★★★ (2.5 of 5)

• Full Title: Pimp My Airship
• Author: Maurice Broaddus
• Year: 2019
• Pages: 311
• Genre: Steam Punk, Alternate History
• Publisher: Apex Books
• ISBN 978-1-937009-76-2 (trade paperback)
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

Pimp My Airship isn’t listed on the author’s Wikipedia page. On the author’s website, I found a link to a short story of the same name (here, 6,100 words), published in 2009. All the words in that short story are in the novel, so I assume the novel was meant to be an expansion of it.

The story is set in an alternate version of Indianapolis, one that’s part of the “United States of Albion”, a group of colonies that failed in their 1700s revolution. Steamworks, gears, and other steampunk paraphernalia litter the book, but in many ways the setting seems a lot like our own United States, except with non-digital technology and stunted sciences. There are racial divides in the big cities with Black people serving as an underclass of cheap labor (free labor, in the case of the massive prison populations), and large forces of City Ordained Pinkertons (COPs) who “maintain law and order” by keeping the lower classes in their place and protecting the wealthy capitalists from everyone else. An unlikely trio of characters acts as a catalyst to a revolution of sorts, which doesn’t quite go as planned.

 

Praise

I enjoyed the alternate history angle, as I often do, and the steampunk subgenre always holds some degree of fascination for me. I think Broaddus did the work of world-building well. He also gave us characters who don’t fit familiar archetypes and seem to have fairly complex backgrounds and motivations.

And the storyline was interesting too, with smile-inducing surprises, though it was a bit too much for such a short book.

 

Points Off For...

Unfortunately, there was simply too much wrong with it for me to enjoy it very much.

There were glaring mistakes, errors that a simple read-thru from a friend (or editor) should have caught. For example, on page 41, the character named Sleepy “tucked the umbrella into the corner” and went on talking, but eight paragraphs later, he was “setting the umbrella in the corner” again. How many umbrellas did he have? There were its/it’s mistakes, “yolk” when he meant “yoke”, and others I didn’t bother to record. One thing that might not have been a mistake but felt like one was the initial description of Sophine, which seemed pretty clear that it was talking about a white woman (“porcelain skin”, lighter than her “olive” toned mother, etc.), but the reader learns later that Sophine is seen by others as obviously non-white. This book was not well-edited.

It bugged me that I expected more airship action, but the title vehicle was nowhere to be found for most of the book. It made a showing near the end, in a dramatic scene, but was gone too quickly.

I had trouble with Broaddus’ descriptions of spaces, settings, and action. (His descriptions of characters, with the exception of Sophine, were very vivid.) Whether the trouble was his or mine, I’m not sure, but I very often couldn’t follow where characters were in the scene or what they were doing. The omniscient narrator jumped back and forth between characters’ viewpoints, further confusing the issue. Are they hiding outside and watching an airship land, or are they inside a warehouse? (A big action scene near the end gave rise to these questions.) Are they downtown or in the wilderness? (At one point, Sleepy is watching a crowd downtown but his friends come clambering out of “the brush”.) This happens a lot. Often a description of a room will start off giving one impression, but by the end of the description you realize that the beginning was inaccurate. Fight scenes, especially the big one at the very end, were impossible to follow. I got the feeling they were re-written many times, sentences getting moved around often, without ever being fully patched together again.

And lastly, I felt the author introduced too many subplots for such a short book, to the point that several of them were left unexplained.

 

Quotations

There were a handful of interesting quotations:

“You should never have more friends than books.”

—page 42

“Sleepy’s views boiled down to pragmatism: the theory of struggle was great only insofar as someone was actually helped. It wasn’t further argument he wanted, but action.”

—page 230

“...he always enjoyed awkward silences more when eating.”

—page 231

Conclusion

I came away disappointed, yet at the same time glad I read it. I enjoy different perspectives, and I’m fond of world-building and social justice narratives — this book had scads of all three. I think I would rate it four stars if it had been better edited for the errors and if some of the scene/action descriptions were more clear.

 

 

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