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chan_fry's review against another edition
3.0
This story has good bones, interesting characters, great world-building, and a handful of interesting quotations. However, overall I found it too full of errors and issues for me to enjoy it as fully as I’d hope.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
(Edit: Also, Goodreads says I somehow read/rated the Kindle edition, which I did not.)
sarahnz's review
1.0
I think it's time to admit that this is one of the rare books that I'm not going to finish. I'm up to chapter seven, the story hasn't grabbed me, and the writing/editing isn't tight enough. It's dumb stuff too, on the editing front: "gaslit lamps lit up ...", "water shuddered through the pipes before pouring down on him in a lukewarm piddle", "whose husbands would rather will themselves to early death rather than face ...", "when he opened his eyes, of two COPs walked along the street below ..."
This just isn't a book for me. Fantastic title, though.
This just isn't a book for me. Fantastic title, though.
alexanderp's review
5.0
Read the original review here.
Apex was wonderful with allowing me to receive a free digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Aside from a stellar title, where can one start with Maurice Broaddus’ PIMP MY AIRSHIP? Well, let’s start with a synopsis:
Enter Sleepy, who wants nothing more than to remain in his (relatively) comfy apartment, keep a low profile, smoke chiba, and spit fast rhymes at the local club. Yet, when the rascal, protester Knowledge Allah stumbles on him, they soon find themselves at odds with the law and running for their lives.
Meanwhile, Sophine Jefferson lives a peaceful life of privilege as an heiress, but it all turns upside down when her father is murdered and she looks for justice, which soon finds her. All three of them soon become wrapped up in a far larger web of intrigue any bargained for, and one with long reaching consequences, not only for the city of Indianapolis, but the entire country.
Not only has Broaddus managed to create an intricate steampunk-esque alternate United States, but he has translated all of the current cultural and societal problems as well. In some ways, this may appear saddening since even in an alternate US, our problems seem inherent, but these issues are instead dealt with head on and with unflinching, courageous freedom fighters and orators who will not be denied. The cops are resisted and critiqued on their methods and corruption. Racism is challenged for being the status quo. No issue is left untouched or ignored by Broaddus.
This is only talking about the themes and issues though, we havn’t even begun to talk about the actual story. With magnificent flair, Sleepy, Allah, and Sophine are all vibrant characters whose banter left me laughing more than once and continue to push and pull against one another throughout the story. Having an all POC cast, is a refreshing change and perfect for the story that was being told, considering it puts them all in direct conflict of the oppressive forces and systems that rise to stop them.
The world building of this steampunk United States is amazing and clearly Broaddus has spent more than a little time building it and hanging out in Indianapolis of Albion. The dialogue is snappy and street smart as one would expect, which keeps the book light on its feet, despite the heavy issues that threaten to weigh it down. The alternate history of this United States is fascinating and hearing familiar names like Lincoln and James Baldwin and others only increases the appreciation for such small details.
Broaddus has managed to create what could be considered a steampunk classic in the years to come. The contemporary relevance, prose, and characterization make this a book that cannot be missed.
Apex was wonderful with allowing me to receive a free digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Aside from a stellar title, where can one start with Maurice Broaddus’ PIMP MY AIRSHIP? Well, let’s start with a synopsis:
Enter Sleepy, who wants nothing more than to remain in his (relatively) comfy apartment, keep a low profile, smoke chiba, and spit fast rhymes at the local club. Yet, when the rascal, protester Knowledge Allah stumbles on him, they soon find themselves at odds with the law and running for their lives.
Meanwhile, Sophine Jefferson lives a peaceful life of privilege as an heiress, but it all turns upside down when her father is murdered and she looks for justice, which soon finds her. All three of them soon become wrapped up in a far larger web of intrigue any bargained for, and one with long reaching consequences, not only for the city of Indianapolis, but the entire country.
Not only has Broaddus managed to create an intricate steampunk-esque alternate United States, but he has translated all of the current cultural and societal problems as well. In some ways, this may appear saddening since even in an alternate US, our problems seem inherent, but these issues are instead dealt with head on and with unflinching, courageous freedom fighters and orators who will not be denied. The cops are resisted and critiqued on their methods and corruption. Racism is challenged for being the status quo. No issue is left untouched or ignored by Broaddus.
