Behemoth by Scott Westerfield Illustrated by Keith Thompson

Behemoth by Scott Westerfield Illustrated by Keith Thompson

Behemoth is a mixture of alternate history and steampunk written for young adults.  It is the second book in the Leviathan trilogy.  The title Leviathan in the first book refers to a giant living airship.  Leviathan won the 2010 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Novel. I think it is quite readable for adults as well.

The setting in this part of the series is an alternate history Ottoman Empire.  There are ornate clockwork mechanical walkers and intricate steam powered machines.  The year is 1914.  In this world, the English and Russians are Darwinists masters of genetically engineered beasts and the Germans and Ottomans are Clankers makers of complex clockwork machinery.  I like that in this world, the Americans do both.

This makes for wonderfully ornate illustrations by Keith Thompson.  His website has some of the art from Behemoth http://www.keiththompsonart.com/ The illustrations are wonderfully ornate in black in white with touches of Victoriana, Art Deco, and even Middle Eastern motifs.

The reader encounters living airships, articulated steam elephants, a steampunk library, and an alternate Orient Express.  This transports you to a very different world.  The descriptions are inventive and eloquent.  We get to imagine Iron Golems in the Jewish quarters of Istanbul, fallen nobility in grand hotels, and an air of revolutionary change.

There is constant action, intrigue, hair raising escapes, and suspense.  Tension is created between the main characters; a young woman posing as a boy to serve in the English air corps, and an aristocratic German who is trying to pass himself off as a commoner.

The design of the book is superb; it is set in Hoefler text.  The line spacing and layout are very easy on the eyes.  The jacket design and photo illustration are by Sammy Yuen, Jr.

This is highly recommended, especially for people who read steampunk or atlernate history.

Blameless An Alexia Tarabotti Novel by Gail Carriger

Blameless An Alexia Tarabotti Novel by Gail Carriger.

This is a wonderfully silly fantastic novel. It manages to mashup steampunk with werewolves and vampires in a comedy of manners. It is quite fun to read.

The main character who is pregnant by a werewolf travels to Italy where she meets the templars and learns a bit about her fathers history.

Lots of silliness ensues. Alexia Terrabotti endures ornithopter rides, angry vampires, and pesto in her travels in Italy. She wards off villains with her weigted dart shooting parasol with the help of her trusty footman Floote and the cross dressing hatmaker Madame Lefleux.

The writing is lighthearted and fun. It is well worth following the author, Gail Carriger. Her blog is quite fun to read with its pictures of parasols and other victorian and steampunk fashions. http://gailcarriger.livejournal.com/

Clementine by Cherie Priest

Clementine by Cherie Priest

This is a chase novel. One main character, Captain Beauregard Hainey seeks to recover his stolen property, a war dirigible.  Another character, Maria Isabella Boyd, must make sure the stolen dirigible, the Clementine reaches its destination.  This creates opposing chases.

The characters are also described in opposition.  Captain Beauregard is an African American air pirate, arms smuggler, and wanted man.  Maria Isabella Boyd is an ex-confederate spy hired by the Pinkertons.  This makes for a novel with strong clashes.

The clashes between the opposing sides happen at a whirlwind pace.  The reading is as fast as the storyline.  It is nonstop action mixed with intrigue;  aerial dirigible battles, dirigible hijackings, and quick thinking.

The setting is a steampunk version of the American civil war replete with clockwork technology.  The book makes some references to her previous novel, Boneshaker, but it is not necessary to read it to understand the action.  There are a few cliches in the novel like a man portable gatling gun and a diamond powered deathbeam.  This is the only real flaw I found in the writing.

I sat and read the book on the train home, then finished it that same night.  It works very well as an action novel.  If you want a couple days worth of fast paced escapism, this novel is worth reading.

Changeless An Alexia Tarabotti Novel by Gail Carriger

Changeless An Alexia Tarabotti Novel by Gail Carriger

This is the second novel in the Parasol Protectorate series featuring Alexia Tarabotti. It is set in a Victorian England with touches of steampunk. The first was Soulless. Alexia is now Lady Maccon. She is married to Conall Maccon who is a werewolf. She is the lady of a house of werewolves.

In this novel, paranormals are mysteriously losing their powers. This is bad for England because so much of their military power lies in regiments of vampires and werewolves. It is a mystery for Lady Maccon to solve. She travels between England and Scotland by dirigible, she hobnobs with werewolves, vampires, and nobility. At the same time she takes tea, wears fashionable dress, and reads the society papers.

The novel is lighthearted entertainment. The writing breaks boundaries by moving between a variety of genres from gaslight to romance to steampunk to adventure. The writing is more comic adventure than scary. She wards off the villains with her trustry umbrella and dangerous hatpins.

