This story is a cautionary tale to all Sci-Fi writers, especially of the Steampunk variety. Don’t fall in love with your setting, especially the politics. You want your readers to become immersed in your newly created environment, and to do so they need to know all sorts of things. Readers don’t know this. They signed up to be entertained, not for a history lesson.
This story starts out well, with lots of suspense and action, but soon slips into info dumps of people and politics. In one spot we are deluged with ten new names — people, places, or positions — on one page. A character named Busain dominates the crucial first forty pages, and then is mentioned four times in the rest of the book.
Steampunk writers can be forgiven for a lot of tech stuff, because that’s one of the draws for their readers. This author has put a lot of imagination into his tech. He does a pretty good job of slipping the details in when they’re needed for the action sequences…but that tends to slow the action down. It’s a fine line.
This story covers a lot of ground (and air) at the beginning, and this results in a fragmented plot that tends to leave us with a cliff-hangers, jumping away to a new place and time from a different character’s point of view. When we get back to the earlier character, the problem has been solved, so we miss the catharsis of the resolution of suspense.
If the main characters weren’t so strong and fully rounded, this would leave us in a muddle of loyalties. Fortunately, in the later part of the book the characters push the author into the background, and except for a few over-long and gory fight scenes, they rule the roost.
In the final battle the time spent on tech description pays off, creating opportunities for detailed mechanical strategies the reader can picture easily.
A good story with great characters, but a trifle overdone in some areas. Recommended for tech-savvy Steampunkers.
Four stars.
This Reviewer’s Pet Peeve: I wish some steampunk genius would solve the Airship Fallacy. You cannot tack upwind unless the hull of your vessel has some other medium (like water or an electro-magnetic field) to push against. Kramer’s inflatable sails are a nice try, but…?