Soulless, by Gail Carriger

(Amazon link)

Alexia Tarabotti is twenty-five years old, half-Italian, and unmarried in an alternate Victorian London in which vampires and werewolves are slightly more acceptable in polite society than she is. She also has no soul.

The soulless, who have the ability to return werewolves and vampires to their human state, once hunted them, though Alexia sees no reason to do so, provided they don't smash her cake at parties. Her state does not put off Lord Conall Maccon, a Scottish werewolf who has fallen in love with her - the main effect of soullessness on the personality appears to be sarcasm, which he finds attractive. Alexia, who finds Conall rude, chooses to stifle her own more carnal interest him.

Unfortunately, as this is a paranormal romance novel, their relationship is quickly interrupted by 1) a series of mysterious disappearances, 2) an evil secret society, and 3) a monster more monstrous than the ones already introduced, to assure us that the vampires and werewolves are just folks, after all.

It all plays out in ways that are easily recognizable to readers of the genre, but the intelligence and humor of the characters distinguish it. Carriger, like Cynthia Leitich Smith in Eternal, has an appreciation for the absurdity of vampires and werewolves as romantic heroes - her ancient, well-dressed vampires are stubbornly frozen in modes of fashion centuries out of date, and the issue of what happens to werewolves' clothing when they transform is addressed, frequently. Apparently cloakrooms developed as a courtesy to shapeshifting guests. Other parts of world history are also modified to explain what vampires and werewolves had to do with them.

A light read that doesn't take itself too seriously. Soulless is the first in a series, and I'm interested in seeing if the worldbuilding is extended in the next book.

I was legally dead for about an hour today.

The problem with being a Wikipedia-based life form -

- well, actually, there are several of them. One of them is that sometimes you're reading a book and you see a sudden change in POV or a strange equivocation, and you try to click on the History page to see what happened there. ("Sir Reed had a reputation for promiscuity. [citation needed] Some historians, however, say that it was unfounded. [citation needed] Those historians, however, are largely discredited. [citation needed] It has been argued that scholars who edit Wiki entries about Sir Reed have an innate bias against him, and possibly also against scholarship as a whole. [citation needed] It has also been argued that you are dumb. [citation needed]")

I mean, that problem's worrying, too.

But the one for which that I originally began that first sentence was the compulsion, when you figure out something difficult, to document the solution. Even when the solution in question is to something that is extremely personal in nature, and thus probably does not strictly require online documentation.

Unrelatedly, today I figured out what to do when I have low blood sugar and really bad menstrual cramps. It involves bed, one electric blanket, two regular blankets, three glasses of water, aspirin, and a lot of vegetables.

Clockwork Heart, by Dru Pagliasotti

This is a steampunk book that manages to avoid glorifying racist and colonialist societies! So that's nice. It is unfortunate that it's also kind of weird in other ways.

The pollution-choked industrial city of Ondinium is divided into four castes: the Famulate laborers, the Lictor police force, the Exalted ruling class, and the Icarii, messengers and diplomats who travel through the city using metal wings and "counterweights" made of ondium, the gravity-defying metal for which Ondinium is named.

While the Exalted are born into their caste, and believed to be the end product of one thousand rebirths and supernaturally wise, the Famulates, Lictors, and Icarii are selected by a giant punch-card computer at the heart of the city, designed and maintained by the Exalted. The Exalted live separate from the Famulates and Lictors, wearing robes and masks and never speaking to them - only the Icarii, the smallest caste, can communicate with people in both worlds.

Taya, an Icarus, sees no problem with this system, and considers her ex-boyfriend Pyke, who does, a little crazy. So when she finds herself being courted by the handsome and brilliant Exalted Alister, she is awed and flattered. Alister's angry and socially awkward brother Cristof, who abandoned his caste to live as a Famulate clockmaker, she considers a bizarre aberration. She doesn't realize the implications of the tensions within their family until it's too late.

I've made it sound like this book is about Taya coming to realize the shortcomings of her society, because that's what I thought it was going to be about. Maybe this is a spoiler, but: that is not what the book is about. The punch-card computer is, apparently, pretty much always right, and no one who ought to be taken seriously ever resents it, and Ondinium is a perfectly nice place. The book is a straightforward romance/adventure, and I had a fairly clear idea how it was all going to play out by the end of the scene where Alister and Cristof were introduced.

Now, I have no objection to the romance/adventure plot per se; yeah, it was a predictable one, and the pacing went wonky around the 2/3 mark, but overall I liked the execution. The romance was very sweet and its dynamics were interestingly unconventional.

But I do find it kinda weird that we're apparently supposed to be siding with the guys who let the hereditary rulers and their punch-cards determine social mobility? And I don't think the problem's with me! I think that that's a setting that's 100% guaranteed to produce Dystopian Horrors, or your money back. Especially given that there are frequent references to the city's choking air pollution. "Choking air pollution" is right up there with "everybody wears winter colors and lives in the sky (or underwater)" as a Dystopian Horrors warning sign. (See: Battle Angel, Chrono Trigger, Last Exile, Golden Sun) That shit is what you call a metaphor.

At one point the book pulls the classically cheap tactic of comparing the relative safety of present-day Ondinium to the violence of a nearby country. Yeah, okay, so you're better than the puppy-kickers. You don't get a gold star. The implication of this sort of tactic, in books as in real-world politics, is always to set up a false dichotomy - we've got to have this insane proscribed caste system based on punch cards and reincarnation, or else we'd be blowing each other up all the time! NO THERE ARE NOT OTHER OPTIONS, SHUT YOUR FACE

Putting the weirdness of the setting aside: I liked a lot of things about the characterization, but can't talk about them without spoiling everything: ( So, Alister is made out of chocolate. I know! It's totally weird. )

I have one other objection, which is totally inane. I object to this line:

No one'll ever punch code the way he did. [...] Lady knows what'll happen if something he wrote ever needs to be modified. It'll probably take the whole team to figure out what he did."

That isn't a good thing! That's a bad thing. Comment your code, dude.