1) "Airborn" by Kenneth Opal
Entrancing, exciting adventure with airships, pirates, and mysterious flying mammals takes place on an earth with the same geography as ours but different technology. Fifteen-year-old Matt works as cabin boy on the Aurora, a two-million-pound airship kept aloft by gas cells filled with hydrium, the lightest gas in the world. Matt loves the skies; aground, he feels stifled and claustrophobically disconnected from his late father, who was also an Aurora worker. Kate, a rich passenger Matt’s age, boards the Aurora in search of furry, flying sky mammals mentioned in her late grandfather’s journal but unknown to anyone else. A pirate attack forces an emergency landing on an uncharted island in the Pacificus ocean. Matt’s intricate knowledge of his ship and Kate’s cheerfully stubborn determination bring them, scrabbling hard, to victory over the brutal pirates and discovery of the wondrous cloud cats. Full of a sense of air, flying details, and action. (airship diagram) (Fantasy. 10-14)
2) "Monster Blood Tattoo--Book 1:Foundling" by D.M. Cornish
3) "Scar Night" by Alan Campbell
First of a dark Dickensian fantasy series from video-game designer and UK resident Campbell.
The city of Deepgate hangs suspended on chains above a bottomless abyss, partly as a tribute to Ulcis, the god of chains, and partly for protection against marauding barbarians. Church teaching instructs that Ulcis will one day lead an army to batter open the gates of heaven, closed since Ayen ejected the other gods and angels—the latter became archons, defenders of Deepgate. Ulcis, at the bottom of the abyss, claims all dead bodies and the life-force of their blood, or soul. Recently the barbarians have been severely weakened by diseases and poisons rained upon them by Deepgate’s powerful fleet of airships. Ironically, the brilliant but vengeful Poisoner Devon is dying of the very poisons he helped create. If, however, he succeeds in producing “angelwine,” an elixir brewed from blood and souls, he might achieve immortality. Church leader Presbyter Sypes allows Devon’s project to continue, despite the murders Devon must commit to make angelwine; Sypes hopes to use the elixir to cure Carnival, an insane vampire-angel who descends upon the city every Scar Night to claim the soul of another victim in order to sustain her own immortality. Carnival’s counterpart is Dill, a timid, innocent angel and last descendant of the city’s battle-archons. Dill’s tutor is the young assassin Rachel Hael. Another plot strand follows the hulking Mr. Nettle, whose daughter was one of Devon’s victims, as he attempts to reclaim Abigail’s soul and bring her back to life.
Gory and violent, underpinned with dubious logic, inventive and eye-filling, yet for all the hard work, it doesn’t really get under the skin.
4) "The Map of Time" by Felix J. Palma
H.G. Wells meets Jack the Ripper, the Elephant Man and a historical dimension’s worth of other figures in this imaginative novel by Spanish writer Palma.
The author is an acclaimed writer in his native country, winning the esteemed Ateneo de Sevilla XL Prize for this novel, his first to be published in the United States. At the heart of the story is a question that has fascinated geeks since the beginning of time, or least since Einstein’s day—namely, is it possible to travel through time and, moreover, to violate the prime directive and tinker with events of the past and perhaps even future, reshaping lives and altering the course of history? In this instance, that question haunts a melancholic Briton whose lover, a naughty person of the night, was summarily dispatched by a serial killer working under the cover of the London fog. So obsessed is he by the desire to turn back the clock that he opens himself up to the possibilities of bamboozling. Enter H.G. Wells, who is introduced into young Andrew Harrington’s sorrowful tale in leisurely time as both a “celebrated author” and “painfully thin and having a deathly pallor,” the result, perhaps, of too much hard thinking—particularly about such things as machines that can take a person across the firmament of time. Is Wells a crackpot? Is time travel an elaborate con? Such questions emerge continually throughout Palma’s winding narrative. Now, it has to be said that Karl Alexander beat Palma to the punch with his novel Time After Time (1979), which pits—well, H.G. Wells against Jack the Ripper. Palma’s book has the wider reach, however, as well as a harder scientific edge. Palma is also a master of ingenious plotting, and his tale takes in far more than a simple game of cat and mouse: Even the most careful reader won’t foresee some of the twists here, and there are plenty of them.
