Best Steampunk
Series
The Iron Seas by Meljean Brook
This sprawling steampunk tour-de-force
(five novels, six novellas) has it all: detailed, vivid worldbuilding;
fast-paced action; finely-drawn characters; fantastical creatures and marvelous
machines; and, above all, love.
Author Brook has set her action-packed
stories of love and adventure on an intricately-imagined alternate Earth where
the Mongol Horde has overrun much of the world (with the help of
nanotech-directed mind control), where zombies roam Europe and Africa, where
airships fill the sky and the integrated mechanical technology that enhances
human bodies is viewed largely with suspicion.
The series began with The Iron
Duke, the story of the mechanically-enhanced hero of the battle to save
Britain from the Horde and the female detective who is charged to investigate
the body that literally drops out of the sky onto his doorstep.
The latest novel in the series, The Kraken King, debuted in 2014 as
e-serial novel in eight parts. (All
eight parts are now available as a single integrated volume.) Brook keeps up the pace in this recent
addition to the series, with a spunky writer heroine (sister of one of her
earlier heroes) and the former leader of a rebellion against the Horde carrying
the rousing tale.
So much fun I wanted to grab my sword and
jump aboard the next airship!
Best Shipboard
Mystery
In the Black by Sheryl Nantus
A murder onboard a “courtesan” ship
visiting a mining planet kicks off this compelling read. The investigation of the crime would be
interesting enough, what with a shipload of suspects in the dead working
girl’s, uh, colleagues, and a planetful of them in the girl’s clients.
But author Nantus has created some
memorable characters in Sam Keller, Captain of the Bonnie Belle, responsible for what happens on her ship, and marshal Daniel LeClair, brought in
by The Powers That Be to “assist” with the investigation. The two are attracted
from the start—when they’re not scrapping over how to go about solving this
murder. The captain and the marshal make
a great pair, and with the sexual tension between the two at a constant boil,
it’s only a matter of time before they give in to each other.
Nantus sets her mystery in the believably
bleak, gritty world of a workaday future.
Space travel is no adventure for the people in this story; it’s a means
of getting from one not-very-exciting place to another. The miners work hard for months at a time,
with not much to look forward to except the arrival of the courtesan ship. The courtesan ship makes its rounds of
similar places. Sam, a military vet,
keeps trying to escape her past in this backwater job. And Daniel tries to work his way back from an
incident that derailed his career and his life.
That Sam and Daniel find each other in all this seems a minor
miracle. But isn’t that what romance is
supposed to be all about?
Most
Thought-Provoking SFR Onscreen
PERSON OF INTEREST (CBS)
The small screen captures the prize for
engaging our interest in a year when large-screen efforts bypassed any romantic
elements in SF.
This creation of writer Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight), with backing from
J.J.Abrams’ Bad Robot production company, Bad Robot, Kilter Films, and Warner
Bros. Television, captures the post-911 zeitgeist perfectly. Michael Emerson
(LOST) stars as Finch, a wounded cyber-genius who has invented a supercomputer
for the government to track communications for any possible terrorist
activity. The Machine is capable of more
than this, however, and begins to identify ALL possible crime. Finch uses this
“irrelevant” information to intervene and stop the crime before it happens.
He recruits an ex-CIA agent named Reese
(Jim Caviezel) for the active part of this job.
Reese has been living on the street, trying to forget his former
life. Working with Finch and The Machine
provide redemption for Reese.
Others are added to the mix—two NYPD
detectives, a former enemy-turned-ally named Root, who is linked to The
Machine, a sociopathic former mercenary (Shaw), a sympathetic crime boss
(Elias)—as subplots interweave with the main line of the story over the series’
four seasons.
The series’ underlying questions have
begun to take on increasing importance in Season Four: When does an artificial
intelligence acquire true sentience? How
do we define self-awareness? Can we
expect a machine to understand (and abide by) human moral constructs? What happens when the intelligence—not just the knowledge--of
the machines we create far outstrips our own?
The Machine has a rival now in the equally super-intelligent (and
self-aware) Samaritan, a computer that has not been created with any moral
constructs. Who will win? And, in the end, will it make any difference
for humanity?
