6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Proof of Devolution, November 26, 2009
This review is from: Unnatural History: Pax Britannia Series (Mass Market Paperback)
Unnatural History is the first in a steampunk series called Pax Britannica, published by Abaddon books. The back cover includes an endorsement by Clive Barker, which I can only hope was referring to some other title published by Abaddon. I took Unnatural History on summer vacation with me, knowing it was likely to be pulpy fare, given the description of the hero, Ulysses Quicksilver on the bookjacket: "dandy, rogue, and agent of the throne. It is up to his dashing soldier of fortune to solve the mystery and uncover the truth before London degenerates into primitive madness and a villainous mastermind brings about the unthinkable." Some of my best childhood memories are of reading Conan or Doc Savage paperback reissues on beaches, so it seemed appropriate. Jonathan Green might be (and I hope he is) attempting to emulate a pulp writer by writing poorly, if that's his agenda he's overshot his mark. Both Robert E. Howard and Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent) had their moments of bad writing, but the brilliance of their raw creativity shone through nonetheless. I can still read both Conan and Doc Savage without feeling the need to pick up a red correcting pen.
With Jonathan Green, I not only picked the pen up, I made good use of it. I could be an arrogant bastard and say I want his job, but I'll settle for his editor's. This book has enough writing errors to fill a semester of teaching composition, from lack of precedent to horribly mixed metaphors, ridiculously wordy prose to word choice errors (such as "while" away the time - it's supposed to be "wile".) And this is just the technical side of his writing.
I was hoping that, despite the technical issues, the story itself might be worth reading, or at the very least, for recommending to younger adolescent readers. I can suspend my need for cutting edge special effects when I see a film, so why not suspend my need for correct grammar?
This was not the case. Before I move on, I'll recommend some good steampunk for the YA set: Airborn by Kenneth Oppel, Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve, or Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld.
Interestingly, Mr. Green's missteps are as revealing as other writers' leaps and bounds.
Firstly, Green has created an alternate history where the British Empire, and strangely, Nazi Germany have survived into the 1990s. I'm dubious about the likelihood of the rise of the Third Reich if Britain was still a powerful world Empire, but I was willing to let it stand for the sake of fun. Sadly, Green's neo-Victorian '90s, while playfully amusing at times (he seems to suggest Michael Crichton as a major professor of Evolutionary Biology), reads like a catalog of all the things the Victorian era is presented as in steampunk, and yet in its best iterations, never really is. There are airships, Victorian slang (toadies and toffs), and of course, a "brown velvet frock coat" (13). What could be more steampunk? The problem with Green's approach is that he writes as though he doesn't understand history--there are few explanations (I can only hope they are forthcoming) about why the world is still stuck in a very proper and British nineteenth century.
Now, one might argue that I'm being unfair, and I should just let Green have his fun, but as a critical scholar, I expect good historical research and speculation, even in a mindless adventure story. Consider how Paul Guinan used primary historical sources in writing Boilerplate, or the use of Henry Mayhew's writings on the London poor in Jeter, Powers, and Blaylock's steampunk novels of the '80s. Even when a writer conjectures a future, rather than an established past, there must be a believability to it. Stirling's Peshawar Lancers is a dense read, because he's gone to the trouble of extensive world-building. This is a standard task for the writer of SF and Fantasy. If your world doesn't hold together, your story won't either. Because we know little about the why of the setting of Pax Britannica, we find it hard to imagine, hard to see what characters look like - what are they wearing? Are brown frock coats back in style, or did they never go out?
Second, Green's hero, Ulysses Quicksilver, is a pulp hero without any real post-colonial sensibilities. While he has some rogue tendencies, he is still an unswervingly loyal agent of the Crown. He is a caricature of a number of other heroes, most notably Batman and Doc Savage - a mix of brawn and brains, neither of which are delivered well: the brains always seem to be something Quicksilver is lucky enough to stumble upon, rather than a logical deduction. The brawn is likewise without precedent until Quicksilver needs it. While he makes a passing reference to Tibetan monks, it is only in the heat of a battle that we learn that Quicksilver would survive this fight, "thanks in part to the martial arts he had learned in the company of the Tibetan monks" (68). It was like reading a book written by a tabletop roleplaying gamer: "Oh, and by the way, my character learned martial arts when he was in the Himalayas." Green adds injury to literal insult when he writes that Quicksilver "push[es] a foot into [the creature's] midriff." Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic(and if this were the only instance of Green's poor word choice, you might be right in saying so), but 'midriff' is word without combat connotations. You "kick" in the "stomach"; you do not "push" in the "midriff", no matter how much you're trying to emulate what you suppose to be the polite manners of Victorian style or culture. But I digress -- I'm supposed to be talking about how Quicksilver is a caricature.
