Due to a perfect storm of gin & tonics, cabin-visitation, and general slovenliness, I read roughly eleventy million pulp steampunk books this summer. Before they disappear into an undifferentiated stew of plucky scientist's daughters and clockwork corsets, I mean to write up just a little about each one.

Heretofore, I've been reviewing books from my Summer of Steampunk that aren't particularly notable. Some of this is that it's easier to be a crank; some of this is the fact that I had to get something down before I forgot clean about them. Rather than give the impression that I hate everything and why am I even reading steampulp, I wanted to get in a review of a book I enjoyed. Hey Mikey! etc. 

The broad strokes are thus: Aline is the personal assistant to a growly Russian dude, Sasha Romanov (and I would like to just take a moment to be a bitch about this name; really?) She quits in a fit of pique in order to marry the boring cipher she's engaged to, which puts the question to the true nature of her feelings towards her employer, &c &c. When Aline is targeted by a Jack the Ripperish murderer, a whole mess of crazy steampunkery ensues, including such things as Leonardo da Vinci, secret societies, immortals, vampires, mecha-soldiers, and the Crimean War. I generally prefer a kitchen sink approach to pulp, and this book delivers that in spades. I'll start with things that bugged, and move onto things I liked. 

Minuses: Prince of Hearts isn't particularly well plotted: things take too long to get started, and then happen too furiously once they do. My real problem (which became very apparent when I went to read the second in this series and had zero idea what was going on) is that the architecture of the techno-steampunkery slash paranormal taxonomy makes little sense and/or isn't explained well. I'm going to admit I don't pay attention very well to explanations or infodumps, so this could be me. Even still, I think it lacked a certain metaphorical punch necessary to be memorable.

Pluses: War in the Crimea, wot wot! Maybe I'm easy, but I straight up love it when people go for strange, little-remembered national conflicts in their alt-histories. I googled a little, just so I had the particulars fresh about the Crimea, and that conflict was such a pyrrhic shitshow, remembered mostly because of Florence Nightingale or the Charge of the Light Brigade. (The latter is primarily remembered because a whole mess of folk got killed attacking the wrong location. Good Lord. It's like the Battle of Thermopylae, but more of a bummer because it's stupid.) 

Due to a perfect storm of gin & tonics, cabin-visitation, and general slovenliness, I read roughly eleventy million pulp steampunk books this summer. Before they disappear into an undifferentiated stew of plucky scientist's daughters and clockwork corsets, I mean to write up just a little about each one.

Most of the titles I've read for my Summer of Steampunk come from the recommend feature at my public library, because I can't be arsed to do actual research or pay for anything. Now I love my library, but it's true that their database is terrible and the search function worse. Which is how come I came to read the second in a series without knowing that was the case. I think it's generally true that you have to read the first in any series, even if you then decide to skip around. So much important exposition -- especially when one is dealing with an alternate history -- takes place in the first, and then is assumed knowledge. While some of this can come down to the skill of the writer, I think we need to be realistic about our expectations when it comes to pulp. Which is my longwinded way of saying, this book was dumb and confusing in places, but some of that could be my fault for reading like a slob. 

The plot of Clockwork Mafia is fairly perfunctory. Like at least two other titles I read, the main character is a plucky middle class lady whose mad scientist father has just died. She, of  course, is also into the mad scientry, and evil Dickensian villains are now after either her or her dad's formula/device/whatnot. I did not understand the alternate history at all. Apparently, the East Coast is still some kind of British colony, complete with the peerage? But then there's a country in the Midwest which is run by some kind of bandit queen? Just, whatever. Main character girl somehow both works as a mechanic on a long haul airship and is a lady of society, and extremely silly false dichotomies pop up all over the place. Altogether, this book is below average.

But the cock-up involving book order ended up amusing me. It eventually becomes clear that no one from the first book likes this character: they think she's a two-faced social climber. Even though I didn't see any evidence of said duplicitous cattiness, the girl spends just an inordinate amount of time apologizing to the leads from the previous book. Before I figured out why this was the case -- book two! duh -- I thought the choice to make one of these cookie-cutter virgin ingenues apologize to everyone for just existing completely charming. Sorry I'm such a dishrag! Pardon my dreariness! That the leads from the other book appear to be violent sociopaths made me occasionally feel bad about her apologetics -- seriously, girl, those people are wack -- but not often enough to spoil my fun. I will not be reading the first to determine the exact psychosis of the original leads. 

Oh, and I was hugely disappointed that it wasn't a literal Clockwork Mafia, like one where automata are made up like stereotypical mobsters in zoot suits and pomade. I would read the shit out of that. 

So that happened. 

I've been reading a bunch of pulp steampunk recently -- at some point I'll have to update a bunch of same-samey titles with "brass" and "steam" and "corset" in the titles -- and this stood out as not stupid. There's a lot here that's de rigueur for the genre: plucky scientist's daughter, hat pins, Dickensian moppets, dreary eye dialect, etc. But there's an alternate history here that runs deeper than the usual "justification for clockwork umbrellas" one encounters on the more romantic edge of things, and a refreshing attendance to the harsh economics/imperialism of the Victorian era.

I mean, sure, there's usually a gesture to how Unfair it is for the Scientist's Daughter to wear a Clockwork Corset when what she really wants to do is Direct -- though, of course, she has no idea how good she looks -- but here poor people actually starve, and the upper classes literally drink blood. Something something, vampire virus used by the aristocracy to keep themselves in power something something. So it's not particularly deep, but it was cool to see.