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A couple of weeks back, I put together a list of stories about airships. Included on the list was Lucy Saxon’s Take Back the Skies, which is one I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. It’s about a girl who disguises herself as a boy and stows away on a smuggler’s airship to escape her abusive father and avoid an arranged marriage. Romance, steampunk adventure, and SAVING THE COUNTRY all figure in. Sounds fun, right?
What with the popularity of steampunk, there are a WHOLE LOT of books that feature airships. As there are SO MANY, I've tried to focus on stories in which the majority of the action takes place ON AN ACTUAL SHIP.
In Emilie and the Hollow World, which I wrote about over at Kirkus, Emilie stows away on a MAGICAL SUBMARINE and has a very Jules Verne-y adventure. It is an AWESOME book, perfect for readers who're always looking for old fashioned adventure stories. Shipwrecks, sunken cities, action, adventure, different cultures and species, politics and family drama, a plucky heroine (who, by the way, is described as having "brown skin and dark eyes," as are most of the other people from her region), a super blend of fantasy and science fiction elements, a strong emotional core, humor, heartache, and even a smidge of romance.
In Emilie and the Sky World, our heroine—who is now employed by the folks she stowed away with in the last installment—heads into the sky (duh), where she has ANOTHER adventure, this time involving a patchwork planet, a missing expedition, an intelligent plant-based lifeform, and yes, there's another stowaway. Like the first book, it's super-fun in every way, and this one has the added excellence of multiple storylines about trust, friendship, and family dysfunction that play off of and complement each other really nicely.
I LOVE THIS SERIES, AND WANT MORE PEOPLE TO READ IT.
In this book—I still haven't read Curtsies & Conspiracies, so I can't speak for that one—Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality is located on a bunch of connected dirigibles. Which adds even more entertainment value to a world and plot that is already bursting with it.
How have I not written about these? Traction cities! Pirates! And yes, LOTS OF AIRSHIP ACTION! Just looking at the cover art makes me want to read them all over again.
Okay, these were actually published for the adult market, but there were some sexytimes that OCCURRED on an airship in the first book, and one of the main characters in the second one is an airship captain, so I'm including them.
Girl stows away on an airship to avoid an arranged marriage, but it turns out to be a smugglers' ship; adventures and romance ensue. This one is due out next week, and is the first in a SIX-BOOK SERIES.
I know, I KNOW. I'll get to them! (Especially the Oppel series, as the comparisons to Verne and Stevenson are PULLING ME IN. I think I might even have Airborn on my Kindle. But then again, Josh loved Leviathan, so I should probably buy the other two so that we have them in the house...)
Multiverse story about a boy from our world who hooks up with the crew of the airship Everness (and gets romantically involved with the captain, I think?) and proceeds to have lots of adventures. The cover art of the first one, especially, doesn't do much for me, but the book itself sounds SUPER, so I'm bumping this one right up the list.
A society girl is accused of unlawful magic and is headed for a live of slavery as an airship battery... or something like that. Every description I've read has been slightly different.
This is actually the sequel to Innocent Darkness, which appears to be a futuristic-steampunk-faerie-reform-school mashup. After the events of the first book (which, based on the descriptions I've read, sounds ridiculously fun), the heroine joins the crew of an airship. SO ONTO THE LIST IT GOES.
ANOTHER airship hijacking, this one was apparently at least partly inspired by A Night to Remember. It's had pretty mixed reviews, but I'm curious enough that I'm planning on giving it a try.
Did I miss your favorite? Let me know in the comments!
I really, really enjoyed this one: it works as historical fiction, as science fiction, as a horror story, a romance, a coming of age, and as a retelling of H.G. Wells' original. The changes that Shepherd makes, the twists she introduces, they all feel organic and they play off the original and change it, but in ways that complement the Wells, if that makes sense. It changes it without trying to replace it or diminish it, maybe? Whatever it is I'm trying to say (YEESH), it's TOTALLY engrossing, and I TOTALLY DUG IT.
Shannon Hale has written nuanced, complex re-imaginings of fairy tales, she has written hilarious adult romance, she has written original fantasy, and with Dangerous, she has proved that she’s perfectly capable of writing a cracking SF yarn as well. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s emotionally complex, it’s super-ultra-action-packed, and it features a cast of characters that is diverse ethnically, culturally, physically, experientially, and economically.
I haven't read this one, but it sounds so awesome that I just ordered myself a copy. It's about twin sisters, born conjoined, now separated. One of them who has magical abilities, one of them who doesn't.
“Abby, I’d swear it really did talk. A crab apple tree in that park at Queen and Sherbourne. I think it asked me where Dad was. Said it hadn’t seen him in a long time.”
Abby whipped her head around from the window to glare at me. “Stop it. Just stop it. Why are you always saying things like this? You’re embarrassing yourself. And me.”
