2004 young adult steampunk fantasy, first of a trilogy. Matt Cruse is
a cabin boy aboard the airship Aurora.
It's an odd world, this, a strange combination of real and
invention. The author's biography mentions being inspired by the idea
"What if airplanes hadn't been invented?", but there are miracles here
too: the gas bags are still goldbeater's skin, but they're filled with
"hydrium", which occurs naturally, and is even lighter than hydrogen.
That's all fair enough, the sort of miracle I can take for granted in
a fantasy… but then Oppel tells us it has a distinct smell of ripe
mangoes.
At which point I say hang on just a moment, a complex smell like that
means complex organic chemicals, esters and furanones and lactones,
great big molecules that are not consonant with a very light gas.
But I'm the sort of annoying reader who checks things that seem to
bear on the real world. I read a passage like
over there, the Arctic Star headed over the top of the world with
scheduled stops in Yellowknife, Godthab, Sankt-Peterburg and
Arkhangel.
and I plot it out to see if it makes sense. Which actually it just
about does; I'd have thought St Petersburg would come last, but
swapping the last two stops adds distance to the route.
Map YZF-GOH-LED-ARH
Though we're starting in "Lionsgate City" and nobody ever says where
that is. Somewhere in North America, from context, but the name of
the country goes unmentioned, even though we have Paris and London and
Constantinople and Sydney and other real places. And the great oceans
are the Atlanticus and the Pacificus…
It's something like the turn of the 20th century; there's a silent
film from the Lumière Triplets. But the story is largely disconnected
from the world: there are sky pirates! Uncharted islands! Shipwrecks!
Ornithopters! Girls!
Her hair looked redder in the full light. Maybe it was just the red
bows—girls knew how to do these things.
There's also, which nearly caused me to fling the book away, a daring
escape using an improvised hydrium balloon… to float to the top of a
cave filled with hydrium. Er, the buoyancy, she does not work like
that.
It's wholesome fun, even if the bones of message are a bit close to
the surface (rich kids got problems too); and there's a fair bit of "I
win because I know this large lump of technology better than you do",
which is a mode of conflict I enjoy (see also Elizabeth Moon's Once a
Hero).
But it's desperately slight, and the characters are thoroughly
predictable. Unless you particularly like reading about airships (as I
do), I can't really recommend it.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.