Since it’s my friend Jay Lake’s birthday, it’s about time I got around to blogging about how much I enjoyed his book Mainspring.

After Newton’s discoveries about the laws of the universe, many thinkers during the Enlightenment saw God as a "Divine Clockmaker" — a creator of the universe who then left it alone to run according to the laws he had set up, rather than intervening in the affairs of humankind.  This was the philosophy of Deism.

In Mainspring, Jay Lake has taken the clockmaker analogy and made it literal: the Earth has a huge gear running along the equator, and moves along a giant track in its orbit around the sun.  Thus, it is obvious that the world is a manufactured object, but the philosophical divide still remains between those who believe that the Divine Clockmaker merely created the world and left it to run on its own and those who believe that God still intervenes.