Palma wanders in and out of genres—is his book science fiction? literary fiction? fantasy? Whatever the answer, it’s great fun to read, particularly for those with a bent for counterfactual history.
5) "The Iron Thorn" by Caitlin Kittredge
6) "The Friday Society" by Adrienne Kress
Steampunk meets Charlie’s Angels in Kress’ first full-length outing for teens.
Ignore the Buffy-styled language (“It was very explosion-y”). Ignore the anachronistic attitudes about sexuality, the girl trained as a samurai, the thousand insults to historical fiction. Because this is not about history. It’s a little bit about steam. Mostly it’s about girl power with glitter and goggles, lit by gaslight and spiced by murder mystery. Cora (commoner assistant to a mad, noble inventor with a secret basement lair), Nellie (beautiful assistant to a mysterious, all-knowing magician, a great character diminished by stereotypical exotic Othering) and Michiko (Japanese assistant to a drunken sword-fighting instructor, with more stereotyped behavior on both parts) unexpectedly find themselves caught up in mystery and danger when a secret society starts killing people off. Derring-do, midnight fights, a few kisses with various fellows, some adolescent drinking and crime solving ensue. The final lines set up the girls for additional adventures and presumably more volumes, too.
Frothy, sparkly fun with no substance, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need. (Steampunk. 12-16)
7) "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson
A sprawling disquisition on “the higher harmonics of the sloshing” and other “polycosmic theories” that occupy the residents of a distant-future world much like our own.
Stephenson (The System of the World, 2004, etc.), an old hand at dystopian visions, offers a world that will be familiar, and welcome, to readers of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dune—and, for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. The narrator, a youngish acolyte, lives in a monastery-like fortress inhabited by intellectuals in retreat from a gross outer world littered by box stores, developments and discarded military hardware. Saunt Edhar is a place devoted not just to learning, but also to singing, specifically of the “anathem,” a portmanteau of anthem and anathema. Polyphony can afford only so much solace against the vulgar world beyond the walls. It’s a barbaric place that, to all appearances, is post-postapocalyptic, if not still dumbed-down and reeling from the great period of global warming that followed “the Terrible Events” of a thousand-odd years past. Our hero is set to an epic task, but it’s no Tolkienesque battle against orcs and sorcerers; more of the battling is done with words than with swords or their moral equivalents. The hero’s quest affords Stephenson the opportunity to engage in some pleasing wordplay à la Riddley Walker, with talk of “late Praxic Age commercial bulshytt” and “Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies,” and the like, and to level barrel on barrel of scattershot against our own time: “In some families, it’s not entirely clear how people are related”; “Quasi-literate Saeculars went to stores and bought prefabricated letters, machine-printed on heavy stock with nice pictures, and sent them to each other as emotional gestures”; and much more.
Light on adventure, but a logophilic treat for those who like their alternate worlds big, parodic and ironic.
8) "Masque of the Red Death" by Bethany Griffin
Griffin (Handcuffs, 2008) forsakes realism for sultry dystopia.
Araby Worth lives in a tower soaring above a swampy, disease-ridden city. While her scientist father searches for a cure, Araby loses herself in a drugged haze and then finds purpose again joining a rebellion. But nothing is as Araby believes. Multiple factions work at cross-purposes, everyone has a secret agenda and the complex plot only thickens in this riff on Poe’s short story. Griffin has taken several hot tropes—dystopic setting, pretty dresses, steampunk, love triangle—and created something that, if not new, at least feels different. The underlying questions about science and religion, which may save or destroy, and Araby’s strangely dispassionate understanding of her own depression (despite a remarkable blindness to anything else) give the tale an unexpected psychological tension. Araby’s precise, self-absorbed narration overwhelms some details of setting and nuances of character but elicits sympathy nonetheless. The complicated plotting fails to resolve in this volume (it is the first of two), but the inexorable movement towards the party in the prince’s palace, where the wealthiest will dance to his sadistic whims while the world crumbles (per the source tale), makes for satisfying reading despite the lack of answers.
Formulaic but fantastic, from the eye-catching cover to the growth of a heroine who might save the world. Tailor-made for popular consumption. (Dystopic steampunk. 14 & up)
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