Agatha leads a quiet, but frustrating life as a lab assistant, working for the brilliant, but eccentric Spark that runs her town, her dreams tortured by inspiration she could never quite reach. In the past, most of Europa was a patchwork of small kingdoms controlled or supported by Spark scientists and their armies of monsters, machines or combinations of both – but much of that changed when the Baron created his empire, absorbing the little kingdoms.
And the day came when Agatha’s town went from being a nominal, self-governing part of the empire to being fully under the Baron’s control. In the take over, Agatha found herself moved from her home to the Baron’s own floating castle. There she sees ever more of the Baron’s forces and the eccentric creations of Sparks across the continent – as well as develop some contact with the Baron’s son, Gil
But she also learns far more about her past, her talents and her past frustrations, opening up vats new possibilities but also putting her in considerable danger, and demand.
I’ve started reading a lot of Steampunk because there’s so much I love about it – the aesthetic, the slightly whacky technology, the glorious stylishness of it, the fun, proper and quirky characters, the wonderful combination of completely out there concepts mixed with Victorian sensibilities; it’s immense fun, it’s beautiful and it is incredibly imaginative and creative.
And on those grounds Girl Genius: Agatha H and the Airship City is the very epitome of Steampunk. But not just Steampunk – that whole genre of over the top adventure novels is perfectly included and lampooned in this book. The hero with his contrived, dramatic language and over the top heroics, who never ever dies and sees everything in clichés! The evil geniuses and their completely out of their mind nefarious schemes! The plucky girl side-kick (I wrote a hundred of my favourite lines from this book and stopped because I was quoting nearly the entire book. But when Othar suggests that Agatha set him free as his ‘Spunky girl sidekick’ her response, as someone who has been round Sparks all her life just has to be quoted:
“I’d rather not end up being the Easily Duped Minion Who Sets the Insanely Dangerous Experiment free. Or the Hostage Who Ensures the Smooth-Talking Villain’s escape.”
“Ah…”
“I don’t have any proof that you really are Othar Tryggvassen, or that you’re really human.”
“Err”
“This Girl Sidekick job doesn’t call for a lot of smarts does it?”
Seriously I have a separate book of quotes I wanted to sue for the review because there were so many awesome exchanges like this. The Baron who is effortlessly and awesomely competent and evil and sets things up to constantly test himself and his son (poor Gil. Who also keeps getting flack from Agatha and everyone else over someone he killed, despite his constant protest “he threw a bomb at me!”) including taking a fight with the intrepid hero into a neighbouring room because they’d destroyed everything interesting in his lab. He’s just one of several characters I love – the evil baron, the long suffering heir-in-training and possible love interest, Gil and definitely the strangely dangerous creatures, the Jagermonsters. In fact, when compiling quotes? I could have confined myself entirely to what the Jagermonsters said or did and still be creased with laughter.