This is only talking about the themes and issues though, we havn’t even begun to talk about the actual story. With magnificent flair, Sleepy, Allah, and Sophine are all vibrant characters whose banter left me laughing more than once and continue to push and pull against one another throughout the story. Having an all POC cast, is a refreshing change and perfect for the story that was being told, considering it puts them all in direct conflict of the oppressive forces and systems that rise to stop them.
The world building of this steampunk United States is amazing and clearly Broaddus has spent more than a little time building it and hanging out in Indianapolis of Albion. The dialogue is snappy and street smart as one would expect, which keeps the book light on its feet, despite the heavy issues that threaten to weigh it down. The alternate history of this United States is fascinating and hearing familiar names like Lincoln and James Baldwin and others only increases the appreciation for such small details.
Broaddus has managed to create what could be considered a steampunk classic in the years to come. The contemporary relevance, prose, and characterization make this a book that cannot be missed.
jonbob's review
3.0
Pimp. My. Airship. What a title. As someone with very little steampunk reading hours under my belt this was a book I was super excited to read, especially after how much I loved some of the other books put out by Apex, like SNOW OVER UTOPIA, COIL and ROSEWATER (originally published by small press Apex before being picked up by Orbit – lil piece of trivia for ya there). I didn’t fully know what to expect from PIMP MY AIRSHIP, but I was definitely along for the ride.
It tells the story of a chiba-smoking spoken word poet called Sleepy, who inadvertently becomes the face of a revolution when his performance theatre is raided by the authoritarian Indianapolis cops. Taken under the wing of a professional revolutionary known as (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah, the two of them soon find themselves on the run from one end of a retro-fitted Indianapolis to the other, in a desperate attempt to elude the powers that be. Meanwhile, young heiress Sophine Jefferson becomes embroiled in the shady world of corrupt politicians and racist businessmen who run the city, putting her on a collision course with the path of Sleepy, Knowledge Allah and the fomenting revolution.
I’ll start with the good stuff, ’cause there’s a bunch of stuff I thought was *chef’s kiss* about this book. Pimp My Airship really excels on the macro level – themes and world building. It’s a book that brazenly goes to town on the status quo, shining a bright light on the cockroaches of systemic racism, police brutality and the exploitative nature inherent in industrial capitalism. Broaddus does a great job at weaving these themes into the story and showing how all these things are part of a broader and interconnected web of systemic oppression; in Broaddus’ book the primary function of the state is to protect the interests of the wealthy and protect private property, while the City Ordained Pinkertons (COPs) exists as a supposedly neutral force that in reality acts as the violent enforcers of capital and privatised prisons exploit their overwhelmingly black inmate population for free labour. Sound familiar? Yeah.
The broad world building is cool too. Each chapter is introduced with snippets of reports from the corporate press outlets ironically called Vox Populi and Vox Dei, which give us some background context to the kind of world Sleepy, Knowledge Allah and Sophine exist in. They’re propaganda outlets which go out of their way to perform the kind of mental gymnastics often displayed in our own corporate media institutions that variously boost the voices of the powerful, justify police violence and attempt to paint white people as the ‘real victims’ of racism. One of my favourite parts of the book is the section about The Knights of the White Camelia, a real life organisation of mainly upper class white men who occupied powerful positions in government and business in the 19th century. Even though they’re the ones getting rich exploiting people in the fields and factories, sentencing people in the courthouses and pulling the levers of power in government, they see themselves as the real victims of working class and black exploitation when the oppressed make any attempt to resist. After all, when you’re blind to your own privilege, any attempt to level the playing field feels like oppression. This is handled very well in the book, showing how the powerful view the status quo as the natural order of things and any attempt to level the scales as dangerous radicalism.
Unfortunately this method of world building at times felt much too info dumpy for my tastes. These little media snippets are interesting in and of themselves and do give us as readers some wider context about the world, but too often they weren’t directly relevant to the story being told. This stuff always feels more natural and relevant to me when it’s weaved into the narrative, if the characters see it in action or speak to someone who talks about it. I’d rather not be simply told something is the case, but see it crop up as part of the story.
