Review: The Shadow Conspiracy

I am reading the short story collection The Shadow Conspiracy, edited by Laura Anne Gilman and Phyllis Irene Radford, and it’s lovely. I don’t think I’d really understood the structure of the book before starting it; it is a collection of related stories in a shared world. The seminal story is set in Geneva in 1816 – at the famous house party in which Lord Byron challenged the company to each write a story and the youngest and least famous person present, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, produced the classic Frankenstein. In the book, of course, the story has a somewhat more literal basis in fact.

The reason the shared-world structure is working so well for me is because those are big questions – whether souls can be removed from humans, whether they can be housed in automatons – and this format lets it be explored from many angles. The stories range over London, the Continent and even America, decades into the future (of 1816) in which the automaton industry, spearheaded by the firm of Babbage and Lovelace, is as much a foundation of the world’s economics as the automobile industry today. Characters in the various stories include Mary Shelly, Byron, Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, Marie Laveau and a wide range of less historical figures. The research seems to be well-done – I especially noticed it in the Marie Laveau story. (I was wondering for a bit if the author was just very familiar with Barbara Hambly’s mysteries in the same milieu, but no, she’s had to do some original research too.) Not all of the dialog is period-perfect, but it’s all fairly good and some differences can probably be excused by alternate history.

And some of it is pretty funny; here’s Ileen, the “Promethean” (reanimated) maid and Soames, the automaton butler:

“Ileen, I do not like to ask this in front of Cook or the boy, but there are certain matters of routine maintenance which, er, I feel sure that your Continental mind will be resilient enough to – that is, which you may approach in a purelyimpersonal manner – ”

“Of course, M’sieur Soames. Where I come from, the upstairs maid is often required to service the major domo.”

“Oh, please! You mistake, I assure you. One would shrinnk from – I an not sure an automaton can – er – in short, here is this oil can. Do you suppose you can reach the back of my neck? It will, I fear, be necessary to remove my collar, for which breach of decorum I deeply apologize.”