Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris
Saturday, April 30, 2011 at 5:08PM 
Published by Harper Voyager on April 26, 2011
Phoenix Rising is the first in a series of steampunk novels featuring The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. I’m not a big follower of the steampunk “movement,” nor do I go out of my way to read this science fiction subgenre, but Phoenix Rising sounded even quirkier than most steampunk so I decided to give it a try. It turned out to be moderately entertaining but less interesting than I thought it might be.
The novel starts with field agent Eliza Braun rescuing the Ministry’s archivist, Wellington Books, from a cell in Antarctica, where he was being held by the House of Usher. Braun disobeyed orders by rescuing him; she was supposed to execute him to assure that his knowledge didn’t fall into evil hands. To punish her transgression, the Ministry’s director, Basil Sound, reassigns her to the archives (an assignment that does not permit her to indulge her passion for dynamite), where she must serve under Books’ tutelage. When Books tasks Braun with filing unsolved cases, Braun decides it would be more fun to solve them. In particular, she wants to take on a case that her former partner had been investigating before his admission to an asylum. She enlists Books’ help and, working on their own (without the Ministry’s knowledge or support), they attempt to infiltrate The Phoenix Society, a secret organization whose members conspire to restore the faded glory of the British Empire. Their self-assigned mission provides an excuse for the novel’s various fights and chases, as well as constant bickering (and thinly-concealed desire) between Braun and Books.
One of the charms of steampunk is inventive gadgetry; surprisingly little of that turns up in this novel, and the mechanical devices that finally appear are unoriginal. Much of the novel seems familiar: from the “difference engine” to serrated blades that extend from carriage wheels, from a secret society bent on world domination to Dickensian street urchins, a fair amount of this novel has been done before. Even The Phoenix Society’s orgy scene seems like a pale replica of Eyes Wide Shut. With the exception of that scene and some other references to passionate encounters, the novel resembles an episode of the old British television series The Avengers.
Despite its setting in time and territory, Phoenix Rising is not written in the Victorian prose style that characterizes many steampunk novels. I imagine some readers prefer reading modern English but it somehow seems untrue to the steampunk mystique. The novelists’ writing style is adequate to the task but it isn’t exceptional. I give the writers credit for telling a fun story, one that held my interest, and for creating a couple of winning characters in Eliza Braun and Wellington Books. The novel’s end sets up the next in the series; I’ll leave it to others to read it. This one wasn’t bad but it never rose above ordinary. I would recommend it only to true devotees of steampunk.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS