The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar
The delights of The Bookman are by and large the same as those of any Steampunk novel - the depiction of an alternate Britain where the technological advances of Charles Babbage have propelled it into an exciting, dark and dangerous new world that Victorian society is perhaps not yet ready to embrace - a society where fictional and real-life characters co-exist, Sherlock Holmes rubbing shoulders not only with Moriarty and Irene Adler, but also Jack the Ripper, Oscar Wilde and Jules Verne. Lavie Tidhar clearly revels in the opportunities afforded the richness of such a setting, bringing in a few additional references from The Phantom of the Opera (although that's been done by Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes adventure The Canary Trainer ) through to Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner . Here we have a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen drawn from as diverse a bunch as Karl Marx, Mrs Beeton, Nevil Maskelyne, Tom Thumb and a book-seller named Jack who operate from his shop off St. ...