“But—” Why did I say things like that? Because I couldn’t help myself. Because I craved more than anything else to have a little mojo of my own.
I like drawings that make me laugh. When I inherited a traditional Blue Willow-pattern plate, I just had to redraw it and add a dinosaur. As I drew more plates and added more calamities—UFOs, Sasquatch, and volcanoes—folks urged me to produce real dinner plates. A Kickstarter project was born.
The first two Kickstarter projects went well (flying monkeys and giant robot), so here is the third project in what might turn out to be a long series. This design includes a hungry sea monster who appears to have escaped from the wild areas of an early Renaissance map.Imagine finding that bad boy behind your fish sticks!
...I wrote about Jaclyn Dolamore's Dark Metropolis, which was a mixed bag for me, but which ultimately had a silver lining: it allowed me to revisit Madonna's Express Yourself video.
But the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures. Writers may find the future appealing precisely because it can’t be known, a black box where “anything at all can be said to happen without fear of contradiction from a native,” says the renowned novelist and poet Ursula K. Le Guin. “The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in,” she tells Smithsonian, “a means of thinking about reality, a method.”
LOTS of good stuff in this article!
I'm looking forward to plowing through the whole issue soon. (AND PATRICK STEWART IS ON THE COVER, SWOON.)
I'm really not into having the whole Which One Is Better debate, because I don't have a strong aversion to any genre: if it's a good book, it's a good book, yay books. YAY BOOKS.
Anyway! Despite the title, ultimately, the essay is more about the differences between the two genres, and more especially about the strengths of SF/F:
You absolutely cannot obscure underlying weakness with waffle. Otherwise the emails will arrive, picking up on discrepancies. Not just for the sake of point-scoring or nitpicking but because fans become so engaged with imaginary worlds and so passionate about their characters.
That passion, so easily mocked by laughing at Trekkies and Whovians, is another thing that distinguishes SF and fantasy from literary fiction. Mocking that passion is missing a key aspect of speculative fiction. By drawing readers in large numbers, contemporary fantasy becomes a platform to debate key, current social and political challenges, while science fiction continues to explore the impact of technological developments, for good and ill, before we have to tackle these things in reality.
IN A WORLD where the government regulates the temperature of microwaveable food so that no one burns their mouth on frozen burritos, one girl must fight for her family’s right to consume something other than lukewarm convenience foods.
“I don’t want my food to be safe, or still kind of icy in the middle,” I cried. “I want it to be burning hot and freezing cold. I want to singe the taste buds off my tongue and give myself incapacitating ice cream headaches whenever I eat a freeze pop.” “You want to taste things the way they really are,” said the mysterious new boy in school. “I want to live.”
More importantly, Star Wars encapsulates a pop-culture tradition of space operas that can easily invent spaceships and robots and aliens, but that helplessly acquiesce to old, stereotypical treatments of gender and race. Why does that matter? Sci-fi is at least in part a dream of a different world and a different future. When that future unthinkingly reproduces current inequities, it seems like both a missed opportunity and a failure of imagination.
“Twilight, I’m sorry, is about a very unhealthy, toxic relationship. [The protagonist Bella] falls in love with this guy and the second he leaves her, her life is over and she’s going to kill herself! What message are we sending to young people? That is not going to help this world evolve.”
Which, really, is a pretty low-key statement. She doesn't insult fans of the franchise, she expresses an opinion about the source material. I'm less comfortable with her comment about sending the right "message", but it's a short quote, so I'm trying to avoid making the assumption that she's suggesting that YA fiction should carry specific messages. Because yuck.
Anyway, as you may expect, she's taking a decent amount of flack from Twilight fans:
@shailenewoodley your comments about Twilight? SHAME ON YOU. Most of the fandom of Twilight is supporting you! UNGRATEFUL
I find it interesting that so many people are taking her statement so personally... because she said NOTHING about the fans, the fandom, even about the quality of Meyer's writing or even of the movies. Disagreeing with someone, not liking the same things? That is not disrespect. She didn't say that people shouldn't like the book, she didn't say that people who like it are stupid or have bad taste, she didn't trivialize it by suggesting that romance stories are somehow lesser than other kinds of stories or that franchises with a largely female fanbase are silly.
The whole brouhaha is a perfect example of a larger issue that has way more bearing on the "evolution of the world" than Twilight: a disinclination towards, difficulty in having, a flat-out refusal to engage in rational discussion. Everything is black or white, right or wrong, red or blue, and if you disgree with one opinion that a person expresses, if that person doesn't share exactly the same value system or worldview that you do, well, to hell with her and everything else that she might ever say or do.
Ag. Now I'm all depressed and want to go back to bed.
_____________________________________________
ETA: Yes, I'm still thinking about this. Which is semi-ridiculous, probably, but as I'm a semi-ridiculous person, it's fitting. Anyway, it's also easy to draw parallels between the "if you don't like what I like, you're a mean jerk" mentality and the "people who indulge in literary criticism are haters" mentality. It's all tied in there together. Blerg.
