Etiquette and Espionage

"This is the second series from Gail Carriger. Really, any of Gail’s stuff is great, but Etiquette and Espionage was more overtly steampunk than her earlier series had been. It features a fourteen-year-old girl named Sophronia who is sent away to a finishing school, which is a lovely pun in these books: a finishing school is where you go to learn manners, and this finishing school is where you go to learn manners and to finish people off. It’s literally a school for young assassins who will enter society. They know which fork to eat with or whatever, but they also know how to stab you with it and take you out. So it’s very fun. We talked about technofantasy… The school itself is very like the magic schools that are all over the place – you know, like Harry Potter’ s Hogwarts – but it’s technofantasy magic. So the school is on an airship, but the airship would just never work, it would crash, you would get bad weather and that would be a bad day. But because it’s steampunk, hands get waved – ‘Oh, it’s an airship. There are reasons.’ There’s an entire group of sooties, an underclass, working steam boilers in the lower levels of this thing – the ship would weigh as much as a regular ocean-going vessel. You’d need an awful lot of lift to get this thing off the ground. But again, no one cares, because it’s fun. It gives Sophronia an opportunity to do espionage on board in the tradition of these great magic school stories, where you sneak around after hours and solve mysteries among the faculty and your classmates. But because it’s in her Parasol Protectorate world, it features werewolves and vampires and ghosts, and that all gets mixed in with this steampunk veneer. So it’s really good fun, and I think that’s the thing that’s a hallmark of most of these books: they aren’t taking themselves too seriously. I personally think that the best steampunk knows how to wink at the reader. Most of it anyway – of course there’s going to be an exception to that. I haven’t seen one. And this is the thing: when you see it as a genre, you think steampunk has to tell a certain story. But by the time I was into my second or third year of working on my research, I had read romance, westerns, straight-up adventures, horror, quest fantasy… And by that point I concluded, I’m pretty sure we can do whatever. You can take any genre and steampunk it. I might be wrong about that…"