Worldshaker by Richard Harland

Title: Worldshaker
Author: Richard Harland
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

Worldshaker is a steam-punk novel, part of a dilogy about the education of Colbert Porpentine, grandson of the master of Worldshaker, Sir Marmus Porpentine. Worldshaker is a massive ship, two and a half miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide, well over a thousand feet high, home to ten thousand people, and two thousand "filthies" - people who live below decks and unaccountably have within their control the power plant of this the city on rollers (when it's on the ground) or city of the air.

Col wakes up one night because of a ruckus in the hallway outside his room. One of the Filthies, who was brought up top to be turned into a Menial (a servant of the ruling classes), has escaped and is now running loose on the upper decks! The guards visit him and then depart and it's only after this that Col realizes that it wasn't the ruckus which disturbed him, it was something before that. He looks under his bed and there's a filthy hiding there. When she comes out, she turns out to be disturbingly attractive despite the dirt, and she can even speak, something which quite astounds Col. Her name is Riff and when he calls out to the guards in surprise, she runs and hides in his closet!

But Col doesn't betray Riff. The guards do not arrive, so he locks her in his closet. The next morning, his sister Gillabeth bursts into his room complaining that he needs to get ready - there's an important breakfast with his grandfather. She immediately goes to his closet and his heart almost stops as she wrenches it open, but Riff is no longer there!

The great announcement which grandpa makes that morning is that Col is to be his successor; he will be groomed to take charge of the ship. He is to go to school. Col's mom takes him on a shopping trip to gather school supplies. She's so worn out by this effort that she has to repair to Col's room to sit out an attack of the wilts and the vapors. It's while she's sitting on his bed that Col realizes the filthy is back! Riff is under his bed at that very moment. He hastily bundles his recovering mother out of the room and confronts Riff. She looks clean. It's a new Riff in many respects, and Col is finding it harder and harder to dismiss her from his thoughts or to see her as a filthy. She tries to smuggle out one of his books - on volcanoes (I wonder why?!) - as she leaves, and she tells him she'll be back.

Col is just about having a fit over her. Everything in his life was looking up, except that she's now in it. However, he sees a solution. All Riff wants, is to return to the below world with her fellow filthies. On his tour of the ship with his grandfather, Col learns that food is sent to the filthies via a chute, and so the next time Riff shows up, he escorts her to the nearest food chute (which is a long way from his room) and sends her down it. Now everything is coming up roses. So he thinks.

Col is a good hero. He is not very wise to the ways of the world - especially given that he's been sheltered from it and lied to all his life - but he isn’t dumb, and he's not afraid to question things and to take risks when he deems it important. He's not all powerful, and he has no magical or super-human powers. All he has going for him (aside from his privileged birth) is his smarts, his willingness to put himself into the position of others, and his good nature and sense of morality. Unfortunately, for all this, he does seem to have an ability to dig himself deeper.

When he first arrives at school, he allies himself with Trant, without realizing that Trant is of a much lower social status than he. Col is soon corrected by the upper status kids, who draw him into their circle. Given that these elite kids detest Col and wish for their families to usurp his family's eminent position, it’s hard to understand why they're so accommodating, unless they're working from the 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer' principle, but they don’t seem that smart!

Harland excels himself when describing the school master, Gibber. His name pretty much says it all. Gibber is a gibbering idiot. He has the most hilariously warped ideas imaginable about academic subjects. In geometry, he detests obtuse angles because they’re so open. He much prefers acute angles because they're so sharp, but even they pale against the insurmountable rectitude of a right angle. Gibber makes his class draw right-angles for the rest of the period! Geography fares no better: it turns out that concave coastlines are an abomination. He can scarcely bring himself to even talk about the Great Australian Bight, for example. The coastline of Great Britain, contrarily, is magnificent because it has so many proud promontories! This is inspired and hilarious. Harland had me laughing out loud.

Col would have had it made were it not for Riff showing up in his life and his inability to jettison all thought of her once he'd fed her back down the chute to "the underworld". He makes the mistake, when he's in a good mood, of wrapping up the book which Riff had tried to steal, and sending it down the chute to her as a gift. The elite kids tail him down there, sad to say, and discover him. He gets into a fight with the bruiser of the group (indeed he was only in the group because he was a bruiser) and Col ends up being dropped down the chute himself. He almost comes to grief down there, but is rescued by none other than riff, who is a leader down below. She quite literally rescues him, because the filthies are about to drop him into the bilge and let him die for no reason other than he's from "up there". Riff has to fight a bigger guy to assert her authority, which she does without raising a sweat. She is fast and deadly. And she's secretly thrilled that Col sent her the gift, but she says he has to go before the council - the senior "filthies" - most of whom are no older than Riff.

