Amazon.com Review

Newton's Cannon is an alternate history set primarily in the court of Louis XIV. This might sound familiar to readers of Vonda McIntyre's Nebula-winning

Keyes's characters are expertly drawn: Louis XIV, the aging King of France who seeks a return to international preeminence, young Ben Franklin of Boston, a printer's apprentice who yearns to master alchemy, and Adrienne de Montchevreuil, a lovely, impoverished noblewoman who secretly pursues mathematics, but attracts Louis's lustful attention. The many secondary characters are also believable personalities, and the plot is original and suspenseful. Keyes's writing is precise and witty. "It was, Adrienne reflected, impossible not to be impressed by the Grand Canal. More like a cruciform inland sea with banks of polished marble, it summed up many things about Versailles. It was monumental in proportion, insanely expensive, impossible to overlook, and entirely frivolous."

Though the ending of Newton's Cannon leaves much unresolved--setting up book two of The Age of Unreason, A Calculus of Angels--it's fine entertainment all by itself. --Nona Vero

From Publishers Weekly

Enlightened science is transformed into blackest magic in the opening volume of Keyes's (The Waterborn) 18th-century alternative history, The Age of Unreason. Sir Isaac Newton turns alchemist to obtain Philosopher's Mercury, the key to cosmic end-of-the-world weaponry. Stolen by a philosopher-mage of France's King Louis XIV to use against the invading English, the hellish device threatens to obliterate London unless two unlikely young geniuses can defuse it. Alternating chapters trace the pair's discrete stories, as American icon Ben Franklin, here portrayed as a randy adolescent, and the toothsome Adrienne de Montchevreuil, Louis's latest mistress, separately wield fearsome theorems against supernatural forces manipulating humanity. Clearly enamored with the glories of Versailles, Keyes writes passages of swordplay and foreplay that fitfully flare into life, but the novel is ultimately foiled by muddy secondary characterizations and a finale that fizzles.
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