The subtitle of Andrew Mayer’s book The Falling Machine is: The Society of Steam book 1, so there is every reason to believe that this is the prelude to an ongoing series. Where I had compared Hard Magic (my review) to the X-Men, The Falling Machine tries to be more like the Justice League and it doesn’t succeed. The characters are bland and the plot is silly. It’s yet another book that I gave 100 pages to and then gave up. It’s a poorly conceived story and I have no plans to read additional books. So, let’s see what happened.

Sarah Stanton is a young socialite who finds herself out on the Brooklyn Bridge (during it’s construction) with Sir Dennis Darby (the technical genius behind the superhero group The Paragons) and his robot creation and superhero Automaton. Oh, did I mention that Stanton is the daughter of the Superman like hero, The Industrialist. There is also a Batman like character named The Sleuth who seems to always be one step ahead of everyone else.

The plot turns on the attack of Dennis Darby and the Automaton on the bridge. The bad guys are after Automaton’s inner workings, but are unable to capture him. But, in the process, Darby dies. Darby’s will asked The Paragons to name Automaton as their new leader, but the team is reluctant to follow a robot, so they name The Industrialist to lead. Meanwhile Sarah is investigating Darby’s death. And the bad guys are still out for The Automaton’s inner workings.

The big problem with the book is that it’s boring. It’s a shortish book (only 284 pages) and a third of the way through I was extremely bored by the book. The characters aren’t interesting and the plot is only developing very slowly. And if you are going to have a slow plot, then you need the characters to at least be interesting to keep the reader moving forward. Since this book couldn’t manage that, I left. Too many other books that I want to read. Not recommended.