Book Report: Larklight

Your Humble Blogger had checked Larklight out of the library on the strength of the first two Hungry City books, both of which were terrific fun. This one looked like fun, too. And so it was. So there's that.

The question is what to call it, speaking subgenrewise. It clearly is influenced by steam punk, in that it's Victorian specfic of the Space:1889 sort. Wikipedia calls it steampunk, but that seems wrong to me. There's no punk here. If you tell me something is steampunk, I am going to expect some sort of punk sensibility. What does that mean? Well, a certain amount of sex and violence. Noir influence. A dystopic mindset—not necessarily a dystopian setting, but perhaps an entropic mindset, an idea that everything turns to shit sooner or later, and probably sooner. Distrust of authority. A semi-Marxist focus on control of new technology and nutech resources by the powerful, particularly by multinational corporations. Nihilism. Outsider characters. That sort of thing. You know, punk.

Larklight doesn’t have the faintest whiff of that. It's a Boy's Own Adventure story. Oh, it's tongue-in-cheek, and everso pomo, but essentially, it's a straight ahead adventure. And the Hungry City books are a bit darker and more dystopian, but still don't strike me as punk at all. Wikipedia tells me that some people have been calling punkless steam punk gaslight romance, and I get the gaslight, and I get that it isn't meant to draw a parallel with the Romance Novel, but still, if you call a book a gaslight romance, I'm going to expect a romance. And just calling it a gaslighter doesn't work, both because it fails to indicate the specfic aspect, with spaceships and giant spiders from Saturn and all, and because gaslight already has a very specific meaning, particularly when describing works of literature.

I know that this little Tohu Bohu is not the place to start a Subgenre Slapfight™, but what do we call this sort of thing to make it clear to the potential purchaser what sort of pig is in the poke?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.