I invited Laura Lam here last year to talk a bit about the various inspirations behind Pantomime, and I'm so pleased to have her back to do the same with Shadowplay. Both books are part of a larger story about Micah Grey, runaway, aerialist, and now... MAGICIAN.
I've gone on and on and on about my love for Pantomime—I'm so pleased that it has a spot on this year's Cybils YA Speculative Fiction shortlist—so I was deliriously happy to finally get my hands on the sequel, Shadowplay. It picks up shortly after Pantomime left off, with Micah on the run and being hunted by not one, BUT TWO different groups, and it has the same blend of feels-like-fantasy-but-is-secretly-science-fiction, AMAZING worldbuilding, strong character development, a narrator with an original voice and perspective, but who is infinitely relatable, and Shadowplay is topped off by an extremely satisfying romantic arc! Like Pantomime, the storyline has threads of trust and family, identity and friendship and justice, and it's as satisfying intellectually as it is emotionally.
I can't wait for the next one.
And now, here's Laura!
I love lists, and really enjoyed coming up with a list for Bookshelves of Doom a few months ago about books that shaped my first book, Pantomime. I’m glad to be back to talk about books that helped shape the follow up, Shadowplay. For the first book, most of my research was on life in the circus and intersex history and issues. For the sequel, most of my research was on magic, illusion, and spiritualism. There’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction.
Hiding the Elephant, by Jim Steinmeyer. I really enjoyed this book and it was probably the most useful for drafting Shadowplay. It's told in a conversational style and Steinmeyer explains how a lot of historic tricks worked. I learned how to describe the Pepper’s ghost that appears in Shadowplay from this book, and learned a lot about Robert-Houdin and Houdini, and many other lesser known magicians. Longer review here.
The Giant Taschen Book of Magic from 1400s-1950s. This was my husband’s present to me when I got my book deal for Pantomime. It’s so huge that at the moment the only place I can store it is under my computer monitor, but I still take it out and look at it occasionally. It’s incredible, full of gorgeous colour plates and great essays (first in English, then French and German) as well as countless photos with captions in all three languages. Can’t recommend it enough. I write a longer review of it here.
Hocus Pocus, by Paul Kieve. Aimed for younger readers, but it’s from the magician who worked on the set of Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban (when the map folds up on the table in the film, it was Paul Kieve underneath the table pulling the strings). It was a fun, quick read, and I’ll probably buy it for one of my nephews when they’re a little older. Longer review here.
The First Psychic, by Peter Lamont. This is the biography of Daniel Dunglas Home, one of the most famous psychics in the Victorian era, who was never caught using any tricks, even though what he did seemed to be impossible. Very fascinating. Longer review here.
Writing the Other, by Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward. I kept hearing about this short work about writing about the Other around the internet and read it. It was an excellent short work about diversity and the common pitfalls people can fall into when writing about people different to themselves, often unthinkingly. Definitely impacted certain aspects of Shadowplay, specifically regarding sexuality and race. I didn’t get around to writing a review of this one on my blog – though I should have done!
Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold. My agent gave me this book as a present! It’s a fictional telling of Carter as a magician in San Francisco. Very detailed and beautifully written. I based Maske, the magician in Shadowplay, a bit on Carter mixed with Robert-Houdin.
The Prestige, by Christopher Priest. I saw the film when it came out and it (and the Illusionist) were both great visual research. I read the book and loved it – thought it was fantastic. It sparked the idea for the magician duel I have in Shadowplay, though I take a very different focus. A few people have called Shadowplay a YA Prestige, which sort of fits, much like Pantomime was often compared to The Night Circus.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. I read this when it was hyped around its release. I did enjoy it, though wow, it’s a lengthy book! These are magicians more in the traditional magic sense versus illusion, but the delicate Victorian culture and such matches with Shadowplay as well, and I’m sure it had an effect on the book somewhere along the way.
The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. I studied this at university and I think it had a large effect on Shadowplay. Maske could also be likened a little to Prospero – a man thrown out from his rightful profession unfairly, struggling for redemption. The Tempest is also quite dream-like, and many secrets are revealed in dreams in my book.
Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling. I would be remiss not including the series I’ve read at least a dozen times as a teenager. I was a huge HP nerd – waited in line for the books at midnight, dressing up with my friends as witches and wizards, reading fan fiction, the works. I think the fact that this book has a trio could be linked back to the original trio I read so often as a teen – Harry, Hermione, and Ron. I also think Rowling’s rich approach to worldbuilding influenced me, as well as having little hints in earlier books that come to prominence in later installments.
So, those are some books that I’m sure had an influence, but I’m sure there’s more that have influenced me in ways I don’t realise. I enjoyed all then of these, so if you haven’t read ‘em, I recommend picking them up for a bit of magic.
