Honestly though, you'd expect more steam in a steampunk novel.  Maybe the genre should be called "crystalpunk" or "vatpunk".   

Completely agree. Maybe we'll meet a character in a later book that actually cares about steam, but so far, this series isn't so much steampunk as steampunk-inspired the same way Codex Alera was Pokémon-inspired without involving actual Pokémon.

Nice references!

I think I agree that it would pretty much have to be hydorponics.  There's simply not enough depth of soil in the ground to grow things.  No rivers to move minerals around, etc.  Then again, even with hydroponics, you still need nutrients and water to grow things.  I suppose the water can be extracted from the clouds outside the spire, but you still need the nutrient solution.  I think it's sustainable with steam-tech, but I submit that to start up the process would require advanced understanding of how things work.  Just another example of how things have degraded since "the Builders".

Wikipedia's article on hydroponics and its history is surprisingly interesting:

The earliest published work on growing terrestrial plants without soil was the 1627 book Sylva Sylvarum by Francis Bacon, printed a year after his death. Water culture became a popular research technique after that. In 1699, John Woodward published his water culture experiments with spearmint. He found that plants in less-pure water sources grew better than plants in distilled water. By 1842, a list of nine elements believed to be essential for plant growth had been compiled, and the discoveries of the German botanists Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop, in the years 1859-65, resulted in a development of the technique of soilless cultivation.

That seems pretty contemporary to steampunk to me.

More interesting to me is that she also changed her speech when confronted by both Cavendish and by the Enemy. The fact that Cavendish could have quite likely taken offence to Folly's normal speech patterns makes me suspect that Folly can force herself to speak directly to others, it's just hard for her (she mentions that her Master keeps himself from falling apart through willpower).

I wonder if Folly's direct speech with the enemy is a clue as to the enemy's nature, somehow.

Here's the thing: sliced ham, chicken nuggets, imitation crab meat, those frozen pre-cooked chicken breasts with the grill marks on them... they're all what's called "restructured meat". In other words, they're chunks of meat (or sometimes not even chunks) that are glued together to form whatever shape is desired.

If you ever bite into a piece of "meat" that has no fibers in it, or really soft mini-fibers (or that happens to be shaped by a rectangle), the odds are really high that the current shape does not match the shape of the muscle the meat came from.

However, people are currently working on 3D printing meat. Once that's achieved, we should be able to replicated a proper steak, with all muscle fibers properly aligned and everything (people actually want to 3D print working organs for transplant, but that's gonna take a lot longer).

I'm guessing that's how the vattery works: you have huge vats where the different type of meat component cells are grown (a muscle fiber vat, a blood vein vat, etc) before final 3D printing and assembly into primal cuts.

Personally, I'm ok with this idea. I've never had an issue with ham, or imitation crab meat (I'm not really a fan of chicken nuggets, but that's more the breading, really). If / when we figure out how to get the texture right, should it matter where the meat originally comes from? (Assuming, of course, that there are no poisonous ingredients involved in the printing process or whatever).

Keep in mind, the barges were not stolen by a bunch of Outsiders in the middle of the night, they were rented, along with pretty much every other boat available. And the people inside the barges were mortals, even if there were Outsiders protecting the barges in the water.

That means manpower, and resources and someone with sufficient magical knowhow to figure out a spell to unravel Merlin's creation of Demonreach.

Nemesis has gone corporate.

Harry's great arrogance was in assuming that the people in charge of the Circle were wizards opposing the White Council. Cold Days taught him that the White Council is just a sideshow in all this.

I've always felt that when it comes to entering the Never Never, there's gates and then there's Ways. From how they are used, it appears that Ways behave differently from Gates in that an established Way works the same for everyone, whereas a Gate is trickier.

When it comes to defending his house from Never Never incursions, it seems Harry's method was to try to avoid making his house the exit of a Way. Instead, he seems to have relied on the inherent instability of Gates (this could be one possible explanation for why Harry's place lead to different Never Never locations in Grave Peril and Changes) to make it harder for his enemies to attack him (since they would have to spend the effort to find out what new spot in the Never Never corresponded to Harry's house at the time of their attack).

Meanwhile, both Lea and Corpsetaker appear to have relied on the opposite strategy: turn the Never Never side into a Way, and fortify it as much as possible. Harry's hideout appears to be a compromise: since he's hardly ever there, he deemed it better to have a stable Way that lead to one of the safe paths through Winter used by the Council.

Of course, just because Gates are not as stable as Ways, that doesn't mean that one cannot find a path to their target in the real world. Both Thomas and Cowl accomplished it in White Night. I suggest that both followed a similar method, namely, using a tracking spell on someone on the Real World to lead them.

I've always considered Proven Guilty a good example of a story with both Gates and Ways. The closed cinema theater was a Way that always lead to a spot close to Artic Tor. Meanwhile, the mirrors used by the fetches in their other attacks are merely Gates, which means that when they escape into the Never Never, it's harder for other people to follow them.

