Man, I wanted to like this one so much, instead I found it disappointing. It was on my research list for a steampunk pulp-fiction DnD campaign and I needed a break from The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my favorite aesthetics is steampunk Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow.

The title, the cover, everything about this book says we’re in for a swashbuckling adventure. The opening chapter doesn’t disappoint with a thrilling aerial dogfight. It’s an incredible scene with lots of worldbuilding. The airships are powered by catching magical aether on magical sails and using that to power crystals that keep the ships aloft. Everyone wears goggles (because steampunk) and has to tether their harnesses into guidelines throughout the ship. The planet’s surface is deadly and the world is covered in thick mist and fog. Humanity survives in these ancient vertical cities built miles high. Cool stuff. I was dying to see some more cool scenes and my imagination was racing. So many possibilities I could come up with: maybe a daring jump between a crashing and rescue airship? Maybe we climb to the very top of the spire and glimpse a rare sunset as we peek over the cloud cover? Or maybe the bottom levels are abandoned and we crawl all the way down to discover what nightmare surface creatures have found their way in?

Nope. Instead of swashbuckling adventure, we get a cold war spy novel driven by a rag tag group of mostly bland characters in mostly bland locations.

The main character is an airship commander- Captain Grimm, the most excellent and skilled leader of both men and ship. A character this good at his job runs the risk of being boring, but I found him aspirational. The other characters in the party are mostly archetypes, but they at least don’t get in the way of the pacing. One is a noble girl who is used to bossing people around. Her best friend is a warrior and his personality can be best described as … childhood best friend? Another one is the baker’s daughter serving as the naive audience stand-in who gets all the exposition thrown at her. Her pet cat is awesome though. In this world cats can speak a language understood by few humans. Their scenes were always a highlight as they’re all as arrogant and prideful as you would imagine your cat would be.

Lastly there’s the magician and his young apprentice. Both crazy. One only speaks to her glass jar of crystals, the other can’t open doors with doorknobs. Later, in one of the best moments in the whole book, from the magician’s point of view we see the magical aether of the world slipping in and out of his vision and twisting his perception of reality. Throughout their interactions with the other characters they both have been occasionaly slipping out of lucidity and coming back with an out of context comment. Here we finally get to see what he’s been seeing and now his comment makes total sense. It plays really well because the comment wasn’t completly random, it still related to the conversation.

The plot takes forever to get going. Thankfully I was so hooked by the opening and fast pace that it wasn’t until I was a quarter through that I realized I still didn’t know what the plot was.

The enemy spire (Aurora) invades Spire Albion (ours) and infiltrates amongst the populace. The president of Albion recruits Captain Grimm and a rag tag group of new army recruits. These kids are chosen because they’re too fresh to be compromised, which I found a bit of a stretch, but I rolled with it. Their investigation leads them to an out of place scene in a Shaolin monk temple. That could have been an interesting crossover between genres, but Butcher doesn’t describe it or make it interesting. It’s just there. Then we’re led to the biggest sin in the book - spending the majority of it in ventilation shafts and sewers fighting bugs and rising in the ranks of cat society. Until the end of the book the airships were all but forgotten about.

I’ll say it again: If you create a steampunk world with airships and cloud raking skyscrapers, but you spend your time in nondescript tunnels, you’ve missed the mark. This book needed another pass or two in the manuscript phase. Airships travel the world and shipping lanes are mentioned, but with who? Where? If Spire Aurora is our enemy, then I assume we’re not trading with them. I guess for this plot it doesn’t really matter because the bad guys are doing bad things to us and they have to be stopped.

Why the spires are at war is not a question asked in awe struck wonder; it’s an incredulous I don’t know what the villain’s motivation is. The closest we get is near the end the right hand henchman has a moment of self realization that he’s about to kill thousands of people. He justifies his actions in the most cliched sour-grapes way.

Espira looked around at the wooden buildings, the wooden walkways, the wooden supports and beams, representing more wealth than any dozen habbles of his home Spire. Their greed and vanity were their weakness, and would be their undoing. He was simply lighting a match. p508

I’m sounding harsh, but overall I enjoyed my time with this book. The pacing never let up, the action scenes were top notch, some superbly written moments, and it was at least an intriguing setting. This was my first Jim Butcher novel. This book, while flawed, made me appreciative of Jim Butcher as an author, and one I definitely want to check out again.

p.s. For years I’ve had this romantic scene in my head of an airport lounge in the literal sky that I don’t have the writing skill to get out. It’s this vibe of inspired awe that there’s a structure this high up, mixed with jazz suits and Edward Hopper Nighthawk’s isolation. Did you know the Empire State building was originally designed and built with a dock for blimps? Yes, there was a time at the turn of the twentieth century when skyscrapers were just starting to push 100 stories while blimps were all the rage. At the time it was thought maybe the rich would avoid the traffic on the ground, choosing instead to traverse the city hopping skyscraper to skyscraper from the sky. What a different world that would have been huh?