Col's "sentence" is to aid a filthy to go topside as a spy, and the one who is chosen is, of course, Riff. Col is to return by having the officers upstairs lift him out by means of a grasping hook - the same way they capture the filthies they wish to turn into menials. But his return from the underworld isn’t greeted with great joy. He's now despised almost as much as the filthies are, because he's been contaminated by being amongst them. He's shunned and his family finds its elevated and privileged status being undermined by Sir Marmus's rivals. Seeing an advantage now, the elite boys at school reject him, and even Gibber increasingly disses him. Col ignores them all until he discovers they're planning on beating him up before the school term is over.

When he considers how he might be able to fight back, he suddenly realizes there is someone who can help him learn to fight, and it's someone he made a promise to not four days ago. Col remembers his promise to get Riff topside, and so he lowers a rope, as agreed, down the food chute for her to climb up. When she arrives, he's so excited by her arrival that he expects a joyful reunion with hugs and kisses, but she pretty much tells him goodbye and disappears.

Later he's amazed to discover that she's very successfully disguised herself as a menial and now roams Worldshaker with complete impunity! He tells her of his predicament, and she agrees to teach him to fight if he will teach her to read. Of course you all know where this is going. They spend much time together, and she learns to read, and he learns to fight and takes down ten opponents when the Squellinghams try to beat him up at school. What he didn’t expect was that these very villains would tell him that his sister Gillabeth was behind the attack! But things are about to get worse.

In order to salvage the family reputation and position of power, Sir Marmus negotiates a marriage between the Porpentine and the Turbots, namely that of Col to Sephaltina Turbot, which Col blindly goes along with since he feels bad about bringing the family down, and he thinks Riff is partnered with one of the filthies anyway, and even if she were not, she certainly wouldn’t be interested in someone like him. He doesn’t expect her to show up at his wedding, very effectively disguised as a privileged upper deck person, nor does he expect his reaction to her to precipitate a revolution. It all started with the jelly....

Original, brilliantly written, endlessly entertaining, and thoroughly engrossing, this is a novel I cannot help but highly recommend. Even on my second reading it was still as appealing as it was on the first. Now that I'm back up to speed on volume one, I'm very much looking forward to embarking upon the Liberator. Full steam ahead!

Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl By David Barnett

Title: Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl
Author: David Barnett
Publisher: Tor
Rating: worthy

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Erratum in galley ebook
P23 "glitterving" should be "glittering"

The male protagonist of this steam-punk novel is Gideon Smith, a 24-year-old who lives with his father in a small fishing village near Whitby, Yorkshire. Both of my parents hailed from Yorkshire, and I've actually been to Whitby, a seaside town which is featured in Bram Stoker's Dracula, so it’s no surprise that Barnett has Gideon meet Bram Stoker there.

I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of Victorian dramas which seem obligated to drag historical people unnecessarily into the fiction. I find that boring and uninventive, and all-too-often patronizing of, and insulting to the persons so press-ganged. In fact, I made the mistake of reading the prologue to this novel and I found that even more boring and uninventive since it parades out the discredited story that Eddy, the son of Queen Victoria's son Edward (the Edward who gave his name to the Edwardian period of English history) was somehow entangled with the Jack the Ripper murders. This myth was the basis of the Johnny Depp movie From Hell and is patent nonsense. Having said that, Barnett has added a twist to this one which makes his "crime" forgivable, in my book at least!

So, it was not an auspicious start to this novel, but I have to say that Barnett started to win me over with chapter one, where Gideon enters the picture. His father is a struggling trawler captain, and Gideon often helps him on his fishing trips, but the one morning when his father decides to let Gideon sleep in, is the day that the entire crew of the trawler disappears without explanation, and Gideon is left alone in the world, his mother and two brothers having already died some time before.

Well there is an explanation, of course, but that's for you to read, and at that point in the story it was more of a mystery than an explanation (but it clarifies nicely as the novel progresses)! The local fishing community just accepts these disappearances as the sea's dividend for allowing humans to sample its bounty. Gideon is a big fan of Captain Lucian Trigger, a story-book hero who, if not completely fictional, is, I guessed, not remotely like his fictional portrayal. Gideon doesn't quite grasp this, and so he endeavors to contact the man in hopes that he can help with another local mystery that has hold of Gideon's imagination.

It’s in process of pursuing this plan that he encounters Bram Stoker, right before a Russian sailboat runs aground with the all the crew save one, missing. The captain is discovered lashed to the wheel and drained of blood, and a large black dog runs ashore and disappears. The only cargo on the ship is three coffins with soil from Transylvania. Anyone who has read Stoker's Dracula will know where that's headed (but don't be too confident: Barnett has added a twist!). The original Dracula novel is excellently reproduced on film in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 epic, a movie I highly recommend.

