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bethifer's review
3.0
Original concept well executed. Great art and writing. I do recommend this to Steampunk aficionados as well as those who like good old ghost stories.
tomasthanes's review
4.0
These short stories are quite pleasant to read. My favorite story was "Steampunk Rat". The stories seemed to improve as I read through them.
This book could be improved by two changes to the book, one small and one a bit more of a challenge.
While the book has a Table of Contents, it must be formatted in a non-standard way because the Kindle app navigation menu doesn't recognize it and offer to let you jump to the individual stories from the "hamburger" menu. A simple addition.
And, while the book has a foreword, it doesn't do anything to provide a context to the reader about the world and the main characters of the stories who live there. I'm guessing that the author assumes that all readers have read the graphic novels; I did not. It took me until two-thirds of the way through the book before I felt comfortable with the world because I lacked the context of the earlier stories. A more complete foreword would ground the reader and let them enjoy the stories immediately.
I did have some questions about some of the technology in the stories. For example, the arrows were quite thick (one inch diameter) and contained a battery with enough current to injure or kill the author's kind of demon. That's a lot of current in a very small space and the size/weight of the arrows would limit their range drastically. I therefore assumed that since this is an alternate universe, the batteries were using a different technology that we only wished that we had. [Tesla (Elon Musk's Tesla) may already been working on steam powered batteries.]
While the ghosts are consistent with most canonical ghosts, the demons in these stories are very physical until they are killed which is quite different from the way I conceive of demons but then, again, this is an alternate universe.
The author is does a good job of providing a balanced cast of characters (not just "white men") including a black scientist that history has largely ignored in favor of Edison and Tesla, a young Irish girl, and others. Kudos.
This book could be improved by two changes to the book, one small and one a bit more of a challenge.
While the book has a Table of Contents, it must be formatted in a non-standard way because the Kindle app navigation menu doesn't recognize it and offer to let you jump to the individual stories from the "hamburger" menu. A simple addition.
And, while the book has a foreword, it doesn't do anything to provide a context to the reader about the world and the main characters of the stories who live there. I'm guessing that the author assumes that all readers have read the graphic novels; I did not. It took me until two-thirds of the way through the book before I felt comfortable with the world because I lacked the context of the earlier stories. A more complete foreword would ground the reader and let them enjoy the stories immediately.
I did have some questions about some of the technology in the stories. For example, the arrows were quite thick (one inch diameter) and contained a battery with enough current to injure or kill the author's kind of demon. That's a lot of current in a very small space and the size/weight of the arrows would limit their range drastically. I therefore assumed that since this is an alternate universe, the batteries were using a different technology that we only wished that we had. [Tesla (Elon Musk's Tesla) may already been working on steam powered batteries.]
While the ghosts are consistent with most canonical ghosts, the demons in these stories are very physical until they are killed which is quite different from the way I conceive of demons but then, again, this is an alternate universe.
The author is does a good job of providing a balanced cast of characters (not just "white men") including a black scientist that history has largely ignored in favor of Edison and Tesla, a young Irish girl, and others. Kudos.
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