According to the 2010 daily planner I bought at Borders, on this day in 1981, “Mary T. Meagher, known as Madame Butterfly, swam the women’s 100m butterfly in a record 58.91 seconds.” 5+8+9+1=23. That said,
Smoke billowed around his face as he regarded Newbury. “He made mention of the fact that the unit in question had been destroyed in the impact.”
Newbury met his gaze. “I find that very difficult to believe, Mr. Chapman. I understand the skeletal frames of these automata are constructed out of brass?”
“Correct.”
“Then why were there no remnants of the unit in evidence anywhere on board the ship? Both Miss Hobbes and I toured the wreckage, and I can assure you, there was nothing to be found.”
Chapman poured the tea, his face thoughtful. “Well, if Mr. Stokes’s assertions are correct, the unit may have burnt up in the fires that followed the crash.”
Newbury sipped from his teacup. “Come now, Mr. Chapman. We both know that the heat in the wreckage would never have reached a temperature enough to incinerate brass. There has to be another explanation.”
The Affinity Bridge
3/5 stars
We meet our dapper hero, Sir Maurice Newbury, fanboy of the latest tech and student of the occult, at a seance (which he entertainingly debunks) and our plucky heroine, Victoria Hobbes (here’s hoping the new year will bring at least one “steampunk” title that fails to reference the odious materialist of Malmsbury), at Newbury’s office for tea and exposition of the “revenant plague” zombifying, exclusively so far, the lower classes… who are also being picked off in a string of grisly murders popularly thought perpetrated by a “glowing bobby”. With such conundra weighing on their minds, the duo dash off to poke around the wreckage of a just-crashed automaton-piloted airship and the game is afoot (or atoot, as in, you know, a noise associated with steam engines).
In tone the book falls somewhere between an Agatha Christie “cozy mystery” and the Tom Swift novellas I devoured as a kid. As a light adventure it works, but as a mystery it kinda fails: by a third of the way through, the reader knows the “who”, by two thirds through, the “how”, and all that really remains are decent, but by no means pyrotechnic, chase and fight sequences (with zombies!), tidying up, as it were, and stage-setting for the sequel. That’s not to say that Mann isn’t talented, that I didn’t get numerous kicks out of The Affinity Bridge, just that I expected more. The novel’s greatest strength is surely the flavor of its world, which I found most agreeable. The airships grounded and in flight, the cavernous, automated factories, the trackless steam engines rumbling over fog-occluded Whitechapel cobbles, Hobbes’ visits to her asylum-bound precog sister – all tasty enough, but not terribly filling. In one of my favorite set-pieces, Hobbes comes upon the unconscious Newbury, half-full bottle of laudanum near at hand, in the center of a pentagram chalked on the floor of his bedroom; but Hobbes never learns, nor do we, “what Newbury had been up to with that pentagram.” What a tease!
The Affinity Bridge is not the “enormous pile of awesome” for which Chris Roberson’s blurb on the back cover led me to hope, but a reasonably awesome foundation on which to heap such a pile. If this weren’t the first volume of a series, I’d conclude that Mann was deficient in plotting ability and unable to follow through on his most intriguing concepts; but I’ll generously attribute these flaws to first-time jitters/canny restraint, and remain optimistic that the sequel will handle its occult/paranormal and mystery elements more deftly and deliver on the various pacts made with readers here.
Happy reading and cuídate.