Back to this novel! I do like that Barnett has divorced himself from trope with Gideon. He doesn’t have Gideon go haring off into the heart of the mystery like an idiot. He portrays Gideon as a thoughtful, courageous, and smart young man who realizes that he's going to need help to figure out if smugglers might be connected to his father's disappearance and are operating near his village, but when he talks to a friend of his father's, and also to the village constable, he's dismissed and not taken at all seriously. That's when he resorts to calling Captain Trigger and ends up in the company of Bram Stoker. Stoker learned of vampires from his fellow Irish friend Sheridan le Fanu, but he cannot get Gideon interested. Instead, Gideon resolves to set off for London to personally seek Captain Trigger's assistance. That's when he meets the mechanical girl called Maria who. I guessed. is actually modeled after a real person.

But she isn’t just any old clockwork toy. Nope. She has a body made to look as realistic as possible, and although she's clockwork inside her body, inside her head is a different story. Her creator is Hermann Einstein (which coincidentally happens to be the name of Albert Einstein's father...), but he's gone missing. He fitted her empty head with something that he discovered in a most unlikely location. Her head is no longer empty. Far from it.

Gideon learns how abused Maria is by her keeper, a grungy old man with disgusting tastes, who is in charge of the house in Einstein's absence. Gideon invites her to travel to London with him to find her maker, and she agrees, so they take some spare cash which Maria has access to, and borrow another invention of Einstein's: a motorized bike. This prepared, they set off again for London town, home of Queen Victoria.

Meanwhile Bram is poking around Whitby in pursuit of a vampire, and he discovers one of the very last people he might have expected to find - and she is the very antithesis of what he expected a vampire to be! Little does he know that his investigations will bring him right back into contact with Gideon.

And that's all the detail you get for this one! The story continues apace, and continues to be engrossing, as Gideon and his growing ensemble of acquired friends begin pursing seemingly disparate threads that I felt, even before I knew one way or the other, would all lead back to the same source. There are airships (one piloted by a very adventurous woman), there is a trip to a ancient and exotic location where trouble is stirring big time, there's air piracy, there's a threat to the empire over which the sun never sets, and there are truly evil creatures (and that's just those working for the government!). All the threads lead to a fine yarn, and a taut fabric, and though I was less than thrilled with the ending (the novel is evidently the start of a series), the quality of the writing and the plotting merits this story as a worthy read. I recommend it.

The Dark Unwinding by Sharon Cameron

Title: The Dark Unwinding
Author: Sharon Cameron
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: worthy!

A Spark Unseen is also reviewd in this blog.

In June, 1852, Katharine Tully is traveling by carriage to visit her uncle. Her aunt Alice believes he's quite insanely frittering away the family fortune, meaning that her own spoiled son will get nothing. She dispatches Katharine to cauterize the hemorrhage before it’s too late. Aunt Alice is not well-liked by Katharine, but the latter undertakes this odious task because, as her aunt's bookkeeper, she realizes that she has much to lose if the family becomes bankrupted by an insane relative's profligacy. Katharine can see her way to enjoying a comfortable living once Alice is dead and gone, and she has only to deal with her not-too-smart cousin, whose needs are easily satisfied. I wonder if Cameron chose the name 'Katharine' spelled with that second 'a' as it is, because it’s similar to the supposedly heretical Cathars?!

But I digress! She arrives at her uncle's mansion via a mile-long tunnel lit by gas lamps - all of which she compulsively counts. Cameron says the idea for Tulman's home was given to her by the residence and activities of the 5th Duke of Portland. Katharine is deposited at the front door with her trunk and valise, but when she knocks, no one answers. The house is huge and very dusty, and no one seems to be around. She follows some footprints left in the dusty carpet, which lead from the unlocked front door, and becomes almost lost.

After being virtually deafened by the chimes at five o'clock from an incredible number of clocks in one room - all working precisely in sync - she hurries to a different room which is dark, and where she hears giggling, and then is scared by someone watching her. It turns out that the observer is nothing more than a rather lifelike model with sparkling eyes. Eventually she finds her way to the kitchen where she's greeted in a hostile manner by the servants. A young man named Lane is gruff and very protective of her uncle. Mrs Jeffries, the cook, is equally unpleasant and quite territorial in her kitchen, and Davy is just a kid who is evidently mute and who loves his large pet rabbit. Her uncle Tulman is nowhere to be found. Apparently he only visits the house on Thursdays.

After spending a disturbing night in the unkempt bedroom, where she found cut human hair matching her own color in one of the wardrobe drawers, Katharine is taken by Lane to meet Uncle Tulman, which involves a long walk across windswept countryside and through a small village. She encounters a young girl called Mary in the village who she later discovers has adopted Katharine as her own mistress, and subsequently acts as her lady-in-waiting. Katharine's uncle proves to be very much more escapement than clockwork, but he's not what you'd call insane; he's merely eccentric with a touch of autism - but that's not how they would see it in 1852. Tulman takes to her, however, and shows her some of his "toys", which include a clockwork fish, a clockwork dragon, and a clockwork boy. Katharine also discovers that he's a math savant, and that he shares her own obsessive compulsive counting disorder, and also that he upsets very easily!

