Reviews :: Book Genre :: Steampunk :: Page 3

There’s a reason we like George Mann‘s work. It’s all fast-paced, fun, and can be read without having to work at it. GHOSTS OF WAR (Amazon) is Mann’s second Ghost novel, and follows up immediately after GHOSTS OF MANHATTAN. It has pretty much all the elements that made MANHATTAN fun, yet also seems to have more flaws than the first entry.

Mechanical, bat-like constructs are terrorizing the city of Manhattan. They swoop down and abduct random people off the streets, and those people are never found. The Ghost does what any good vigilante hero would and tries to solve the mystery. He is helped once again by Detective Felix Donovan—one of the few who know the Ghost’s real identity.
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Every once in a while I come across a book, or series of books, that totally yanks the carpet out from under me. I don’t expect more than the ordinary when I pick ‘em up (other than, perhaps, noticing the amazing cover art). I plop myself down in a chair, open the thing up, and quite simply just get to it. Then it reaches out, smashes me in the face with its awesomeness, and says, “You love me!” Leaving me with naught to do but obligingly respond, “Yes. Yes I do.”
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We rarely read any novels from Pyr that could be deemed a “miss.” The number of stellar novels put out by Pyr since its inception is astonishing. But every now and again even they miss the mark. THE HORNS OF RUIN by Tim Akers (Amazon) is Sword & Sorcery/Steampunk hybrid. Sounds cool on the surface. In fact a lot of this story sounds fantastic on paper…unfortunately that paper doesn’t include the actual execution of the idea.
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Professor Amelia Harsh has lost her tenure at the last university in Jackals that would hire her (after being fired by the other seven…). Why? Because instead of studying and writing papers like a normal university professor, she’s out hunting relics of Camlantis, which everyone knows is a myth.

Enter Abraham Quest, the richest man in Jackals, who has been doing his own archaeology on the sly, and found proof that Camlantis exists. Unfortunately, the clues point the way into the heart of darkness itself, the source of the Shedarkshe river in the wilds of a jungle from which no explorer has returned. Camlantis was a utopia, with untold engineering feats, a society of pacifists, and Amelia and Abraham are convinced that it holds the key to making their own war-torn society a better place. But it means risking lives in order to see that goal realized.
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George Mann is awesome. That is all.

OK, that really isn’t all we are going to say, but it covers our opinions nicely. George Mann has given readers quite the year. If you were late to the party, you got THE AFFINITY BRIDGE (EBR Review). You also got GHOSTS OF MANHATTAN (EBR Review). In the UK you got THE IMMORALITY ENGINE. And now here in the US, THE OSIRIS RITUAL (Amazon) has finally been released. How great is that?
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If you have been following our not-so-humble blog, you know we like George Mann. So when we got our paws on his GHOSTS OF MANHATTAN (Amazon), published by Pyr, we knew we were in for a treat.

GHOSTS is set in America during the roaring 20’s, but with a Steampunk bent, and as if that isn’t cool enough, George Mann inserts enough Urban Fantasy elements to create a sweet mesh of the two genres. Actually, the genre almost does a complete swap in the last third of the book. It was a little jarring, but the pace of the book swept us along, without giving us time to let the change bother us.
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Steampunk. You can hardly go wrong with it. It’s that genre that is filled with airships, goggles and adventure. With the novel BONESHAKER (Amazon), Cherie Priest tries her hand at the steampunk genre.

We had heard a lot about this novel. Authors, editors, and readers everywhere called it amazing. We had heard it called one of the best steampunk novels ever written. Do you see where this is going? Yeah. We were let down. WAY down.
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Scott Westerfeld is perhaps currently best known for his YA SF novels. He recently decided to try his hand at Steampunk in an alternate version of World War I. LEVIATHAN is a good entry into the genre, but it isn’t without drawbacks (depending on your point of view, of course).

LEVIATHAN (Amazon) follows the PoV of Alek, the son of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand (in case you didn’t know before, now you know where the band gets its name–that’s your useless piece of trivia for the day). In Westerfeld’s story, the assassination of the Archduke and his wife incites World War I, just like in actual history. This differences are the Steampunk and Biopunk (this term will make more sense in a moment) settings. The two major factions are the Clankers (the Austrians, Germans and such), and the Darwinists (England and other “Allies”). The Clankers are based in machinery, and lend to the Steampunk stylings that the book promotes. The Darwinists, frankly, are much cooler. They manipulate biological creatures into war machines, ships, and anything else they have need of. As a counterpoint to young Alek’s “Clanker” PoV, we have the PoV of Deryn Sharp. She is a fifteen year-old girl posing as a boy in the British Air Service aboard the Leviathan–a huge biologically created ship that resembles a flying whale.
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If you are like us, when you go to a bookstore you let your eye wander. If you already know what you want to buy, and you walk right to it and pick it up, you’ve missed a golden opportunity. When you let yourself browse the bookstore, you get the opportunity to let books choose you, in a sense. This is how we discovered THE AFFINITY BRIDGE by George Mann. The art design on the cover is incredible–some of the best we’ve see this year, in fact–and we knew right away that we wanted to read it. So, we each picked up a copy…

… and remembered that, unfortunately, we are poor. So we put the copies back, and went to the library. It was a bummer.
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