The backstory is one of an eccentric, intelligent lady with a difficult family and quirky friends both normal and paranormal (ghosts, vampires, and werewolves). Her friend Ivy is entranced by terrible hats and her sister must travel with her to Scotland to avoid scandal.

The third book in the series coming out in September 2010, Blameless, should be as entertaining as the first two.

Soulless An Alexia Tarabotti Novel by Gail Carriger

Soulless An Alexia Tarabotti Novel by Gail Carriger

The main character of this novel is a proper english lady and a spinster. She carries a silver tipped parasol, likes, tea, and reads a lot about science and the supernatural. Alexia Tarabotti has an original personality which is quite charming to read in this novel. Her proper manners and headstrong character create a nice juxtaposition to the humor in the novel.

The book is quite lighthearted. It jumps around many genres and constantly spins out new takes on old ideas. Where can you read about a comedy of manners in courting a Scottish werewolf lord in London? How about talk to fashionable vampire fop, or be chased by a bloodthirsty golem.

I could call this book a victorian steampunk, supernatural, romance, comedic thriller. A surprising mix and mash which comes up with exuberant new ideas in each chapter. There are also elements of alternate history, Queen Victoria even makes a brief appearance.

Soulless is the first book in a series. I put the second one, Changeless on reserve at my library and am waiting for the third book to come out. Her writing is fun to read. I also like Gail Carriger's website http://www.gailcarriger.com/ It has a nice mix of Victorian fashion, funny pictures, and lists of steampunk novels and films.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Leviathan combines alternate history with steampunk. It is a young adult novel which can easily reach a more general audience. It is 1914, the Britsh are Darwinists manipulators of life threads, the dna which Darwin discovered. The Austrians are Clankers masters of steam driven clockwork machinery. The world is tilting towards war between the two factions. It is a story of extremely different worldviews.

The setting alternates between a giant hydrogen filled whale airship, the Leviathan which is British and a young Austrian noble, Aleksandar Ferdinand who is on the run.

The book is beautifully illustrated with finely detailed black and white drawings. Many are full page with pictures of steam driven mecha, ladies in bowler hats, airships, and other images. The images convey a mix of the future and the past. Keith Thompson did the artwork.

The two teenage main characters are very likable, Deryn Sharp, a teenage girl disguises herself so she can be an airship cadet. When Aleksandar and Deryn Sharp meet we get an interesting clash of cultures.

The historical details mesh well with the fantasy details. There is an afterword in the book which explains what is historical and what is fantasy.

There is very wide spacing between lines, wide margins, and a non-standard font Hoefler Text. Even the chapter headings look nice. This makes the book a pleasure to read.

Scott Westerfeld wrote the Ugly series which was a New York Times bestseller. Leviathan is on the current Locus Magazine bestseller list.

I am looking forward to reading the next book in the series when it comes out.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

This is a fun novel to read. It is a steampunk novel set in Seattle during the 1860s. Seattle Washington has not yet become a part of the United States. The city has fallen apart because of a mysterious gas that turns people into zombies.

I enjoyed the technology described in this novel. It is very dark. People wear filter masks to protect themselves from the zombie gas and have to purify all the water they drink. There are airships, giant drilling machines, and underground sealed living spaces.

There is a grim feeling to this novel. The feeling of an industrial wasteland. This is combined with a kind of western frontier spirit. The characters are stark and flawed. They are also driven by very human passions. Ezekiel Wilkes who is sixteen wants to find the true story of his father. Briar Wilkes want to find her son, Ezekiel who has descended into a wasteland.

The minor characters are just as good as the main characters, the evil Dr. Minnericht, his henchman Yaozhu, and the tough old woman Angeline are very aptly named. The descriptions are colorful and full of pathos.

This novel would be a good read for both teenagers and adults. There is lots of action, history, and very convincing descriptions.

Daily Thoughts 2/20/2009

Everybody can simply lend or swap books or help filling this weather-proof outdoor bookcase any time - since November 2005 five such open library cupboards were installed in Hanover by Werkstatt-Treff Mecklenheide e.V.. The idea seems to origin from the artists Clegg & Guttmann, who realized their first "Open Public Library" in 1991 in Graz (AT). Taken by Norbert Luckhardt, Hannover, DE with a Cannon EOS 5D. This image is licensed under Creative Commons.

