Black Iron

Veaux and Rickert, best known for the polyamory handbook More Than Two, make a successful first venture into fiction with a crowd-pleasing, droll, and energetic tale of an alternate 19th-century Britain in which the most divisive political topics of the day are the military implications of Dr. Frankenstein’s animates and an open-door policy toward Mohammedan and Israelite immigration. Goofy pickpocket Thaddeus “Muddy” Pinkerton—having been hired to sneak into a royal zeppelin party in distinctive shoes, plant a ring with the Roman pope’s seal in Queen Margaret’s chambers, and escape via silken kite—is startled when his employers attempt to kill him. The queen, caught with the incriminating ring, is imprisoned as a heretic supporting the Roman rather than the French Catholic Church; young Lady Alÿs of France, a zeppelin passenger who saw Thaddeus jump from the zeppelin, escapes the palace to begin her own investigation in support of the queen; and the schemers behind the plot parlay the queen’s arrest and growing fears of foreign refugees into a call for a xenophobic villain to take the throne. Veaux and Rickert build their setting seamlessly through the action, with a tone that creates a bold and very British aesthetic. Unsubtle modeling of the central conflict on current American politics is forgivable given the stellar storytelling overall; for sympathetic readers, the failure of the coup (with its rallying cry of “bring Britain back to greatness”) will be cathartic. This is a delightful and promising steampunk adventure. (Oct.)