More like Operation: Endgame
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- George Dower / Infernal Devices
series3 books1987
similar bysteampunk19th century+4 more
K. W. Jeter's trilogy, whose 1987 original helped coin the term 'steampunk,' follows clockmaker George Dower as he's dragged into escalating Victorian conspiracies involving mechanical devices, secret societies, and inventions that shouldn't work but do. Infernal Devices, Fiendish Schemes, and Grim Expectations mix dark comedy with the gears-and-brass aesthetic the series helped establish before it had a name.
- The Bookman Universe
series6 books2010
similar bypolitical intriguesteampunk19th centurybritish isles+2 more
- Hunchback Assignments / Modo: Mission Clockwork
series5 books2009
similar byadventuroussteampunk19th century+1 more
- Newbury & Hobbes Investigations
series23 books2008
similar bysteampunk19th centurybritish isles
George Mann's steampunk series follows Sir Maurice Newbury, an occult investigator working for the crown in an alternate, more mechanized Victorian Britain, and his assistant Veronica Hobbes, as they take on cases blending supernatural threats with the era's mechanical marvels. The Affinity Bridge, the opening novel, entangles them with a crashed automaton airship and a spreading plague of the reanimated; later books deepen Newbury's struggle with addiction and Veronica's search for her institutionalized sister. It combines detective procedural with alternate-history steampunk London.
- Temeraire
series48 books2006
similar byadventurous19th century+2 more
Temeraire is a series of nine alternate history fantasy novels written by American author Naomi Novik. The novels follow the adventures of Captain William Laurence and his dragon, the eponymous Temeraire, and reimagine events of the Napoleonic Wars with "an air force of dragons, manned by crews of aviators". His Majesty's Dragon, the first entry in the series, won the Compton Crook Award in 2007 and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel the same year. Temeraire: In the Service of the King, an omnibus volume collecting the first three novels, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2007. Temeraire was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2017.
- Clockwork Century Universe
series8 books2008
similar byadventuroussteampunk19th century+1 more
Boneshaker opens Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century, a steampunk alternate history that reimagines Seattle after a mining disaster releases a toxic gas that turns people into the walking dead, forcing survivors behind a massive wall around the poisoned city. The series expands out from that starting point across the American Civil War era, following different characters and cities in each book (Clementine, Dreadnought, Ganymede, The Inexplicables, Fiddlehead, Jacaranda) rather than one continuous plot. Boneshaker was nominated for the Nebula Award and won the 2010 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
- The Leviathan Trilogy
series3 books2009
similar byadventuroussteampunkeuropescience fiction+1 more
Set in an alternate First World War, Leviathan splits the belligerents into Clankers, who fight with mechanical walkers, and Darwinists, who fight with fabricated living creatures built from spliced DNA. Scott Westerfeld follows a British girl disguised as a boy to serve on a living airship and the exiled heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne as their paths collide, continuing across Behemoth and Goliath. Keith Thompson's illustrations are integral to all three books, alternating text chapters with illustrated sequences.
- The Difference Engine
William Gibson & Bruce Sterlingstandalone novel1990
similar bypolitical intriguesteampunk19th centurybritish islesscience fiction
The computer age arrives a century early with Babbage's perfection of his 'analytical engine'. The industrial revolution is accelerated by the development of steam-driven cybernetic 'Engines'. An advanced Great Britain prepares to better the world's lot. An example of the 'steampunk' sub-genre of the cyberpunk movement.
- Sally Lockhart
series4 books1985
similar by19th centurybritish isles+1 more
Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart quartet follows a resourceful, unconventional heroine navigating Victorian London - a sharpshooting, mathematically gifted young orphan who builds an improbable career as a financial consultant against the era's expectations for women. The Ruby in the Smoke opens with Sally investigating her father's death and a mysterious jewel; the following novels widen out into fraud, opium-trade crime, and international intrigue, tracking Sally's evolving relationships, including with the journalist Daniel Goldberg, across four Victorian-set mysteries.
- Wolves Chronicles
series12 books1962
completed
similar byadventurous19th centurybritish isles+1 more
The Wolves Chronicles is Joan Aiken's long-running alternate-history series for young readers, set in a nineteenth-century England ruled by the Stuart dynasty and beset by wolves that have migrated across a Channel land-bridge. It opens with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, in which two girls outwit a scheming governess sent to ruin them, and expands over twelve books into a sprawling saga of orphans, conspiracies, and journeys through a Britain quite unlike the real one. Aiken kept adding to the same timeline across more than four decades, including later prequels set before the first book.
- His Dark Materials Universe
universe13 books1995
Start hereHis Dark Materials · Start here
similar byadventurous+1 more
In a world like ours and unlike it, every human soul walks outside the body in the shape of an animal — a daemon, who speaks, who cannot be lied to, and who settles into one fixed form only when childhood ends. This is the country of His Dark Materials: a company of parallel worlds across which an invisible dust of consciousness drifts down upon the waking mind; where a Church that calls itself the Magisterium would sooner sever a child's soul than let that Dust be understood; and where a golden instrument, the alethiometer, answers true questions for anyone with the patience to read it. Philip Pullman's design stands in two trilogies and a scatter of shorter tales. His Dark Materials — Northern Lights (published in America as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass — carries Lyra Belacqua from the rooftops of a shadow Oxford across the borders between worlds. The Book of Dust returns to that same territory: La Belle Sauvage looks back to Lyra as an infant carried through a great flood, while The Secret Commonwealth follows her grown and less certain into adulthood, with a concluding volume closing the arc. Around them sit slim companion books — Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine — and Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation, made with Pullman's blessing. The register is grave and luminous at once, its title lifted from Milton and its quarrel drawn from Blake: a story that takes the side of curiosity, love, and the physical world against any authority that would forbid them. It reads as adventure — armoured bears, aeronauts, knife-cut windows between skies — yet reasons like philosophy. Begin with Northern Lights / The Golden Compass and read the first trilogy through before turning to The Book of Dust, which deepens everything the first has already made you feel.
- The Adventures of Arabella Ashby
series5 books2016
similar byadventuroussteampunk19th centuryscience fiction
- Oswald Bastable
series5 books1971
part of Moorcock's Multiverse
similar byadventuroussteampunkscience fiction
Oswald Bastable follows an Edwardian-era British soldier flung into a series of alternate futures where the First World War never happened, opening with The Warlord of the Air (1971). Across the trilogy he drifts between rival empires and airship wars, an early and influential example of what would later be called steampunk. Michael Moorcock's A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy sits within his wider multiverse of linked worlds and recurring avatars of the Eternal Champion.
- Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
series26 books1991
similar bybritish isles+2 more
Outlander is a series of historical fantasy novels by American author Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon began the first volume of the series, Outlander, in the late 1980s; it was published in 1991. She has published nine out of a planned ten volumes. The ninth novel in the series, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, was released on November 23, 2021.