The question is, what turns a Gate into a Way? We don't know for sure, but I would offer this: it shouldn't be that hard for the same beings that opens a gate in the same place in the real world (or vice-versa) to end up at the same location in the Never Never (or vice-versa) every time. Do it often enough, and you weaken the barrier between the Never Never and the real world (this is how Harry describes it in Changes) and a Way is made. This could explain why Harry managed to open the same Way she did, since I think it's fair to say Harry was more in common with Cowl than with Agatha.

P.S. I suspect that Fae can discern from the real world the type of place a Gate (or a Way) will open to. It's something we see Lily do in White Night, and it's the only thing that would explain why Tiny the Gruff (considering how injured he was) would dare jump into the Never Never from the train station in Turn Coat without being worried about reaching the same place in the Never Never as the hobs.

because being possessed by nemesis allows a sidhe to be less than honest, and she was obviously not functioning on all gears at the time?

Fair enough, I figured that would be your reply. I can't imagine the advantage to Nemesis in making the threat seem bigger than it was instead of smaller, though.

and Lea gets rather poetic at times. Also, Jim uses the word 'peer' in terms of status not power level.

Uhm, what Lea actually said was that the Queens have "power to rival the archangels and lesser gods." I don't really see how there's a lot of room for interpretation and poetry in that, but that may just be me.

from GK's pov, I think he may have been testing the waters. At this point, he was half convinced Harry had been infected by N and wanted to see what happens.

Would you mind expanding on this a bit? I'm not sure I see what you mean here.

frankly I think if GK was involved at all it was as Mab's agent. It was her plan, she started the ball rolling.. its quite plausible she briefed GK, but she may not of.

...Considering that we've actually seem Rashid look into the future in text (Turn Coat) and that there was a whole scene with Bob and Harry discussing how Rashid likely saw into the future in this book, wouldn't Occam's Razor (and Doylist analysis) suggest that it was the other way around, and it was Rashid who briefed Mab and led her to get the ball rolling?

are we still talking DF here?

The first bit I reference comes straight from the short story the Warrior. The second one comes from Bob, who told Harry that Uriel was the being in charge of the biblical plagues. Of course, Bob could have been wrong there. But at least 2 of the 3 examples provided are things that we saw happening in the books.

yep, mabs agenda doesn't always coincide with the WG's. makes her pissy don't it?

... If she's taking advantage of it knowing that their agendas don't really coincide, wouldn't that make her kinda stupid? That is, of course, unless she happens to have faith in the WG for some reason.

i was using a humorous auphymism to point out your theory at times has no weight and relies on pure conjecture to make up for these fallicies.

Since I'm always trying to improve myself, could you maybe provide some examples of the times where my theory has no weight and relies on conjecture? Maybe that way I can make a better defense of it.

but put that way no, GK prefers to work without dirtying his hands or meddling in what aught not be meddled in(he's the uriel of the bunch, ebs the michael). SK was different, it was WC business. thanks.

I find this statement utterly confusing. First of all, because Uriel is most definitely the kind to dirty his hands (unless you believe his "plausible deniability" thing in Ghost Story; you know, the one Harry didn't actually believe?). As examples of Uriel getting his hands dirty, there's the events of Small Favor, The Warrior, Ghost Story... every appearance of his, actually. His problems are two, actually: first, if he gets his hand too dirty, the world may end up exploding due to his sheer power level. Second, if he gets his hands too dirty, he may end up accidentally switching sides, and that would be bad.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the Gatekeeper acted the way he did in Summer Knight because it was Council business. To begin with, it's clear that he's the only member of the Senior Council who kept such a close eye on Harry, something not even Eb did. He also made it clear that he wasn't there observing because of the Council's Trial, but rather, because he knew how bad the situation in Faerie was, and that only Harry would be allowed to resolve things. And even then, he did everything he could to help Harry, providing him with the glamour cream, the bit of the Table, and a Way back to Chicago from the Mother's Cottage. Do you remember how Mab reacted when she realized who gave Harry this stuff? Sounds to me like even Mab recognizes Rashid as a meddlesome old man.

The events of Turn Coat  follow this same theme. Rashid does as much as he can, given his limitations and his very busy schedule in his extremely important job. He can't actually step foot on Demonreach, so it's not like he could have stuck around to help Harry with the fight, or volunteered to be part of the arresting party. And even then, in the middle of the fight, he sends a message that helps the good guys win, showing once again that he's keeping a close eye on the situation.

So the fact that he decided to involve himself in Proven Guilty and then proceeded to do nothing else doesn't really align with his other appearances at all. If he follows the same pattern as before, he must have been watching from afar, and ready to give Harry the tools he would need to succeed. That's what Rashid does.