Kenneth Oppel, Airborn [Library of Babel]

When I switched over the ScienceBlogs, I did so intending to keep my booklog separate. In the last several months, though, the book log has been languishing, in large part because I feel obliged to keep up the quantity and quality of the posts here. Which means that I end up not writing booklog entries because that would take time away from writing ScienceBlogs posts, and I don’t have time to do both.

So, I’m going to face facts, and just move the booklog posts over here. This also offers the advantage of allowing spoiler cuts (the current set-up for the book log does not), which is nice. So, anything with “Library of Babel” in the post title is a booklog entry (and there will be a “Booklog” category soon).

For the inaugural Library of Babel post here, we’ll go with the book I finishe yesterday before dinner, Airborn by Kenneth Oppel. This is a YA/ coming-of-age story in an alternate world where airships rule the skies.

The plot is fairly standard stuff: the protagonist, Matt Cruse, is a plucky cabin boy on a luxury airship, and dreams of breaking free of class limits to captain his own airship someday. Onto his ship, the Aurora, comes Kate De Vries, a spirited and willful young woman from a wealthy family, looking for evidence to prove her grandfather’s stories of mysterious flying creatures true (her granfather is rescued by Matt in the prologue, and dies after speaking of “beautiful creatures” in the sky). Of course, their paths cross, and sparks fly (chastely).

The plot is straightforward Robert Louis Stevenson stuff, with pirates, shipwrecks, jungle adventures, and all manner of derring-do. Buckles are thoroughly swashed, and everything turns out more or less as you would expect. The execution is very deft, and it deserves the praise it received when it was released.

I do, however, have some quibbles with the worldbuilding, which I’ll explain after the cut.

The only real problem I have with this book is the same problem I have with a lot of alternate history type material– the minute I start thinking about the set-up, it all starts to look pretty silly. And I’m giving them the dopey physics of the airships (which are supported by “hydrium,” a non-flammable gas lighter than hydrogen).

I mean, the goal here was obviously to write a story in which the luxury ocean liners of the early 20th century are replaced by luxury zepplins, which obviously requires some changes in history. And there are plenty of changes– the oceans are referred to by different names (Atlanticus and Pacificus), and one of the ports of call for the Aurora is “Lionsgate City,” which appears to be San Francisco.

And yet, too many other things seem to be the same. The other ports of call mentioned in the book are Sydney and Paris, and Paris has an Eiffel Tower (which the book notes is topped with a special airship mooring mast). And that’s the problem– if history is different enough to result in the oceans having different names, why is Sydney still Sydney, and why is there still an Eiffel Tower in Paris? Those names and structures strike me as highly contingent upon specific historical circumstances, and if you change the past dramatically, you ought to change them, too.

In a sense, the book is trying to have it both ways– it wants some justification for the oddity of giant airships, so there are clear alternate elements, but it also wants to be able to call upon some of the connotations of Sydney and Paris in the real world, so it leaves other things unchanged. And this sort of thing drives me nuts.

Either the changes should be smaller– the discovery of the mythical “hydrium” in the late 1800’s would probably be enough to get you luxury airships, without changing much else– or they should be bigger, at which point you might as well just set the whole thing on a distant planet and have done with it. These half measures make no sense, and just irritate me.

To be fair, the plotting is good enough that I didn’t really think that much about it while I was reading the book– it’s only going over it afterwards that I started picking at the seams. And it’s also not helped by the fact that I’m probably subconsciously comparing it to Howard Waldrop’s excellent “You Could Go Home Again,” which does the luxury airship thing in a world closer to our own, and makes it make sense. If you’re not the type to be bothered by quirks of worldbuilding, this book offers airships, and pirates, and shipwrecks, and jungle adventure, and all sorts of fun stuff. It’s worth a read.