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.