Another young man whom she encounters was an earlier resident of the village who is now back for a brief visit is Ben. He's fascinated by her uncle's toys, but I have a bad feeling about him - especially since at one point young Davy seems to be deliberately trying to drag her away from him! Katharine learns that there are in fact two villages with a population of some nine hundred people, all of whom were liberated from London workhouses. If she shuts down the operation, these people will be left destitute. She talks with her uncle's lawyer, Mr Babcock, who relates to her the history of the place. Her great aunt had wanted to protect her son Tulman, and set all of this in motion to provide for him, and to eventually start showing a profit which would repay the estate everything which had been taken from it, but she died before she could bring this plan to fruition. Babcock says he is merely finishing what she had begun all those years before.

As the days slip by, Katharine is more and more torn between her growing attraction to life at Stranwyne, the estate where she is a guest, and her practical inability to do other than what her aunt Alice has demanded she do. She decides to have a birthday party, but then dithers over that decision. She goes roller-skating in the underground ballroom with Lane. But on the other side of the ledger, there are weird and scary things happening.

Twice Katharine wakes up with a hangover even though she has definitely not been drinking, and she discovers there isn't even any drink to be had in the villages. One morning she wakes up with dirty boots and no idea how they got that way. She discovers Mrs Jeffries sneaking around in Lane's room where he creates fine miniature figurines in silver. She learns from her maid that someone is sending letters écrit en français from Stranwyne, and no one knows who is sending them. One night in the hallway outside her room, she encounters someone who she follows but never catches sight of, and finds her way to a place close by the kitchen, which has been decorated with things carried from elsewhere in the house, and where both a meal and a fire was set. She finds there a book about South America, and takes it the next morning to spend time with Davy, trying to teach him to read and write, but then she discovers that he appears to be able to read perfectly well. So why won't he talk?

Well on page 183, Katharine Tulman changes her name to Mary Sue as she's heading out with a picnic basket and encounters a man in the tunnel coming the opposite direction. She hides and then follows him, discovering (as she sees him in better lighting) that it's Cook, the surgeon, who meets Jeffries, the cook, in the underground ballroom. She simply dismisses this as unimportant despite everything which has happened to her. That kicked me out of suspension of disbelief right there, because I simply don’t buy that someone who would snoop in someone's room, or go wandering the house in the middle of the night merely to satisfy her curiosity, and who lives in an environment where she's already encountered many strange and suspicious things, and who already has reason to be suspicious of Jeffries, would just let this go.

That suspicion of Jeffries should have taken root when she saw the woman leaving Lane's room and slipping something into her pocket, but Katharine never called her out on that, nor did she tell Lane about it, and he's the very guy (so Cameron expects us to believe), with whom she's supposedly falling in love! What specie of love is it which has so little confidence?

On the day of Katharine's birthday, she drinks some wine - which I thought had been drugged, but evidently it had not. Something had, however, been poisoned, so maybe the villain isn’t Ben, but Jeffries? I’d thought they were in it together. Anyway, what happens is that two men show up with a warrant to escort someone to the "lunatic asylum". Mary greets them at the door, but then takes off in a panic when she realizes who they are, and she runs to Katharine's room where the party is, to warn them. The men then find their own way to Katharine's bedroom. There went my suspension of disbelief again, right out the door. There is no way in hell that these people would do something like that. Yeah, in a children's book perhaps. In a cartoon animation, but in 1852 England? Never. In fact, impropriety is rather high in this novel for its time. I have let this slip by for the sake of the story, but while some of it can be fitted to the tale, a lot of it cannot (such as the example depicted above) and stands out like a sore thumb - or more like a sore finger pointing out how fictional this tale is!

But we discover that they aren't here for Uncle Tulman, who has been squirreled away. Now that took me by surprise! Unfortunately, before any more can transpire, Katharine passes out from the poison. When she wakes up, she finds her life was saved by the quick administration of ipecac. Carapichea ipecacuanha is native to Brazil. It's a poison which is not recommended for use in inducing vomiting any more. It was known in Europe three hundred years ago, but how well it might have been known in 1852 in rural England, I can’t say. For myself, I actually never had heard of ipecac until I came to the USA.

So it turns out I wasn't quite as far wrong in my assessment of these characters as I'd begun to think! How unusual for me! I did have some minor issues with it, but it was nice to see a YA story that didn't become lost in a YA triangle of boring adolescence. This is a smart novel, well written, with a few issues, but nothing that would prevent your thorough enjoyment of it. It also appears to be the start of a series. The ending was dramatic with some unexpected twists and turns, so while I am not sure I will read any more of the series, I have no problem rating it as a worthy tale.