This is where the book is weaker in my opinion – at the micro level of character. This is very much a plot-driven story and for the first three quarters of the book the characters have very little agency. Instead they’re helplessly carried along on a wave of events happening to them and I struggled to identify any goals or motivations they were working towards, beyond simply escaping the bad things being done to them. Even then, they never seem to have any plan to get themselves out of danger, and instead are reliant on the unexpected actions of others to get them out of a tight spot. I mean obviously YMMV on this, but I’m more engaged by characters who do stuff, and it’s their actions that create drama and tension and drive the story forward by their consequences. So even though lots of stuff was happening and danger was never far away, I didn’t get a great sense of narrative tension because Sleepy and Knowledge Allah didn’t really have any goals for most of the book. Sophine was more interesting. She has plans for her life that go very awry and she makes decisions that drastically alter the course of her life; I felt like she had much more agency and a direct effect on the world around her than Sleepy and Knowledge Allah ever did, so this was a plus point in the story.
So yeah, PIMP MY AIRSHIP was a bit of a mixed bag for me; great at the broad strokes stuff, a bit weaker when you zoom in and a method of storytelling I personally just don’t have a taste for. Overall I was a bit disappointed it didn’t reach the potential it clearly has, but there are definitely things to love about it and I still think it’s definitely worth a read for those aspects.
It tells the story of a chiba-smoking spoken word poet called Sleepy, who inadvertently becomes the face of a revolution when his performance theatre is raided by the authoritarian Indianapolis cops. Taken under the wing of a professional revolutionary known as (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah, the two of them soon find themselves on the run from one end of a retro-fitted Indianapolis to the other, in a desperate attempt to elude the powers that be. Meanwhile, young heiress Sophine Jefferson becomes embroiled in the shady world of corrupt politicians and racist businessmen who run the city, putting her on a collision course with the path of Sleepy, Knowledge Allah and the fomenting revolution.
I’ll start with the good stuff, ’cause there’s a bunch of stuff I thought was *chef’s kiss* about this book. Pimp My Airship really excels on the macro level – themes and world building. It’s a book that brazenly goes to town on the status quo, shining a bright light on the cockroaches of systemic racism, police brutality and the exploitative nature inherent in industrial capitalism. Broaddus does a great job at weaving these themes into the story and showing how all these things are part of a broader and interconnected web of systemic oppression; in Broaddus’ book the primary function of the state is to protect the interests of the wealthy and protect private property, while the City Ordained Pinkertons (COPs) exists as a supposedly neutral force that in reality acts as the violent enforcers of capital and privatised prisons exploit their overwhelmingly black inmate population for free labour. Sound familiar? Yeah.
The broad world building is cool too. Each chapter is introduced with snippets of reports from the corporate press outlets ironically called Vox Populi and Vox Dei, which give us some background context to the kind of world Sleepy, Knowledge Allah and Sophine exist in. They’re propaganda outlets which go out of their way to perform the kind of mental gymnastics often displayed in our own corporate media institutions that variously boost the voices of the powerful, justify police violence and attempt to paint white people as the ‘real victims’ of racism. One of my favourite parts of the book is the section about The Knights of the White Camelia, a real life organisation of mainly upper class white men who occupied powerful positions in government and business in the 19th century. Even though they’re the ones getting rich exploiting people in the fields and factories, sentencing people in the courthouses and pulling the levers of power in government, they see themselves as the real victims of working class and black exploitation when the oppressed make any attempt to resist. After all, when you’re blind to your own privilege, any attempt to level the playing field feels like oppression. This is handled very well in the book, showing how the powerful view the status quo as the natural order of things and any attempt to level the scales as dangerous radicalism.
Unfortunately this method of world building at times felt much too info dumpy for my tastes. These little media snippets are interesting in and of themselves and do give us as readers some wider context about the world, but too often they weren’t directly relevant to the story being told. This stuff always feels more natural and relevant to me when it’s weaved into the narrative, if the characters see it in action or speak to someone who talks about it. I’d rather not be simply told something is the case, but see it crop up as part of the story.
