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.

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 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.

Perhaps especially readers in disability studies (or perhaps general readers more so) should note a prosthesis for the leg of a major character who had been struck by lightning: Chinese experience with bamboo and plants with similar flexibility lies behind a kind of spring in the prosthesis that helps the character walk — for a very direct human/mechanism interface.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 7-15, 25 April 2017