Review: Esprit de Corpse

Esprit de Corpse by Ef Deal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm so used to any book that contains an airship being full of bad punctuation, homonym errors, and unintentional anachronisms that I almost gave this one a high rating just for meeting basic standards of competence. That would be unfair to non-steampunk books, though, so its place in the lowest (Bronze) tier of my Best of the Year list for 2023 reflects a competently crafted book that nevertheless regularly challenged my suspension of disbelief.

The version I got via Netgalley wasn't completely without typos or homonym issues, and there was at least one apparent slip in the author's otherwise strong period research (the main character speculates that the airship might be coated with aluminum, which in the early 1840s was still not produced in industrial quantities and cost more than gold). I noted "dissuade" for "persuade," "twerked" for "quirked" (the image of someone's lips twerking is amusing, I have to say), "thence" for "thither" (a surprisingly common mistake made even by good writers), and "evincing" for "eliciting". The author also writes "endeared her" for "endeared him to her".

These are minor issues and easily corrected. What distracted me a lot more is that characters would often know things that we hadn't seen them be told, or that they had no reasonable way of knowing for sure, such as the contents of an automaton's chest cavity when they hadn't opened it, or that a place had been purchased by the railway company.

The other thing that bothered me most was that the main protagonist had a private self-propelled railway coach, and repeatedly used it without a driver, while focusing on her research or even sleeping; we saw right at the beginning that animals could wander onto the tracks, or trains could break down or be delayed, and she believed that the railway company didn't know about her machine (and hence would not consider it in their traffic plans), so this is ridiculously risky behaviour, just asking for a crash.

We're told early on that she graduated with four doctorates at the age of 15. This is a huge, dramatic "this character is a genius" decal, of the kind that often is not only not backed up by, but actually contradicted by, things we are later shown, especially in the steampunk genre; I immediately expected that she'd prove to be as dumb as toast. Apart from her stupidly reckless use of the railcar, she wasn't obviously an idiot, though. I suppose the claim of unheard-of genius is supposed to make it more plausible that she could create a functioning autonomous automaton (in an existing casing, admittedly) in a few hours, complete with senses, sentience, and the ability to understand spoken language, by means of programming with punch cards, something she hadn't previously attempted, even though she herself previously said that she couldn't figure out how you could fit an adequate power system into the space (let alone a bulky control system). It's still not remotely plausible, but it does count as a genre trope, so I'll reluctantly pass it.

I'm less inclined to pass the apparent conflation of welding and riveting, and less still the fact that the Persian necromancer wears a Sikh turban and writes in the Sanskrit alphabet. I suppose there are ways you could justify both - maybe he studied in India - but presented without such justification, it's jarring.

So much for the mechanics and the setting. In terms of the story, we are on firmer ground. There are a couple of love interests for the two sisters, and those subplots are competently handled with interesting arcs. While the genius character does need several other people (and the occasional mild coincidence) to help her resolve the plot, she isn't passive or lacking in agency. One of the secondary characters is both a flashback antagonist and a present-moment helper, appropriately ashamed of his terrible earlier behaviour, and not given a pass for it. That's a good level of complexity.

The plot moves along well, and overall, I was entertained. If the author is able to create a greater separation between author knowledge and character knowledge and maybe tone down the more implausible tropes, I think future books in the series will be worthy of an even higher rating.

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