Aetherium, Book 1: Assassins of the Steam Age
When the local airfield is destroyed, Taziri Ohana is the only airship pilot left to chase the killers across the skies of Marrakesh. Along the way she meets a brooding marshal, a wild young pilot, and a grim detective who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, but can they stop the richest and most powerful women in the world? And when Taziri learns that her enemies have turned her own inventions into strange and deadly weapons, her family’s survival may hang in the balance!
Meanwhile, exiled Incan princess Qhora and her swashbuckling lover Lorenzo face a gauntlet of assassins, cruel aristocrats, and wealthy industrialists conspiring against the very Queen that Taziri is trying to save, and their only hope for peace may be a lone airship falling out of the sky over a palace erupting into civil war!
Welcome to the world of AETHERIUM, where wondrous machines sail the seas and the skies, enormous beasts roam the earth, and the restless dead whisper to the living. Similar to our own world in the sixteenth century, AETHERIUM explores a reality in which many of the megafauna did not die out, including terror birds and saber-toothed cats, and where a devastating Ice Age continues to ravage Europe while African queens rule over the most advanced nations in the world. But strangest of all may be the science of controlling the souls of the dead using a golden metal with many names: sunsteel, orichalcum, and… AETHERIUM!
Keywords: steampunk, steampunk fantasy, steampunk thriller, historical fantasy, historical fiction, alternate history, airships, epic fantasy, dark fantasy, ghosts, demons, werewolves, witches, dragons, gods, Norse mythology, Egyptian mythology, women, feminist fantasy, African fantasy, Indian fantasy, Viking fantasy
A really fun and interesting book!,
Ahh, where do I begin? I loved so many things about this book that I don’t even know where to start. xD
OK. Let me begin by saying that it’s been a while since I read such a fun, balanced and well written story that mixes sci-fi with several other things, including history and reality. 🙂 “The Burning Sky” is a book that sorta made me feel like I was reading a wonderful mash-up between Final Fantasy games, Darker Than Black and something entirely new, different and unknown. And, as you can imagine, that mixture blew up my mind. *o*
The story is complex and has many different angles, almost as many as characters are there. But it’s all so well interwoven that you don’t end up with a bunch of pieces that don’t match, but precisely the opposite. The author builds up the story from scratch, grabbing each little thread and putting it precisely where it should be to fit perfectly into the whole scheme that is the general plot. And, at the beginning, you don’t feel that much cohesion between the main story-line, some of the characters and everything. You kinda feel “misplaced” or something, because you don’t really understand too much of the world they live in or the things they take for granted. Yet, it all contributes to the suspense and to the surprise and to the amazement you’ll feel when you actually see it all fit and become one hell of a story. That’s one of the reasons why I say it reminds me of Final Fantasy (and of Darker Than Black too, although the strongest similarity to DTB is the fact that there’s someone who has the ability to use electricity to attack people, like Hei… *-* And the whole police/miltary involvement, the risky detective doing crazy things that go well beyond her duty, etc.). Because it gives you that same feeling of entering into an unknown world that, however, has a lot of similarities to the one you know (or the future of the one you know). That sort of “uneasiness” you feel when you’re beginning a FF game and you don’t understand a thing of what they are doing or who are the good guys and who are the bad guys or why X people are fighting Y people or anything… Until you do. Until you open your eyes and flip a page and begin to see it all clear and you say to yourself: “Wow! This is one hell of a game!”. Well, in this case, that exclamation ends with a “book” or an “author”, if you will. 🙂
The way in which the story is told strongly reminded me of the books of the Game of Thrones series. Just like George R. R. Martin does there, Joseph Robert Lewis shows us one character per chapter, focusing the attention on one and then hopping to another, in a very skillfully accomplished game of perspectives and impressions that really caught my attention. I was avidly reading more and more, trying to find out what was happening to my favorite characters and hoping the next chapter would be about them. xD And, many times, I had to stop reading and go to bed precisely when I finished a character about someone I didn’t like all that much and when a chapter about one of my favorites was coming up.
Speaking of the characters, they are absolutely amazing. Forget about troubled teenagers and their love triangles spiced with supernatural powers of some kind. Forget about clumsy main characters that succeed only by chance. No. You won’t find any of that here. Instead, you’ll find a whole universe of amazing, admirable people that you end up loving. Taziri is one of the main characters and she quickly became one of my favorites. She’s a woman who flies airships for a living and who, at the same time, keeps a family that she loves. But she’s not only that. She’s a genius electrical engineer and she’s smart and cool, when she has to be. She has a peculiar sense of humor that I liked and, while she’s still emotional sometimes and, sometimes, she appears to be weak, you KNOW she’s not and you see several proofs of her courage and wit throughout the book.
Of course, she’s not the only one. The other pilot, Ghanima, corporal Kenan, detective Kella, Qhora and Lorenzo, all of them are great. Smart and funny, or serious and deep, kinda-newbie-at-everything but loyal to the death, elegant and strong, clever and brave… You can find it all in them.
But, by far, the best among them all is Marshal Syfax Zidane. *o* I simply loved him. From the time he appeared and until the epilogue, my heart beat faster for this wonderful guy who was not only the smartest of all his institution but also the most stubborn, devoted and brave of them all. He’s just… I don’t know. He’s such a great mixture of wittiness, courage, determination, compassion, intelligence and coolness that I melted for him from the moment I read about him and, as I read more and more, I simply kept reaching the liquid state helplessly and hoping he’d escape safe and sound from the huge mess he was in. xD By the time I reached the end, I was completely in love with him and now I’m…
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|Thrilling and steampunky.,
The story is nicely complex, with a lot going on across the four-day period of the plot. It requires some concentration to keep all the plot threads and characters straight, though it’s worth the effort. The one thing that let the book down a little was the number of POV changes with, frequently, very short chapters. It began to feel choppy, whirling through a succession of characters’ heads rather too fast. But that’s a minor problem.
Reading about a matriarchal society was interesting. This point could’ve been irritatingly belaboured, but wasn’t: it took me a while to even notice how frequently women were in positions of command. Many of the major characters are women, leaving the men slightly under represented – though Major Brute-Force Syfax has enough presence to make up for most of that all on his own. Swashbuckling Lorenzo, on the other hand, is literally a pale shadow of a man and fails at being especially interesting. That said, there’s clear potential for him to develop a long way in the future and I’ll be interested to read about his adventures in the next book.
This is a story full of adventure (and guns, and explosions, and bombs, and fires, and riots, and attacks, and airship crashes, and stabbings, and and and…). If you like a lot of excitement with your weird science and sinister plots, this one is a winner.
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|The Burning Sky,
My favorite things about “The Burning Sky” were the plot, which is a thriller, and understanding the alternative world Lewis has created. The premise of Lewis’ world means the history of the world would have changed; how everything, from science to culture, would have developed differently from the Ice Age to the time the story is set. This makes anticipating how people will react and the direction the story might go more unpredictable. “The Burning Sky” kept me guessing, right up to its dramatic conclusion.
**Originally written for “Books and Pals” book blog. May have received a free review copy. **
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