Leviathan

"Leviathan also has a wild airship. Airships are a hallmark of steampunk – you would think that it would be trains, but it’s not. And in this case, it’s not even a steam vessel. It’s a flying whale, which has been gene hacked – it’s a form of gene splicing, playing off the idea that we’re dealing with a period where evolution is new in the public imagination, and somebody could take that and run with it. What if we crossed a whale with all these other things, and created an animal that could fly through the air? They walk through the whale, there’s decks and things inside, it’s absolutely bananas. K. W. Jeter, who coined the term steampunk, said something about gonzo fantasies when he was describing steampunk early on, and this is definitely a gonzo fantasy. Most steampunk novels will take place in the 19th century, but this is an alternate version of World War One . It follows two main characters, one who’s on the Austro-Hungarian side, and one who’s on the British side. It’s a boy and a girl, and they’re set on a collision course to each other. It’s a romance, but it’s very slow burn, because the girl on the British side has masqueraded as a boy to be able to enter the air service. That’s one of those instances of social retrofuturism, looking at that inequality. So she dresses as a boy, she goes for training, and she ends up on the Leviathan. In the meantime, the young man – who is the prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire , and being hunted by political enemies – escapes his home in something that is essentially a steampunk version of one of the smaller two-legged walkers from Star Wars . It’s still somewhat technofantasy, in that we can’t get robots to walk on two legs very well – we’re getting there, but it’s not an easy thing to do. When Scott Westerfeld imagines this, he does a bit of hand-waving by invoking real world engine manufacturers, and saying, that’s why this thing works so well… So they’re set on this collision course to meet each other, and then ultimately go on to the further adventures in the other books. It’s high flying, it’s exciting, it’s fast paced. And if you love audiobooks, you can’t go wrong. Alan Cumming narrates, and he’s amazing. No! In this book you do get literal steam on the Austro-Hungarian side, and there’s the walker… And this is where some people will get fussy and say it’s dieselpunk. Okay, so now we have to change the name every time we change the fuel source? That’s ridiculous! There really, ultimately, isn’t that much steam in steampunk. And even if there is steam, it’s at this ridonkulous level… there’s this anime called Steamboy where steam technology works like nuclear technology. I’m pretty sure we can’t do that. For quite a while, people were trying to break the word down into some etymological compound thing. Is there steam? Is there punk? And so Westerfeld wasn’t steampunk because he had a flying whale, which is bio, so it’s biopunk…. But I think, get real! These terms only have meaning from the way that we use them. People would look at things like Firefly episodes, or Doctor Who and the design of the TARDIS, and say, is that steampunk? And if somebody’s asking if that’s steampunk, there’s a really good chance that that’s what the word is coming to mean. Language is always on the move, it’s always shifting. And Leviathan was definitely marketed as steampunk. Westerfeld never shied away from that – unlike some other writers of steampunk, who didn’t want to be lumped in with all this ridiculous frivolity."