Looks like it could be a fascinating story in the mode of Ken Liu's "silkpunk" stories and R.F. Kuang's Poppy War trilogy (the author of which whose name was mangled with S.L. Huang's in the Hugo controversy "report", I just thought that was hilarious), but as with the a previous work by this author I found the prose too herky jerky, long stretches of action with some dialogue but it doesn't really convey atmosphere and character to me, reads more like a screenplay, so I set it aside after the first chapter.