attackfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
attackfish) wrote2012-01-21 11:36 am
attackfish) wrote2012-01-21 11:36 am
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Goliath by Scott Westerfeld: WWI with Giant Lightning Cannons
For some reason, the local indie bookstore has gotten more and more concerned about not releasing books before the official release date. Time was, I could pick up a preordered book the day it came in, even if it didn’t come out for a week, so long as it wasn’t Harry Potter or something. Not anymore! So the bookstore had my copy of this for almost two weeks before I could bring it home. Such are my woes.
What do you mean you aren’t impressed? Okay, be like that.
With Istanbul far behind them, Alek, Deryn, and the Leviathan sail for Japan, but on the way, Alek finally figures out his strange friend’s secret, and before he can figure out what to do about it, the Tsar himself sends them far off course to Siberia on a desperate mission to rescue the mad but brilliant scientist, Nikola Tesla, who has created a weapon that could end not only the current Great War, but all wars, forever.
So our boy Alek knows all about Deryn’s little secret! (It doesn’t count as a spoiler if it’s on the cover flap, does it?) This is the moment we who have been following this trilogy have been waiting for, not the least because Alek, slowly stumbling out of his previous and completely period appropriate sexism, was bound to take it less then well. I always get anxious about this sort of thing, the exciting, we’ve-been-waiting-for-this moments, because I’m always worried that after all that build up, the emotional payoff won’t be a payoff so much as a let down. Westerfeld pulled it off amazingly. It was fantastic (and terrible, terrible) watching Alek go from “Dylan is the perfect boy, I wish I could be like him,” to “She’s completely mad,” in seconds just because he found out her true gender. It was the only realistic reaction for Alek, and Westerfeld didn’t pull his punch. And I’m really glad Westerfeld has Alek discover her secret early, so that he has several hundred more words to stumble a little further down the road towards realizing girls can be awesome too.
One of the things I like best about this series, and this continues into Goliath, is that Deryn isn’t all alone in being an awesome woman. Even though, onboard the Leviathan, in the air service, it is a naturally woman-light environment, Westerfeld doesn’t take the easy way out. He gives us Doctor Barlow, Lilit, and assorted minor women characters who are each very different and wonderful. Poor Alek is just doomed to keep meeting smart, badass women.
Westerfeld has an alarming habit of adding incredibly horrible things hat the story lets you see out of the corner of your eye without ever letting you focus on. The starving fabricated bears as big as busses are one of them. Not only do we meet them (*shudder shudder*) but we find out that they’re loose in parts of populated Central Europe. It’s easy to get so focused on the plot that things like that just don’t connect for a little while, but when they do... It’s things like that which show how much deeper the worldbuilding is in the Leviathan trilogy than in the Uglies books.
I know that I have been hard on the genre of Steampunk in the past, and I was hard on Behemoth for the way it dealt with Istanbul as a setting, but Goliath is a huge improvement over that. Maybe it’s just because they’re only in Japan, and later Mexico for a very short time, but I didn’t feel quite so much like there was as much exoticizing. Westerfeld did a good job of showing some of the truly strange intersections of racism, ethnocentrism, and international policy, sending the Leviathan to Japan just so they could “help” the Japanese oust the Austro-Hungarian Navy so that they wouldn’t be able to say they beat a European power all by their Asian selves. He stayed out of the touchy issue of European colonies in Southeast Asia, but I can’t blame him, given that the book was already more than five hundred pages, and to do that topic justice, he would need a lot more. The trip through Mexico just felt tacked on though, and I would have preferred they go through Canada as planned. The way the Europeans, Americans, and American business interests all had their fingers in the revolution could have been a novel all on its own. However, I would have liked to have found out about how the new steampunk technology has affected the periphery of the world, for example, how India is dealing with Darwinist creations, and also, I would have liked to have spent more time in Japan, exploring what Steampunk has done for the Meiji (or really just post Meiji) era and the sudden rapid Japanese development. And you will never be able to convince me that in Japan, which is both Clanker and Darwinist, there are no Humongous Mecha.
I still stand by my previous assertion though. I agree with Count Volger. The Lorises are unnerving, and they just get more unnerving as Goliath progresses.
One last thing, Keith Thomson’s illustrations are again, spectacular. He conveys the mood and the adventure of the novels beautifully, and his expressions are a riot. Between his artwork, and Alan Cumming’s narration, I’m tempted to buy both versions of the book just so I can have both.
I always hate it when a series I love comes to an end, and Leviathan has been a wonderful, fantastic, exciting ride. I don’t want to get off. I suppose there’s always rereading, and I hear rumors of a Leviathan movie?
