Love and Romanpunk (Twelve Planets) [Kindle Edition]

Tansy Rayner Roberts (Author)

Book Description

Thousands of years ago, Julia Agrippina wrote the true history of her family, the Caesars. The document was lost, or destroyed, almost immediately.
(It included more monsters than you might think.)

Hundreds of years ago, Fanny and Mary ran away from London with a debauched poet and his sister.
(If it was the poet you are thinking of, the story would have ended far more happily, and with fewer people having their throats bitten out.)

Sometime in the near future, a community will live in a replica Roman city built in the Australian bush. It’s a sight to behold.
(Shame about the manticores.)

Further in the future, the last man who guards the secret history of the world will discover that the past has a way of coming around to bite you.
(He didn’t even know she had a thing for pointy teeth.)

The world is in greater danger than you ever suspected. Women named Julia are stronger than they appear. Don’t let your little brother make out with silver-eyed blondes. Immortal heroes really don’t fancy teenage girls. When love dies, there’s still opera. Family is everything. Monsters are everywhere. Yes, you do have to wear the damned toga.

History is not what you think it is.

LOVE AND ROMANPUNK.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Helen Merrick

Julia Agrippina’s Secret Family Bestiary
Lamia Victoriana
The Patrician
Last of the Romanpunks
Afterword

"Connie Willis meets Gail Carriger over more than a cup of tea" - Helen Merrick

Locus Recommended Reading List for Best Collection 2011

Product Details

• File Size: 214 KB
• Print Length: 85 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press (February 8, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0077DIRW6
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #402,844 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightfully fresh and original February 9, 2012

By Sean the Bookonaut

Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts is the second in Twelfth Planet Press' Twelve Planets series.

I have been HANGING OUT for the ebook version of this book and fully appreciate the work that has gone into making my wish a reality(yes they did it just for me).

What does one get?
-----------------------
For the meagre sum of $5.95 the reader is treated to 4 original and reasonably independent works, lovingly woven together.

1.Julia Agrippina's Secret Family Bestiary
2.Lamia Victoriana
3.The Patrician
4.Last of the Romanpunks

Love and Romanpunk is a bit of a showcase of Tansy's skill. Each of these works are independent in both style and tone, which I think makes for an entertaining and refreshing read.

I think all could stand alone, bar the last, which does rely on the others to a large degree for backstory.

Favourites
---------------
If pushed, I liked Lamia Victoriana the most, Tansy has captured Victorian repressed sexuality, gothic horror/romance and Roman vampires all in one short piece.

I appreciated the construction, the form and the history of Julia Agrippina's Secret Family Bestiary but enjoyed it less than the other pieces.

The Patrician could be expanded into its own book - a little buffy mixed with a little Dr Who as other reviewers have mentioned.

The Last of the Romanpunks was action, and hardboiled humour - a nice little tale to wrap up the series.

Recommendations
---------------------
Overall I got the sense that Tansy had a lot of fun writing this collection. It was certainly an enjoyable, relaxing read. Read it if you enjoy good writing, if you are keen to see a snapshot of what Tansy is capable of .

Then being the unabashed fan that I am go out and buy anything else by her.

In a publishing market flooded by Vampires stories, Tansy somehow walks away from 4 vampire stories unscathed. They are all delightfully fresh and original. That in itself deserves applause.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Alt-history is always better with monsters April 3, 2012

By Dave Versace

Amazon Verified Purchase

The four short stories that make up Love and Romanpunk wrap around the premise that the Rome of Augustus and his heirs was crawling with mythological beasts, in particular vampires and lamia. So far, so here-take-all-my-money please. Rayner Roberts cannily folds inhuman monsters in with the historical procession of debauched Imperial lunatics - Nero, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius - and serves up a delicious alternate history in which lamia plague humanity over the course of centuries.

First up is my personal favourite, 'Julia Agrippina's Secret Family Bestiary', which recounts the rise and disintegration of the Augustine Emperors, as told by Nero's mother Julia Agrippina Minor. It begins - and wins my undying affection - with this passage:

"Let us begin with the issue of most interest to future historians: I did not poison my uncle and husband, the Emperor Claudius. Instead, I drove a stake through his heart."

