Book: The Philosopher's Flight by Tom Miller (2018)

"Eighteen-year-old Robert Weekes is a practitioner of empirical philosophy—an arcane, female-dominated branch of science used to summon the wind, shape clouds of smoke, heal the injured, and even fly. Though he dreams of fighting in the Great War as the first male in the elite US Sigilry Corps Rescue and Evacuation Service—a team of flying medics—Robert is resigned to mixing batches of philosophical chemicals and keeping the books for the family business in rural Montana, where his mother, a former soldier and vigilante, aids the locals. When a deadly accident puts his philosophical abilities to the test, Robert rises to the occasion and wins a scholarship to study at Radcliffe College, an all-women’s school. At Radcliffe, Robert hones his skills and strives to win the respect of his classmates, a host of formidable, unruly women" 

Tom Miller’s genre-bending The Philosopher’s Flight is well written, but falls short for me in a few ways. Many writers of fantasy and science fiction, in hopes of finding a broader audience, have taken real-life historical settings and added some sort fantastical element to them. This gives the reader a chance to read this genre, but because it’s set in the real world, or alternative history version of it, non-fantasy readers can enjoy them because they can identify with the setting. Harry Turtledove has made a career out doing this.

In this world, witches or wizards are philosophers and all the best ones are female. In spite of their amazing prowess in military campaigns, philosophers are feared. Trenchers, a sort of evangelical set comprised largely of men who fear and despise these powerful women, continually oppose and threaten the philosophers in ways both physical and legal. The harrowing opening passages evoke lynchings and the witch trials, while throughout the book we see Trenchers attack these women for everything from their use of birth control to their refusal to bow to the patriarchy.

Set during World War I, the story follows a rare male philosopher, Robert Weekes, as he is taken on as a contingency student at Radcliffe College, one of only a few token men training with women. Most of the men are merely theoretical philosophers, but Robert, or Boober, as his Montana family lovingly calls him, is an empirical philosopher, raised to fly. Encouraged and cajoled into his skills by his mother and older sisters, he is a truly unusual man and not just because he's an expert sigilist.

Some obvious social commentary runs through this first book in a series, giving us the experience of role reversal, with a sole male prodigy among women who encounters derision, discrimination, and abuse that was usually heaped on women entering largely male educational settings during this era.

I will say the book is not that complex, which made the book somewhat easy to read. Still, nothing seems to happen in all of it’s 400 pages. It’s like Harry Potter without the threat of Voldemort. The book is so focused on world building, so focused on teaching Robert to fly, that the threat from the Trenchers is never truly explored –they become lost in Miller’s attempt to point out how bad women have had for years.

For fans of steampunk (yeah, that’s here as well), they might find the devices used to make the Philosophers fly cool, but book is way too long, and way too anti-climatic to be worth continuing on to book two.