This is where the book is weaker in my opinion – at the micro level of character. This is very much a plot-driven story and for the first three quarters of the book the characters have very little agency. Instead they’re helplessly carried along on a wave of events happening to them and I struggled to identify any goals or motivations they were working towards, beyond simply escaping the bad things being done to them. Even then, they never seem to have any plan to get themselves out of danger, and instead are reliant on the unexpected actions of others to get them out of a tight spot. I mean obviously YMMV on this, but I’m more engaged by characters who do stuff, and it’s their actions that create drama and tension and drive the story forward by their consequences. So even though lots of stuff was happening and danger was never far away, I didn’t get a great sense of narrative tension because Sleepy and Knowledge Allah didn’t really have any goals for most of the book. Sophine was more interesting. She has plans for her life that go very awry and she makes decisions that drastically alter the course of her life; I felt like she had much more agency and a direct effect on the world around her than Sleepy and Knowledge Allah ever did, so this was a plus point in the story.
So yeah, PIMP MY AIRSHIP was a bit of a mixed bag for me; great at the broad strokes stuff, a bit weaker when you zoom in and a method of storytelling I personally just don’t have a taste for. Overall I was a bit disappointed it didn’t reach the potential it clearly has, but there are definitely things to love about it and I still think it’s definitely worth a read for those aspects.
arifel's review
4.0
Strap in for smart steampunk adventure centring Black characters in an alternative Indianapolis
With its associations with Victoriana and all the implications for real-world colonialism and oppression that the period evokes, developing a well-realised Steampunk world is an activity that benefits immensely from a critical standpoint that engages with the historical oppression and racism embedded in the genre rather than simply glossing over and thereby almost certainly reproducing it. Joining work like The Black God's Drums by P. Djeli Clark and Everfair by Nisi Shawl, both of which posit alternative histories in which Black polities form and are able to challenge the technological and political dominance of white colonialism, Pimp My Airship by Maurice Broaddus takes a different approach, centring Black narratives in a world where white supremacy and marginalisation has taken a recognisable, but alt-historical turn.
The world of Pimp My Airship has already been explored fairly extensively in Broaddus' short fiction, including a story of the same title, and the Tor.com novella Buffalo Soldier (a full chronological reading list is available in the acknowledgements of this book) but the novel is accessible even if, like me, you haven't read Broaddus' prior work. It takes place in an alternate Indianapolis where the American Revolution failed: the USA is instead the United States of Albion, having never officially split from the British Isles despite having moved its capital from London to Washington D.C. This alternate history means that the Civil War also didn't take place, though slavery has been quietly abolished through the creation of machines which can work more efficiently than slaves. As you'd expect, racism and sexism are still very overtly part of the landscape and all of the main characters are grappling in some way or another with marginalisations which seek to limit the shape of their lives and ambitions.
Read the full review at Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2019/07/microreview-book-pimp-my-airship-by.html
With its associations with Victoriana and all the implications for real-world colonialism and oppression that the period evokes, developing a well-realised Steampunk world is an activity that benefits immensely from a critical standpoint that engages with the historical oppression and racism embedded in the genre rather than simply glossing over and thereby almost certainly reproducing it. Joining work like The Black God's Drums by P. Djeli Clark and Everfair by Nisi Shawl, both of which posit alternative histories in which Black polities form and are able to challenge the technological and political dominance of white colonialism, Pimp My Airship by Maurice Broaddus takes a different approach, centring Black narratives in a world where white supremacy and marginalisation has taken a recognisable, but alt-historical turn.
The world of Pimp My Airship has already been explored fairly extensively in Broaddus' short fiction, including a story of the same title, and the Tor.com novella Buffalo Soldier (a full chronological reading list is available in the acknowledgements of this book) but the novel is accessible even if, like me, you haven't read Broaddus' prior work. It takes place in an alternate Indianapolis where the American Revolution failed: the USA is instead the United States of Albion, having never officially split from the British Isles despite having moved its capital from London to Washington D.C. This alternate history means that the Civil War also didn't take place, though slavery has been quietly abolished through the creation of machines which can work more efficiently than slaves. As you'd expect, racism and sexism are still very overtly part of the landscape and all of the main characters are grappling in some way or another with marginalisations which seek to limit the shape of their lives and ambitions.
Read the full review at Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2019/07/microreview-book-pimp-my-airship-by.html
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