I have read Extraordinary Engines The Definitive Steampunk Anthology Edited by Nick Gevers. I do not like this anthology. I did not like most of the stories in this anthology. There were only three which I liked; Steampunch by James Lovegrove, Speed, Speed the Cable by Kage Baker, and Fixing Hanover by Jeff Vandermeer. There was one story which was interesting to read, but I had mixed feelings about it. The title was Machine Maid by Margo Lanagan. There were a total of twelve stories

I wish they had the selection of stories less literary in nature and focused on more popular stories. I did not find James Morrow's story, Lady Witherspoon's Solution to be steampunk, it was more Victorian fantasy. It was not a bad story, it just was not steampunk in my mind. I think a better anthology to read would be Steampunk Edited by Ann Vandermeer and Jeff Vandermeer, I enjoyed this anthology a lot more.

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

Mattie is a clockwork woman with a windup heart. She is like a porcelain doll made of whalebone, copper gears, and steel. In the center of her chest is a clear box with a hole in it. It is there that her creator, Loharri puts the key in to wind up her heart.

They exist in a city at the edge of an industrial age not our own. The novel is a kind of steampunk, but not in any Victorian style. There is a mix of the magic of alchemy and clockwork machines. Mattie is the bridge between two factions in the city, the mechanics and the alchemists. She is an intelligent automaton trained as an alchemist.

Unlike either faction, she can see the suffering of the common people, the poisoned air and water, the deformed children bred to work in the mines and the peasants forced off their land by automata. She also is in touch with the gargoyles, the fleeting creatures who represent the nobility who are quickly becoming irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.

The city itself is fascinating; there is the foreign quarter with its dark skinned inhabitants, the constant flow of centipede like carriages, the paper factories, the parliament, the palace toppoed with gargoyles, and the automatons doing menial labor. It is a city falling apart at the seems moving into civil war and destruction.

This story is a tragedy and it does not come to a happy ending. There is even an element of a love story between Sebastian, a rogue mechanic, and Mattie. This goes against the wishes of her creator, Loharri. The sense of tragedy and forbidden love is what makes the book so wonderful and lyrical. The story pits the ideas of tradition versus progress against each other leaving ruin in the end. The story is full of unique images and has a poetic quality to it that touches your sense of wonder and imagination.

Ekaterian Sedia also wrote The Secret History of Moscow. This is a story of weird fiction. I could compare it to Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris novels, or possibly China Mieville. She has a website, http://www.ekaterinasedia.com .

Steampunk Edited By Ann And Jeff Vandermeer

Part of a Babbage Engine from 1832, a form of mechanical computer that was never fully developed. Bruce Sterling posits a different future based on a secret society which developed this in his book, The Difference Engine.

Steampunk, Edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer is a collection of Victorian style science fiction. It includes a few excerpts from larger novels including a chapter from The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock.

Some of the short stories are quite entertaining. One of my favorites is The Selene Gardening Society about a group of Victorian ladies shooting garbage to the moon. Another story I found fascinating was the 72 Letters about a society that used golems for industrial purposes. The main character designed and built golems. The story, The Martian Agent by Michael Chabon was about a pair of the sons of a confederate soldier escaping to England on a zeppelin.

The author selection was quite good including; James, Blaylock, Michael Moorcock, Rachel Pollack and others.

I could find little objectionable in the stories, except for the story Victoria about Queen Victoria acting as a courtesan for a while to further her education. It was a bit baudy and filled with an offbeat sense of humor.

There are two essays at the end of the book; The Steam Driven Time Machine: A Pop Culture Survey lists a variety of steampunk movies, novels, and television shows and the essay The Essential Sequential Steampunk A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium lists a variety of graphic novels that are steampunk.

This was a satisfying collection. I found the last two essays to be quite interesting. The editing in this collection was quite clean. I have to congratulate Tachyone Publications on producing a very interesting collection. http://www.tachyonpublications.com/

There is a brief biographical summary of each author in the collection at the back of the book.

Morning Thoughts

I was looking on Facebook and I came across something rather interesting. It is a newswire for librarians. It is basically a large collection of press releases from libraries and library companies. I think it is fairly new. http://www.liswire.com/ . I rather like the idea of it. It still needs a lot more coverage.

My day should be interesting today. Yesterday, I got to the subway and it was so packed that I could not get a seat. I had to stand all the way in. It is quite hard to read standing up. Hopefully, if I leave a few minutes earlier, I will get a seat today and be able to read on the subway. It was like being in a can of sardines. So many more people are taking the subway as gas prices are climbing much higher.

I work an hour earlier on Fridays. Today, it was a much nicer ride on the subway, peaceful compared to yesterday. I got to read some more of Steampunk. I enjoyed reading a kind of odd story by Joe Lansdale, The Steam Man of the Prairie and The Dark Rider which combines steampunk with westerns. It has all sorts of odd things in it, morlocks, a vampire, a steam man, and a few other odd surprises. Joe Lansdale is an author who I really enjoy reading. He writes, western horror, mysteries, steampunk, and graphic novels.
He has a myspace fanpage which lists his films and books. It is kind of entertaning.
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=240828807

I looked through the New York Times Bestseller list which we have as part of our library catalog and placed Bad money : reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of American capitalism by Kevin Phillips on hold.

