Dr. Barlow released her chin, giving a shrug. “Well, I’m sure you’re not the first boy to come into the Service a bit young. Your secret is safe with me.” She handed back the rigging knife. “You see, my grandfather’s true realization was this: If you remove one element – the cats, the mice, the bees, the flowers – the entire web is disrupted. An archduke and his wife are murdered, and all of Europe goes to war. A missing piece can be very bad for the puzzle, whether in the natural world, or politics, or here in the belly of an airship.”
Scott Westerfeld doesn’t expound social contract theory (like, directly) in his new book Leviathan
Rating: 4/5 stars
Leviathan is a steampunk World War I adventure novel, the first volume of a planned trilogy. In Westerfeld’s alternate history, by 1914 the Central Powers, called Clankers, have developed steam-powered mecha, and the Triple Entente, called Darwinists (’cause Charles Darwin discovered the structure of DNA, referred to as “life threads”), have developed all kinds of genetically engineered critters, with only minor alt-historical info-tech breakthroughs on either side of the techno-cultural divide. Once you swallow that background, Leviathan is a pretty straightforward adventure. Prince Aleksandar of Austria is up late playing a war game when his tutors hustle him into a bipedal mecha called a Stormwalker and hightail it out of Prague (Alek’s dad the Archduke has, of course, just been assassinated). Deryn Sharp is a Scottish peasant lass masquerading as a lad so as to join the British Air Service, as it turns out, just in time for the Great War. In a training flight over London, strapped to a hydrogen-filled medusa called a Huxley, “Dylan” encounters some rough weather and conveniently finds refuge aboard the titular living airship. Westerfeld flips between Alek’s thread and Deryn’s, starts merging them in Chapter 23, about 2/3 of the way through, and ends with a cliffhanger. The imagined tech (particularly the Stormwalker and the Leviathan itself) is described in a pleasantly visceral way, and both young protagonists’ understanding of it, of their own and one another’s cultures, and of themselves are integral to, and grow over the course of, their adventure, with Westerfeld explaining his divergence from historical sources in the Afterword. I also really dug Keith Thompson‘s illustrations (which called to mind Yoshitaka Amano’s artwork for the Final Fantasy and Front Mission game series) and political map of alt-1914 Europe.
I haven’t read any of Westerfeld’s other stuff (he seems to specialize in “young adult” books, and has a space opera called The Risen Empire that sounds pretty rad) but I’m sold on this series at any rate, and will be reading the sequel to Leviathan when it drops this time next year.
Happy reading and cuídate.