2024 steampunk fantasy. The Imperium was created by the Seelie Gods,
but fell apart in civil war twenty years ago. Now, Captain William
Blair uses his rackety old ship to run cargo between various
unfriendly successor states. Because what a ship really is… is
freedom.
Scrappy crew, found family, all that good stuff. This book should
have appealed to me, and I've enjoyed Olivia Atwater's solo work. But
this failed completely to make a favourable impression on me, and I
think it was because the props and levers shaping the story were so
obvious. Here is a cargo to deliver; it's going to go wrong. Here is
a passenger; she has a secret. Here is a father figure; he's going to
die. Here is a worry about what would be the worst possible thing; it
promptly happens. Nothing ever goes normally.
And so I could never find myself in sympathy with the characters,
because while they do the right things they so clearly succeed or fail
in any instance by authorial fiat rather than by their own efforts
that I couldn't take their worries seriously. So there's no tension,
and so I find myself noticing the simplicity of the characters too.
I mean, I love the teamwork; rather than the usual disciplinarian
model in imitation of Hornblower or the do-what-I-say of Firefly,
Blair is a captain who runs the ship by consensus, by getting the best
people to work for him and then letting them run their departments.
That's lovely. Conflicts among the crew are resolved in the manner of
adults.
But then oh, goodness, here's another tedious action scene. Oh look
the ship has been damaged and they can't escape from their pursuer, so
they have to do the Really Dangerous Thing that they didn't want to
do. Not that that was foreshadowed at all.
I have found that a small early thing can leave me feeling positively
or negatively about a book. Sometimes it's a little bit of technical
detail that didn't have to be got right, but was anyway. And
sometimes:
Priests of the Benefactor were known by many names in many parts—but
I had most often heard them called "halcyons", after soft and sunny
days.
No, you barbarian, a halcyon is a kingfisher. But nobody in the book,
and I presume neither author, realises that the word has an actual
meaning as well as a vaguely warm fuzzy connotation.
It's also a very busy world. There are flying ships, and powered
armour (though we don't see any), and sorcery, and necromancy, and a
"blunderbuster" which is clearly a bit better than a blunderbuss but
works in narrative exactly like a shotgun to the extent that you load
it with shells… but dammit the entire point of a blunderbuss is the
flared muzzle to make it easier to load with powder and shot. And
there's "fire-rum", which is… just rum. But it's a cool name.
This started, according to the afterword, as a writing exercise in
subverting fantasy tropes, and as that it often succeeds. But alas it
felt like a constant slog to read, and I don't plan to go further with
the series.