative Fiction Database here.[8] // We see results of an early iteration of the Apprehension Engine in a small area in rather rural England: people in the vicinity perceiving Truth, the real reality of (most) things, reducing them beyond madness to a sort of zombie-fication.

Chs. 12-13: We see newer (newest?) iteration of Ruskinite humanoid robots. // "Grand Inquisitor" sequence in which Joe is confined, held down, interrogated, tortured. Cf. and contrast this motif in the classic 20th-c. dystopias, most notably, perhaps, Nineteen Eighty-Four.[9] (Out of dystopia criticism, we use Feodor Dostoevsky's phrase, but with a different meaning.[10] / See ch. 13 for association of zombiefication and intrusive connections into the body, and the metaphoric association of an imprisoning (mental) hospital and a machine.

Ch. 15 "[...] The Recorded Man": Avatar motif presented in a variation yielding steam/dieselpunk personality uploading. // Descent motif into a space with a recording of Frankie as "a numinous vision," a "three-dimensional magic-lantern show without lasers," a "ghost." The "wave that is the human soul is fragile," Frankie tells Joe, and the apprehension engine "incorrectly calibrated [...] exposes the mind to too much knowledge"; the mind in turn "determines the world. In perfect perception of the underlying universe we find the end of uncertainty and at the end of uncertainty the end of choice." Without choice, "no consciousness; without an uncertain future, no future at all." Threat: "Immutable history. Ice instead of water. Life would become Newtonian, clockwork." Note entry into a large container similar to an Indiana Jones shot of a treasure trove or government facility, with the primary treasure here a Tommy gun. (Quoting audiobook; so inexact.)

Ch. 18: The Ada Lovelace as a Super-BattleTrain invading the lair of the supervillain Khan (cf. Beowulf ["bee-wolf"] descending to the lair of Grendel's mother, alluded to earlier in Anglemaker as an "āglāc-wíf," a fearsome woman (woman warrior), such as the women in this novel. Juxtaposition and sometimes conflation of images: bees, humans, and a mechanical swarm: cf. and contrast such works as Bruce Sterling's "Swarm and and Stanislaw Lem's "The Upside-Down Evolution."[11]
Associated with the Khan villain, an image of him on the way to godhead through the Apprehension Engine, absorbing all people. Enter bees while a duel between Joe and the Opium Khan continues, possibly with references to Joe's perceptions to time-bending perception in the Dune series of books and movies. 
There is a reference to "The Machine which will devour the world" associated with a moment in which "the beehive growls." Note wavering of boundaries between and among "the machine,' the mechanical bees, monsters, the Apprehension Engine — in a sequence with the threat of the end of sentience on Earth, or much beyond. Stopping the Apprehension Engine is described in the manner of defusing a bomb. At the "heart" of the Engine Joe is trying to defuse, so to speak  is a combination dial with letters, and — minor spoiler coming up — the code is a key part of Joe's full name, for which cf. and contrast WARGAMES. Concluding Angelmaker, Joe destroys the data that are what remain of the Opium Khan. 

RDE, finishing, 2-4May25