When hired by a beautiful woman to find her lost father, Quicksilver is said to be unable to "resist a pretty face, and when that pretty face belonged to a damsel in distress it made any attempt at resistance even more futile" (57). If Green were clever enough to write with an ironic tone, I could swallow this sort of writing. However, while he's not taking himself too seriously, he's also no Pynchon. Although this serves as a femme fatale plot device later on, it's handled poorly. In short, Quicksilver is Moorcock's Bastable without the narrative conceit of time travel to explain his idiosyncracies. As with the secondary history itself, one wonders how such a cultural dinosaur could have survived a century. Even with the continuation of the British Empire, societal change would have been more advanced. Britain before Victoria was very different from Britain after Victoria. The world of Pax Britannica reads mostly like a historical neophyte's idea of what a steampunk universe would look like. And while steampunk doesn't have to be about alternate real-world histories, Pax Britannica is. And it shows what happens to the steampunk aesthetic when history is ignored.
One of the ribbons at the Seattle Steamcon stated that "Steampunk needs historical accuracy like a dirigible needs a goldfish." While this quote, attributed to Steamcon coordinator Diana Vick, is true for convention Cosplay, it is mostly wrong when applied to steampunk literature. Even within a fully secondary world, historical "accuracy" lies at the heart of steampunk narratives being quality instead of quagmire. There must be an inner consistency to the alternate history or the possible world, or the reader cannot negotiate the narrative's virtual spaces. Setting is as important as character, and when both are poorly rendered, as is the case in Unnatural History, the end result is a muddled mess.
At one point Ulysses muses that "there were many unexplained mysteries in the world -- such as who built the giant heads of Easter Island and the mystery of the Whitby mermaid -- and Ulysses had solved some of them in his time, but how Maurice Allardyce had ever made it to inspector he would never know" (48). I feel much the same way about how Jonathan Green got a contract to write not one, but four of these novels. Worse yet, I own all of them, and for the sake of academic research, will likely read them all. I can only hope Green gets better as he goes.
NOTE: El Sombra, The second novel in the Pax Britannica series, was written by Al Ewing, and while it will never be considered literature, it fulfilled all of the hopes I had for Unnatural History without any of the writing faux pas.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Steampunk Lite, May 15, 2011
This review is from: Unnatural History: Pax Britannia Series (Mass Market Paperback)
Having recently read George Mann's Steampunk adventure,
"The Affinity Bridge", I was expecting more of the same in Johnathon Green's "Unatural History".
And it delivered in terms of writing - for me Green is more fluid in style than Mann - and the overall story which cranked along quickly, but not in terms of Steampunk technology, where Mann delved more deeply and thoughtfully.
Overall however, "Unatural History" was a good diversion on a long flight from Johannesburg, with generally pleasant stereotypical characters, more than enough moustache twirling villians, crazy car chases and certainly non-stop action that took us from the sewers of London to a zeppelin flying overhead.
Of course, having only given "Unatural History" 3-stars, clearly a few things grated.
One in particular was hero Ulysses Quicksilver's "sixth sense" for danger. Having that tingle once or twice would be OK, but it was like a clarion call every chapter, chiming just in time for Quicksliver to duck, dodge or defend himself.
The other is logical but really pulled me up in the Steampunk theme - Queen Victoria is celebrating her 160 year reign, so quite naturally the book is set in 1997, which I found distracting because I instantly thought "**that's** not a Steampunk era". Of course, there is no reason the 1990's can't be Steampunk and it certainly makes sense in the timeline of the novel.
Then there were the dinosaurs. Really? I had to put that to one side because it just seemed so superfluous.
Finally, Green mixes Steampunk and current technology but does not really think it through. So we have cars on the streets of London, including Quicksliver's own Silver Phantom, as well as horses. Been there, done that and the horses lost out...which is why we don't see them on the roads today. Electronics are also mentioned, which necessitates quantum mechanics with all that implies. Again, been there, done that and analogue lost out to digital...which is why Apple sells a gazillion iPods and absolutely zero record players. And there are cities on the Moon and Mars, which requires rocket power and lots of it, and that was never going to be Steampunk, no matter how much coal you stoked that boiler with. Plus they fully understand DNA and again, it seemed sideways to a civilisation that's still using gas lighting.
For me this was a bit lazy and while I know "Unatural History" is not high art, and irrespective of whether Green wants this to be Steampunk or otherwise, this haphazard thinking stole a little of the enjoyment for me. (And I will note that I **think** there was an attempt to cover this off with the motivations of the bad guys wanting to cut out the rotten core of the Empire, but even with that things did not make sufficient sense any time you actually stopped to think even a little bit about them.)
So, a good effort as an adventure novel but only Steampunk Lite in terms of technologoy as a supporting cast member.
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