Review: Jim Butcher’s “The Aeronaut’s Windlass”

I don’t think that guy’s actually in the book, but he sure looks cool, doesn’t he?

Genre tropes are tricky things. There’s a sense in which the conventions of western storytelling were old when Aristotle articulated them in his Poetics. And there’s a sense in which the structures of a genre, say, the genre of steampunk, are constantly being reinvented. At the WorldCon I recently attended, there were several panels discussing the nature and limits and dynamics of steampunk, primarily the distinction between a steampunk aesthetic – the coolness of costumes and visual artwork – and the content of steampunk stories, which may or may not include “period” themes of colonialism, racism, nascent industrialism, and so on. Everyone agreed, however, that steampunk is a well-established sub-genre of speculative fiction, and that every new steampunk work was adding to and developing the definition of the genre.

Now, Jim Butcher has made his name