Colour me delighted. It goes on to detail, in alphabetical order, the specific mythological monsters that helped or beset or sometimes comprised the various branches of the Imperial family. Basilisks, centaurs, harpies - and of course the much-reviled Livia (Augustus' wife) was a blood-drinking lamia. The story centres around the Julias, the three sisters of Caligula (Julia Agrippina, Julia Drusilla and Julia Livilla) who fight to preserve themselves, their brothers and their children from various brushes with mythology and from their fiendish relatives.

The choice to tell the story in an alphabetical-order series of vignettes seems a catchy gimmick at first, but the story so comes alive with Julia Agrippina's passionate ferocity that the gimmick completely fades into the background. Looking back on it, it's a clever artifice that gives `Julia Agrippina' the feel of a real old-world bestiary as well as an epic family saga.

'Lamia Victoriana' is a gothic retelling of the romance between Mary Wollstonecraft and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which somehow despite the presence of bloodsucking monsters, gratuitous murders and a rather steamy lesbian seduction is rather less sordid than its real-history equivalent. The characters swan about The Continent being determinedly romantic and inevitably tragic, which makes it sound like a romp, albeit one where the consequences of thoughtless indulgence and frequent acts of murder are always lurking. The ending is upliftingly chilling, which is a bit of a neat trick.

`The Patrician', a YA romance featuring a young woman and an ancient monster hunter (set primarily in an Australian tourist attraction only a little more improbable than most of the real ones) which explores the dynamic of a Doctor/Companion relationship without once making even an oblique reference to Doctor Who. Instead, `The Patrician' concerns the hunting of ancient Roman monsters and their kind, with the focus on the young protagonist's lifetime journey to becoming an unmitigated badarse. This is the story in the collection that picked up a nomination for an Aurealis Award, for which it is more than deserving, though as I mentioned it's not my favourite. I loved the line "She did not see him again for five years, and when she did, he was too busy stabbing harpies to stop and chat." Sweet.

Finally there's 'The Last of the Romanpunks', which is a straight-up action-adventure set on an airship crawling with monsters. It ties directly back to the previous three stories in amusing and unexpected ways, but Rayner Roberts never lets that get in the way of the hardboiled Die Hard antics. Snappy dialogue, clever and determined protagonists and - yeah, well, she had me at airships.

'Love and Romanpunk' is a great collection. While I picked up this one more or less on a Rome-based whim after hearing it mentioned on the Galactic Suburbia podcast (co-hosted by the author of this collection and its editor, Alisa Krasnostein), I now plan to pick up the rest of the Twelve Planets Series as soon as they become available on the Kindle. Highly recommended.

4.0 out of 5 stars A quick, delightful romp through history and vampires March 25, 2013

By Sophia

Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a short anthology (emphasis on SHORT) written by the author as a silly (and perhaps more useful) way to use the knowledge she gained while working on a PhD in Classics. It proposes a world that has been haunted by classical monsters since before the Roman empire, and that the women of the Caesers' bloodlines named "Julia" tend to be practical warriors, mostly defending the emperors from lamias, a variety of vampires that are nasty and completely unsympathetic. (For me, a refreshing change from the current "so misunderstoooooood" beautiful vampire trend.)

The style of each of the stories varies, from poetry to letters to prose, as we see Julias throughout the ages and how they react to various monsters. The quality (or at least the likeability) of the stories varies too, but the collection is short enough and the subjects and styles variable enough that reading it felt refreshing, and I never felt "short story hangover."

You'll like this if you like: well-thought out world-building, alternate history, character-driven fantasy that isn't set in a medieval mishmash, steampunk, "oh gods, please give me alt-history that ISN'T steampunk," strong women heros.

You won't like it if: you're a Classicist with no sense of humor, you're not much into fantasy, experimental short story styles bother you, you have no sense of humor about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the part of steampunk that is "mashing together two historical periods" bothers you.

I enjoyed it a lot, and since it's short and cheap, I think most people will find it worth a try. It adds some nice variety to several genres of fantasy, and I for one would love to see more Romanpunk (of both the kind the whole book is and the kind featured in the last story) by Dr. Roberts in the future.