This gaslit London version of 'I, Robot' will surprise and
amuse while providing some unpleasant descriptions of
Victorian life. Bow Street sends an officer to respond to a
robbery alert. What largely-built Jolly Fellows finds is a
Swan Lake staged by automata instead of real ballet
dancers; the lovely Swan Princess has vanished. Her
elderly creator gives him a lesson on gear ratios and
implores him to find her. Jolly knows that few fences will
take such an item so he thinks he can return the AUTOMATIC
WOMAN.
Soon after however Jolly finds the elderly professor being
crushed to death by the Princess, and barely escapes the
same fate, due to his greater size and strength, before
wrecking her mechanism. Now his problem is that nobody
believes his story. How can you ascribe malice to an
automata? Reflecting from his filthy jail cell, Jolly
doesn't know what to believe.
Typewriters, pneumatic tubes and punchcards catalogue the
life of society; the government's computational difference
engines are going to process everything - 'the new gods of
our world,' says Jolly. Steam engines spew out sulphur and
poverty infests the back lanes. We meet Doctor Conan Doyle,
treating wounds and dispensing cocaine, and Charles Darwin,
debating with an American who does not want to believe that
people evolved characteristics to help them live in
different regions of the world, for that would have made
him a relative of the Red Indian. Grigori Rasputin is
enlisted to translate and Bram Stoker makes a better job of
it. I actually enjoyed these asides more than the
unfortunate detective's tale, for he is constantly getting
beaten or burned and every place he visits gets smashed to
pieces.
If you like steampunk, take AUTOMATIC WOMAN as a hardboiled
mystery; if you haven't tried it, don't get too repelled by
the constant violence and gore, just focus on the period
setting and inventiveness of the author. Nathan L. Yocum
has put together a convincing and occasionally amusing
alternate London; and the real version was probably equally
dirty, deprived and violent.
The London of 1888, the London of steam engines, Victorian
intrigue, and horseless carriages is not a safe place nor
simple place...but it's his place. Jolly is a thief
catcher, a door-crashing thug for the prestigious Bow
Street Firm, assigned to track down a life sized automatic
ballerina. But when theft turns to murder and murder turns
to conspiracy, can Jolly keep his head above water? Can a
thief catcher catch a killer?
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