The Clockwork Ice Dragon is kind of a mix of “Gift of the Magi”, Polar Express, a romance, and a steampunk science adventure. The characters and the world have some good promise; the one problem really is that the novella just doesn’t have the space to really get into the details that would make the whole thing amazing. The way an inventor/engineer can really make something of themselves is to get into the union of the Magistrate of Inventors, and Aurelia has her one chance via a competition that’s due on Christmas day; the problem is that she doesn’t have a fully working proto-type yet, she’s been working long hours at the foundry, and now her somehow ex-boyfriend is back in her life. Frederick needs her help with an invention of his that’s gone wrong and causing it to snow too much, too hard (that would be the titular ice dragon). So Aurelia has to balance her need to win the invention competition, stop the snow, deal with her unresolved issues with Frederick, and hopefully not destroy her life in the process.
The world of Soldark and the idea of how technology works and is controlled could have been really interesting but there’s little development there in the tech, the social, and the political; this would be ok if there was attention to Aurelia and/or Frederick as characters, but there’s not much there either. Aurelia spends a lot of time fussing about whatever happened with the two of them, and it turns out to have been something easily resolved in a conversation, that may or may not happen seven years after the fact. Aurelia looks bad for that without any sort of character development or more depth to their past history.
The dragon itself gets virtually no attention, other than somehow Frederick’s project got out of control, which is disappointing; Aurelia’s proposed train design at least gets some description, and the science is just real enough that there’s some missed opportunity there too.
I get that novellas are shorter, but at 93 pages, this one could have picked one area to give as little more attention to; that would have taken the story from good holiday travel entertainment to something special.
