1) "Angelmaker" by Nick Harkaway
A bang comes at the door, and with it an offer that one shouldn’t refuse but must. Thus begins Brit novelist Harkaway’s (The Gone-Away World, 2008) latest stuffed-to-the-rafters romp through genres and eras.
Harkaway is the son of spy-thriller master John le Carré, but he has none of his father’s economy or world-weariness. Indeed, he takes a more-is-better approach: If one jape is good, 10 will kill; if one dramatic arc succeeds, let’s have a few more. The tale opens up as a sort of hard-boiled fantasy: The unfortunately named Joe Spork, a clock repairer by day, finds himself drawn into a weird web involving his father, a gangster and half of British intelligence during World War II and the early years of the Cold War, all courtesy of a sort of doomsday machine that falls into his possession. The current inhabitants of Whitehall want it. So does a bad, bad Asian dictator. A band of steampunks called the Ruskinites—you’ve got to know a little something about Victorian aesthete John Ruskin for that joke to work—figure in the proceedings, as do assorted hunters and collectors. Joe has a few choices: He can hit the trail, he can turn tough-guy and fight back or he can sell out. Which choice he’ll stick with is a matter on which Harkaway leaves us guessing, meanwhile traveling the edges between fantasy, sci-fi, the detective novel, pomo fiction and a good old-fashioned comedy of the sort that Jerome K. Jerome might have written had he had a ticking thingy instead of a boat as his prop. Harkaway is a touch undisciplined; his tale stands comparison to Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, but it’s a lot looser, and sometimes there’s too much of a good thing. But it’s a funny surfeit, rich with good humor and neat twists—and you’ve got to love the self-doubting super-spy heroine, once a bit of a femme fatale, now a dotty oldster: “She has to admit privately that she may be mad…She has not lost her marbles or popped her garters, or any of the cosier sorts of madness she had observed in her contemporaries. She has, if anything, gone postal.”
A touch early in the season for a beach book, though just the kind of thing to laugh at away from polite society. Top-notch.
2) "Stormdancer" by Jay Kristoff
Debut author Kristoff’s steampunk adventure whisks readers to a Japanese dystopia where some mythological beings still exist, a few people have fantastical gifts, and all people live under tyranny.
Yukiko, 16, has an ability the shogun’s guild would punish with death: She can commune with animals. In a unique society woven from Japanese culture and history and the author’s ingenuity of mechanical invention and disease, living standards are rough; pollution and drug addiction proliferate under the rule of a corrupt shogun who seeks to win an admittedly nebulous war. When he commissions Yukiko’s father to catch an elusive arashitora, a creature part-eagle and part-tiger, Yukiko’s quest to survive becomes more challenging. Failure to find the arashitora means the end for Yukiko and her father. Indeed, death looms around every corner in this third-person adventure, as Yukiko meets defectors, rebels and others too scared to oppose the shogun. The book takes off in earnest when Yukiko meets an arashitora. She can communicate with it, and girl and beast grow through the bond they form in surprising and thoroughly convincing ways. Ultimately the fearsome pair takes on the regime, but not before Yukiko forays into the wilds of love.
Soars higher than the arashitora Kristoff writes about; superb. (Steampunk. 12 & up)
3) "Lord Kelvin's Machine" by James P. Blaylock
Three-part ``steampunk''--Victorian fantasy--outing for the author of the noteworthy Land of Dreams and The Paper Grail. In part one, scientist Langdon St. Ives, despondent after the recent murder of his wife Alice by the diabolical hunchback Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, struggles to prevent said Narbondo from causing Earth to collide with a passing comet; simultaneously he must sabotage Lord Kelvin's superpowerful electromagnetic machine that, if used to repel the comet, would produce still another disaster. Part two sees St. Ives attempting to recover Kelvin's machine from beneath the English Channel while battling a cast of bad guys intent on revivifying the supposedly dead Narbondo. In part three, St. Ives seizes Kelvin's machine, which turns out to be a time machine, and sets off to make significant alterations to history- -not least, the prevention of Alice's murder. A neat enough idea, but the tone is wrong from the start, as broad comedy-adventure (part one) veers into farcical parody (part two) before subsiding into straightforward melodrama (part three). Neither is the scenario--as if Victorian America had invaded 1930's England--particularly convincing. All in all: a thumping disappointment.
4) "Worldshaker" by Richard Harland
5) "Across the Great Barrier" by Patricia C. Wrede
Eff, now a young woman, has overcome her fear that she is fatally unlucky; now it's time for her to figure out who she's going to be (Thirteenth Child, 2009).
Her staggeringly talented twin brother is off to college back east, but Eff, despite her newly discovered magical potential, is disinclined to follow. She begins working at the local land-grant college’s menagerie of creatures, both magical and ordinary, from the other side of the Great Barrier Spell. Her intelligence and expertise with animals make her an ideal assistant for an expedition beyond the Barrier, and off she goes into this dangerous, beckoning territory, observing, thinking and growing ever more confident. The other primary members of the expedition, Professor Torgeson from New Vineland, and Washington Morris, the Aphrikan-Columbian circuit-rider magician, provide sturdy support to both Eff and the narrative. Eff is entirely fresh: She has no Destiny, cannot be summed up as "plucky" and discovers herself and her world slowly and naturally. In conceptualizing her Frontier Magic series, Wrede made the controversial decision not to populate her Columbian continent with indigenous peoples. Readers uncomfortable with this will find no hasty palliative change; readers less sensitive to the issue will find themselves grateful for every minute they spend with the deliberate, observant and loving Eff.
Splendid worldbuilding and deliciously complex characterization continue to be the hallmarks of this standout fantasy. (Steampunk. 12-18)
6) "The Monstrumologist" by William James Henry Edited by Rick Yancey
7) "The Goblin Emperor" by Katherine Addison
New fantasy from an author who, as Sarah Monette, wrote the Doctrine of Labyrinth series.
Eighteen-year-old half-goblin Maia, the despised youngest son of the Emperor, lives in wretched circumstances, exiled from the Imperial Court and overseen by his brutal cousin, Setheris. But then a courier arrives with the news that his father and elder brothers have been killed in an airship crash. Stunned and disconcerted, Maia must take his place as the rightful Emperor of the Elflands. Armed only with his quick wits, empathy and natural humility, his first task is to face down the arrogant and contemptuous Lord Chancellor, Uleris Chavar, and insist that he be crowned before his father's funeral. Alone and friendless, bewildered by the complex politics and economics of the court—and soon informed that his father’s death was caused by sabotage, not accident—Maia finds the burden almost unsupportable. He comes to rely on Csevet, the courier who becomes his secretary, for information and advice and on his guards Cala and Beshelar, who are sworn to protect him. Gradually he finds ways to solve intractable problems. He treats servants as people and women as equals, an approach that wins him many admirers but also enrages the more traditional nobles. Addison patiently and tellingly paints in the backdrop, mingling steampunk elements and low-key magic with imperial intricacies. There are powerful character studies and a plot full of small but deadly traps among which the sweet-natured, perplexed Maia must navigate. The result is a spellbinding and genuinely affecting drama.
Unreservedly recommended.
8) "Storm Thief" by Chris Wooding
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