{"id":10843,"date":"2007-12-31T23:35:13","date_gmt":"2008-01-01T04:35:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/31\/10843.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:45","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:45","slug":"book-report-larklight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/31\/book-report-larklight\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Larklight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger had checked Larklight<\/a> out of the library on the strength of the first<\/a> two<\/a> Hungry City books, both of which were terrific fun. This one looked like fun, too. And so it was. So there's that.
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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<\/I> 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.
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Larklight<\/I> 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<\/I>, 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<\/I> doesn't work, both because it fails to indicate the specfic aspect, with spaceships and giant spiders from Saturn and all, and because gaslight<\/a> already has a very specific meaning, particularly when describing works of literature.
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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?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger wonders if you can spell steampunk without the p u.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18207,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10843\/revisions\/18207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}