Scott Westerfeld can be found online at scottwesterfeld.com, where he has actually posted a least one short story set in the same universe. Keith Thompson, the series illustrator can be found at keiththompsonart.com.
What do you mean you aren’t impressed? Okay, be like that.
With Istanbul far behind them, Alek, Deryn, and the Leviathan sail for Japan, but on the way, Alek finally figures out his strange friend’s secret, and before he can figure out what to do about it, the Tsar himself sends them far off course to Siberia on a desperate mission to rescue the mad but brilliant scientist, Nikola Tesla, who has created a weapon that could end not only the current Great War, but all wars, forever.
So our boy Alek knows all about Deryn’s little secret! (It doesn’t count as a spoiler if it’s on the cover flap, does it?) This is the moment we who have been following this trilogy have been waiting for, not the least because Alek, slowly stumbling out of his previous and completely period appropriate sexism, was bound to take it less then well. I always get anxious about this sort of thing, the exciting, we’ve-been-waiting-for-this moments, because I’m always worried that after all that build up, the emotional payoff won’t be a payoff so much as a let down. Westerfeld pulled it off amazingly. It was fantastic (and terrible, terrible) watching Alek go from “Dylan is the perfect boy, I wish I could be like him,” to “She’s completely mad,” in seconds just because he found out her true gender. It was the only realistic reaction for Alek, and Westerfeld didn’t pull his punch. And I’m really glad Westerfeld has Alek discover her secret early, so that he has several hundred more words to stumble a little further down the road towards realizing girls can be awesome too.
One of the things I like best about this series, and this continues into Goliath, is that Deryn isn’t all alone in being an awesome woman. Even though, onboard the Leviathan, in the air service, it is a naturally woman-light environment, Westerfeld doesn’t take the easy way out. He gives us Doctor Barlow, Lilit, and assorted minor women characters who are each very different and wonderful. Poor Alek is just doomed to keep meeting smart, badass women.
Westerfeld has an alarming habit of adding incredibly horrible things hat the story lets you see out of the corner of your eye without ever letting you focus on. The starving fabricated bears as big as busses are one of them. Not only do we meet them (*shudder shudder*) but we find out that they’re loose in parts of populated Central Europe. It’s easy to get so focused on the plot that things like that just don’t connect for a little while, but when they do... It’s things like that which show how much deeper the worldbuilding is in the Leviathan trilogy than in the Uglies books.
I know that I have been hard on the genre of Steampunk in the past, and I was hard on Behemoth for the way it dealt with Istanbul as a setting, but Goliath is a huge improvement over that. Maybe it’s just because they’re only in Japan, and later Mexico for a very short time, but I didn’t feel quite so much like there was as much exoticizing. Westerfeld did a good job of showing some of the truly strange intersections of racism, ethnocentrism, and international policy, sending the Leviathan to Japan just so they could “help” the Japanese oust the Austro-Hungarian Navy so that they wouldn’t be able to say they beat a European power all by their Asian selves. He stayed out of the touchy issue of European colonies in Southeast Asia, but I can’t blame him, given that the book was already more than five hundred pages, and to do that topic justice, he would need a lot more. The trip through Mexico just felt tacked on though, and I would have preferred they go through Canada as planned. The way the Europeans, Americans, and American business interests all had their fingers in the revolution could have been a novel all on its own. However, I would have liked to have found out about how the new steampunk technology has affected the periphery of the world, for example, how India is dealing with Darwinist creations, and also, I would have liked to have spent more time in Japan, exploring what Steampunk has done for the Meiji (or really just post Meiji) era and the sudden rapid Japanese development. And you will never be able to convince me that in Japan, which is both Clanker and Darwinist, there are no Humongous Mecha.
I still stand by my previous assertion though. I agree with Count Volger. The Lorises are unnerving, and they just get more unnerving as Goliath progresses.
One last thing, Keith Thomson’s illustrations are again, spectacular. He conveys the mood and the adventure of the novels beautifully, and his expressions are a riot. Between his artwork, and Alan Cumming’s narration, I’m tempted to buy both versions of the book just so I can have both.
I always hate it when a series I love comes to an end, and Leviathan has been a wonderful, fantastic, exciting ride. I don’t want to get off. I suppose there’s always rereading, and I hear rumors of a Leviathan movie?
Scott Westerfeld can be found online at scottwesterfeld.com, where he has actually posted a least one short story set in the same universe. Keith Thompson, the series illustrator can be found at keiththompsonart.com.