Review: Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures
- cepmurphywrites
- May 13
- 5 min read
Review by Gary Oswald
Murder on the Titania is a collection of five short stories all starring the same protagonist, a swashbuckling bisexual 19th century female pirate called Marta Ramos who robs airships and trains. It's also not entirely what you'd expect from that summary.
These aren't really heist stories or adventure stories. They're instead crime mysteries. I enjoyed all the shorts, I thought they were good stories, but they're closer to an Agatha Christie short than a boys own adventure story about pirates.
The normal pattern of these shorts is that Marta is out trying to steal something when someone inconveniently turns up dead and Marta has to try and work out who killed them, normally more out of sheer curiosity than a desire for justice. She often gives the impression of finding the idea of having someone know something she doesn't as deeply offensive and views knowing what exactly is going on as far more of a goal than actually reporting the killer to authorities.
This is what makes these stand out compared to a lot of whodunnit short stories. Marta is a wanted criminal, she lacks both the ability and the desire to enforce the law, the way most detectives can. Only one of the five criminals ends up being arrested, in two of the stories the culprit just wanders off and Marta's like 'ah, well, wonder if they'll escape, not really my concern I suppose'. As a result, there is a different tone to these from either a cosy crime mystery like a Miss Marple or a full on noir detective story about the bleakness of crime. These stories are a bit more edgier than the former, the second story has the victim's face and neck eaten by her beloved dog because nobody came in time to feed him, but lack the gritty focus on pain of the latter, still viewing crimes primarily as puzzles rather than tragedies.
To some extent this tone is a reflection of Marta's personality, she is normally indifferent about the deaths she encounters. Twice she initially decides to not step in after having discovered proof of an upcoming crime even though the results will be deaths, until she is asked to intervene by her crew; though in neither case is there any real doubt in the readers mind as to what she will do. The narrative talks a good game about how heartless she can be but there's never really any doubt that she'll come through in the clutch, in the same way that a character like Han Solo or Jack Sparrow is never really expected to do anything actually bad.
I have not read the follow up book to this one, Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures, which contains three more shorts and might actually have the twist that Marta does something genuinely awful. But within this book, she is someone who we are told is a ruthless criminal but only shown as a mostly decent person, who also happens to steals jewellery from rich people. Which is the nature of this kind of adventure.
Marta is the character with the most focus and is about what you'd expect from the clever rogue archetype. She has a nice relationship with her long suffering second-in-command Simms, a recovering alcoholic and single father, but it's mostly the classic straight man-maverick Lethal Weapon style partnership with Simms sighing mournfully as Marta does something reckless but exciting. Short stories of this type rarely have character work above of that of the cliché and this is no exception.
The same can be said of the worldbuilding. This is an AH book but the world it is set in is relatively underexplored. The USA is broken into multiple small duchies, one based in Denver and one in Salt Lake City etc. This is due to a brutal war that been fought in North America a generation earlier against the infected, which seem to be zombies. This catastrophe essentially broke up the existing empire system and turned North America into a series of warring states.
And that paragraph above is more words on this than the actual stories give it. It is useful for the stakes of the stories for Ramos to operate in an area with multiple states with limited reach, and so that is the set up. There needs to be a reason for this so we get like four offhand mentions of the infected, including Ramos chopping off the heads off dead bodies so they don't rise (though that isn't consistent), and no further explanation of how that happened. And because Ramos is a robin hood figure, her opponents are monarchs and not presidents to avoid the issue of her opposing democratic governments.
This might be different in the second book, where the blurb says a story involves one of the Dukes attempting to extend his domain by deliberately turning the free plains tribes Native Americans into infected, but within this book none of the above is anything more than throwaway and therefore the existence of possibly supernatural elements within the backstory doesn't make this feel like a fantasy book because a reader could easily just not notice it.
But well, why isn't it a fantasy book? The Duchy of Denver doesn't bear a huge amount of resemblance to actual Denver, and while certainly the misogynistic and homophobic attitude of the era is present and something that Marta clashes with, that can also exist in a fantasy world like Westeros. Why is the setting for this a changed USA and not just a fictional world based on the USA?
In an old article, 'Why write Alternative History?', I argued that the power of AH is the mixture of the familiar and the alien. Unlike historical fiction, you can surprise the reader by introducing new elements (which this book very much takes advantage of, the final story 'The Flying Turk' is about the supposed invention of an autopilot for airships, though the title rather gives away where it is going). But unlike fantasy fiction, you are grounded in a world that people already know meaning you don't need to explain it. When Chinese immigrants are introduced in this book's short 'The Jade Tiger', we already know the background without needing to be told.
I do not think Acks, in this book at least, takes much advantage of that familiar feeling. The Duchy of Denver feels more like a fantasy kingdom than a society that emerged from our history.
As such, while it is perfectly good crime fiction, the AH setting feels more like a gimmick than an important element and so not really that interesting. I am not against AH being just a novel way to make stories from other genres stand out, these are good stories that I wouldn't have read otherwise and hopefully can work as a gateway drug into the genre, but because the world building is so backgrounded, the AH elements simply aren't worthy of analysis.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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