It is the afternoon. This morning, I went around checking for books with minor damage, torn covers, peeling spine labels, and other minor damage to be repaired in the reference area. The reference books are fairly clean right now. The shelving is in good order and looks neat.

Thinking back to steampunk, one of my favorite graphic novels is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill. I think the storytelling is fantastic. It is set in alternate British Victoria populated with many of the genre favorites of old, Captain Nemo, Mina Harker, The Invisible Man, Allan Qatermain and others. The first volume deals with formation of the league and a battle between Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty in London. The second volume in the series is even more outrageous. The league fights the invading martians who are like the martians from War of the Worlds. There is brief appearance by John Carter and Gulliver Jones on an alternate mars.

There is supposed to be a third volume in the series which hasn't come out yet. They did an interim story, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Black Dossier but none of our libraries purchased it. I am not going to shell out my own money to buy this. Maybe, I will get it eventually, I am not in a hurry.

I was looking at various blogs when I came across an interesting story at the OUP Blog about a gentleman living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan and plastering the floors and walls with pages from a dictionary. It looked interesting enough for me to mention it in my blog. I really enjoyed the story. http://blog.oup.com/2008/05/words-out-of-context/

Thoughts For The Day

A Victorian era Penny Dreadful. Precursor to the idea for modern steampunk.

Today has been quite slow. I have been more revising of the reference area. I went into the storage stacks and did some checking of the old reference books for items to discard. I also took someone's reference desk shifts because they called out with some personal thing or other.

I am almost done reading Common Wealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet. It will take me a while to put together a review for the book. There is a lot to comment on.

Steampunk edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer is finished processing so I can take it out. There are a lot of really good science fiction short story authors, Neal Stephenson, Joe R. Lansdale, Michael Moorcock, and Mary Gentle are among the authors contributing short stories. There are even a few bibliographies of recommended works.

I can say my favorite steampunk story is not a book, but a rather interesting graphic novel called The Adventures of Luther Arkwright written by Bryan Talbot. It is an apocalyptic science fiction stories written in a parallel universe in the New Wave style. The story even has its own Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Luther_Arkwright
This is a wild adventure story written in a style reminiscent of Michael Moorcock at his best.

Goblin Quest and Goblin Hero by Jim C. Hines came in and were added to the young adult fantasy collection.

Thoughts For Today

Hello, I finished reading a book called Goblin War by Jim C. Hines. I enjoyed reading it. It was a humorous fantasy about a goblin who has to survive human and elven raiders, and an army of orcs, trolls, wolves, goblins, and kobolds. I thought about reviewing it, but I haven't read the first two books in the series, Goblin Quest and Goblin Hero. This makes me think I should wait until we get these two books. None of the libraries in the system where I work have these two books. I am going to try and convince the young adult librarian to buy this series. After all, Goblin War was on the Locus Bestseller list and got excellent reviews. I think it would be an injustice to write a review of a series I haven't read completely.

I requested that our library buy Steampunk edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. It is interesting seeing husband and wife writing teams. I don't know if this team will be as good as Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore who wrote as a husband and wife team, but I know that their writing is already excellent. This book got a starred review in the Publishers Weekly April 21, 2008 issue.

Another book which I am suggesting for purchase is The Kingmakers How The Media Threatens Our Security and Democracy by Mike Gravel and David Eisenbach, Ph.D.. It received a starred review in the May 5, 2008 Publishers Weekly. The book is slated to be out June 1, 2008.

There is a rather interesting article on CNN on the Great Comic Books Scare of the 1950s. It mentions The Ten Cent Plague by David Hajdu.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/05/08/comic.books/index.html

Today, it was a really nice day out. There was a light wind blowing around 70 degrees, not too sunny. I still ran a poetry open microphone today. Eight people showed up and several people read. I guess a few of them were there for the cookies, juice, and water. I read a few of my own poems. I brought some books down from upstairs by different poets, Maya Angelou, Calvin Trillin, Jack Kerouac, Rita Dove, Bei Dao and a few others. The cookies were all gone by the end of the program. One of the older gentlemen who comes to the library talked about trumpet playing for a little bit.

Tomorrow, I am going to the Westchester Library Association conference. It should be interesting. I have to be there by 8:00 a.m. My library is paying for it. I ordered the vegetarian lunch. They always have a hard time messing up vegetarian food. I don't like rubber chicken lunches you occassionally get at conferences. I hope I get to gab with a few different people in addition to the speakers. The train ride up will be interesting. Unfortunately, none of the items I have on hold came in for me to check out.