Literary Endorsement

[tealin]

For the past few months I have been enjoying a novel being written by copperbadge and posted serially on the community jack_and_ellis. It started off entertaining and has gotten steadily more awesome with every twist in the story. In most of the fantasy genre, the presence of magic precludes the development of technology, but this is about a world not terribly unlike our own where they're industrializing anyway; it's all refreshingly well thought-out and the world is all full of interesting implications. On top of general steampunky coolness, it's got espionage, engineering, Australia, parties, and pirates! What more could you ask for?

Anyway, I couldn't resist trying my hand at some of the characters, with mixed results ... they're posted here, but if you want to know who they are before looking at them, you can start with Chapter One. Enjoy!

Comments

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

Oh man oh man, that is solid. Thanks for linking me! I didn't get any work done today sneaking time to read it. I'm pleased as Punch to read about a world with well-thought-out magic in it; so often, magic is made to serve the plot, and isn't consistent or a science at all. My own fiction fiddlings with magic reflect my second undergrad major in the History of Math and Science and deal with the study and systemization of magic à la Newton, Lavoisier, Faraday, and Maxwell - in universities, in academic journals, in commercial patents, in government regulation - and, of course, in brilliant individuals and their crazy inventions.

Rowling's unsteady approach to magic is one of my biggest gripes with the books, though I still find it inventive, original, and delightful. However, it's the way that Harry Potter intersects with real life that I really love, and having alternative histories where the world is only slightly different is probably one of my favorite fictional tropes. As you may suspect, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was everything I could have wanted - long, academic, dry, strange, delightful - like George Eliot's Middlemarch. Plus ravens.