Don't expect a traditional novel. Hell, don't expect a traditional Bruce Sterling story. This is transmission from a parallel Earth by the Italian Futurist and Fantasist Bruno Argento, about a brief moment where Futurists broke all the conventions, seized a city, made the future.

Secondari is the Pirate Engineer, a veteran of the Alpine Front (imagine the Western Front, but up a mountain, on a glacier, with scanty trenches carved out of living rock, and even more bloody minded idiots in charge. They fought 12 Battles of the Isonzo, and General Cadorna instituted literal decimation for units that retreated). Now, after the war, Secondari runs an anarchist-syndicalist torpedo factory that turns out cheap weapons for anyone who needs them, makes motor-boat raids on unguarded surplus armament stockpiles, and dreams of a radio controlled aerial torpedo firing fatal F-rays (nuclear cruise missile, for those of you weak in anachronism).

The story wanders through the travails of Secondari and his fellow Pirates, the Prophet and the Ace of Hearts. Futurism was a strange protofascist ideology, based on speed and violence and machines and finding Nietzschean powers within yourself. The alternative history speeds up towards the end, with the introduction of Mussolini and Adolf from Linz, along with the American master spy Harry Houdini and his loyal assistants Howard Lovecraft and Edgar Burroughs. But just as the story is about to get supremely weird, a full fledged alternate history, it ends, violently and abruptly.

Part of me wishes it'd continued, that we got a full novel instead of Act I, but from any sort of pragmatic sense Futurism is totally indefensible. You can't eat speed or glory. It's a shabby ideology based on favors and a cult of personality. It's hurting people because you're stronger than them, and the romance wears thin.

Still, for its flaws, a fascinating and strange novel.