Sadly, this book stinks; even worse, the author is apparently the editor of a number of anthologies, and a big noise in SF publishing. He sets up a steampunk version of London in the year 1906, peopled by period-dress nerks from a century later. I was misled by the ornate and evocative cover, but a novel which can include the sentence "He watched her scramble down from the carriage" has given no thought at all to the social norms and attitudes of the period in which it is supposedly set.

The plot, such as it is, concerns an airship crash in which a clockwork automaton may have been the guilty party. Why do the airship manufacturers use man-shaped automata to pilot their craft, rather than building the auto-pilot into the ship itself? Why have none of the late-Victorian gentlefolk in the cast had any classical education, ignoring the Greek plural and saying "automatons" instead? Why does the author casually and inconsequentially introduce a perpetual motion machine, which should in any carefully-crafted SF novel be a major plot feature? None of these questions are answered.

I bought this book to while away a long coach journey to the airport and the flight itself, and I only recommend it if you find yourself in a similar situation with absolutely nothing else to read.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

This is a very badly written book. I'm not releasing it because I think anyone will enjoy reading it, but only so as to get Bucharest active again in the Go Hunting! pages so that I can then add the city to my alerts. (What's happening with BookCrossing in Bucharest? There used to be a bit more activity than this, and I'm surprised there are no Crossing Zones.) It's a rainy evening here, but I'm not sure I will go to any great lengths to protect the book from the wet.