What's in this book
- Elizabeth Bear's 2015 steampunk novel - a 1880s Pacific Northwest brothel-worker investigates a murder
- Locus Award nominee 2016; canonical contemporary American steampunk-and-Western fusion
- 352 pages of patient first-person Karen Memery narration in the alternate-history city of Rapid City
- Author also wrote the Eternal Sky trilogy and the Stone in the Skull novels
- Hillary Huber audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of The Difference Engine, Soulless, and contemporary literary steampunk fantasy
Buy this book
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Karen Memory is the Elizabeth Bear novel where she takes the steampunk Western setting, gives it to a 16-year-old seamstress at a high-end Pacific Northwest brothel called Madame Damnable's Hôtel Mon Cherie, and lets her tell the entire story in a particular voice that I would press into the hands of any reader who claims contemporary SF cannot do voice. Karen is a working professional, a survivor of her own backstory, and the kind of first-person narrator who tells you what is happening in a way you cannot stop reading.
The plot involves a mysterious badly hurt woman who shows up at Madame Damnable's door, a US Marshal who is investigating a series of murders, an alternate-history Seattle (the city in this universe is called Rapid City) full of steam-powered technology and a local political establishment that is mostly corrupt, and a slowly developing romance that the book treats with patience.
Bear is doing several things at once and almost all of them work. The voice is the genuine pleasure. The action is well-staged. The romance earns its weight. The closing chapters land with appropriate force.
Five stars. One of the most enjoyable SF novels of the 2010s. Recommended without reservation.
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