The narrator in this book, Gyen Jebi, is a nonbinary artist who just wants to make art and would rather ignore the intricacies of politics and war, which allows the author to paper over a lot of the details of strategy and occupation. Jebi is a native of an alternate version of Korea, in a region under the control of an alternate version of Japan; as an alt-Korean, they find themselves without employment options as the alt-Japanese crack down on the local culture and language. To their militant sister’s dismay, they pursue a position with the local government, and find themselves unwillingly helping the war effort against their own people; no spoilers but it’s a really pointed reference to cultural erasure committed by colonizers. Jebi tries to find ways to express their rebellion, despite their pacifist artistic temperament and their inconvenient attraction to a certain deadly swordswoman. I really liked the characters, particularly the mecha steampunk (silkpunk?) dragon which reminded me a lot of Temeraire; pity it didn’t show up until quite a ways into the book. Although it would have been easy to make the rebellion into the good guys fighting against the occupiers for freedom, the author instead turns the book into a denunciation of war. Both sides are problematic, violence is terrible, and innocent dragons and dreamy artists are the ones who are the most unready to deal.
Tag: genre-steampunk
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
Maia, an unwanted half-goblin (dark-skinned) unwanted son of the elf (light-skinned) emperor suddenly finds himself thrown in the deep end when his father and older brothers perish suddenly. Scarred with the early loss of his mother and the abuse of the person who raised him afterwards, he carries on doing the best he can despite his ignorance of courtly elf politics and the disadvantage of his breeding. I found this sad reading at first because of just how hurt and lonely Maia was and how much he just needed someone to give him a hug, but between that and the slow-moving, patiently developing plot, it made the eventual emotional turning points that much more rewarding. Kind of unfortunate that I read this so soon after The Hands of the Emperor, which told a similar sort of story but with way more complexity and from a different point of view; I kept wishing it were more like, which diminished my enjoyment of The Goblin Emperor through no fault of its own.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark
Set in the steampunk Cairo of Clark’s Dead Djinn universe, in which hapless ministry officials try to regulate supernatural occurrences given shoestring budgets and an unsupportive bureaucracy, Senior Agent Hamed al-Nasr and his new partner Agent Onsi investigate a haunted tram car. I loved Hamed’s weary competence in tackling the case, set against Onsi’s exuberance; I also liked the suffragettes and other women in the story who insisted that Hamed make room for their competence and independence, and how it all managed to tie together at the end. Really tight, well-written novella.
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl
The book opened with the author announcing that she wanted to rewrite the genocide that happened when Belgium ran roughshod over the people of the Congo Free State in pursuit of rubber, which was an entirely new and terrible eye-opener for me. In this revisionist steampunk history, horrified missionaries band together with secular British technocrats to purchase vast tracts of Congolese land, providing a haven for Congolese fleeing the brutal rubber farms, building prostheses for the many who had hands cut off by the corporate mercenaries (a thing that actually happened! The mass amputations, not the prosthetics), and banding together with local leaders to defend themselves with airships and other technologies. It would have been a fine enough ride to leave it there, but then the book fearlessly dives into the consequences: at what point would the king and his people begin to chafe under the well-intentioned rule of their white saviors? What would the consequences be around the world, for their allies as well as those seeking to take advantage of their resources? And at what point would the alliance between the missionaries and the technocrats break down, as they begin to pursue their differing priorities? It’s a phenomenally ambitious book with a wonderfully diverse cast in all aspects. It does drag a bit in places, but nothing feels forced about any of the character interactions, and the whole is very detailed and very well thought out.
Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway
This guy has enough ideas crammed in here to write ten different books. He’s like Neal Stephenson, except that instead of having a hard SF premise underneath the shiny, this is shiny all the way down. Steampunk clockmaker, check. Fearless spy who’s retained her skills into old age, check. Zombie engineer clones, check. Literal world ending machinery masquerading as a hive of bees, check. The writing is slick and lovely and carries you along despite the extremely unlikely nature of, well, everything that is happening.