skygiants

I was putting off and putting off reading Scott Westerfield's Leviathan despite the fact that it is clearly HIGHLY RELEVANT to many of my interests (AU WWI! enjoyably ridiculous worldbuilding! CROSS-DRESSING LADIES), because I bounced hard off the last two YA steampunk books I read and was therefore leery of striking out with the third.

But enough people across the internet have been saying excellent things about them that I finally gave in, and, shockingly, it turned out all those people were right! Leviathan and its sequel Behemoth are kind of ridiculously enjoyable books.

The basic premise is that Europe is split between the Darwinist and Clanker powers, who BY STRANGE COINCIDENCE align pretty much exactly with the Allied and Central powers from WWI. The Austrio-German Clankers use pretty much your standard steampunk technology, all giant walker things and steam and gears; the British-French-Russian Darwinists, on the other hand, bioengineer their airships and artillery out of bizarre and complex organic ecosystems made up of flying space whales and floating jellyfish! (As a sidenote, I have realized that is pretty much the level of ridiculousness that steampunk AUs need to reach in order to work for me. If you spend a lot of time setting up an AU divergence in painstaking detail, I am probably going to nitpick; if, on the other hand, you just give me LULZY MARTIAN LOLVICTORIANS or FLYING AIRSHIP WHALES, I am extremely happy just to roll with it!)

Our protagonists are, respectively: Alek, the AU son of doomed Archduke Ferdinand, who spends most of his time on the run from various soldiers trying to kill him, and Deryn, a plucky crossdressing midshipman aboard a FLYING AIRSHIP WHALE. I like Alek fine - he's pretty endearingly oblivious-but-goodhearted, and, you know, he tries hard! also I find it hilarious how incapable he is of keeping his identity secret to anyone for more than twenty minutes - but (surprising no one) Deryn totally steals the show for me.

To sum up Deryn: okay, there is a bit in an early chapter where Deryn spends half a page thinking about how annoying it is that boys spend all this time in a constant struggle to prove that they are the ballsiest. This is hilarious, because Deryn then proceeds to spend every other chapter in the book cheerfully proving her ballsiness by saving a.) her own life, b.) someone else's life, c.) the entire ship, and/or d.) the entire British navy. At one point, after Deryn has just singlehandedly stopped a giant steampunk elephant from trampling Istanbul using only her wits and a handful of paprika, another character (Darwin's cool-as-ice mad scientist granddaughter, for the record) is just like "kid, from now on you get to go everywhere with me to save the day all the time." I am pretty sure that if I lived in this universe, this would be my attitude too.

( Some more thoughts on romance and cross-dressed girls, because clearly I am incapable of writing short posts about cross-dressed ladies. )

(I think Westerfield could do much more interesting things with the gender issues and also with the intersection of class and gender than he is doing, for the record. But I have the Jacky Faber books for that, and, you know, sometimes you just want a wacky romp through AU WWI with airship battles and revolution and giant flying whales.)