Europa

Europa is what became of Europe after the Spark. Mad science is a heritable condition here, and the people who carry it build clanks, death rays and self-aware castles faster than anyone can govern them — which is why most of the continent now answers to a single Baron who is extremely good at breaking things. In a university at Beetleburg a student called Agatha Clay is hopeless at every practical, loses her possessions constantly, and has a headache that never goes away. Phil and Kaja Foglio have been telling Girl Genius as a comic since 2000; the novels retell and extend it in prose — Agatha H. and the Airship City, and then the Clockwork Princess, the Voice of the Castle and the Siege of Mechanicsburg. The mood is gaslamp fantasy played for comedy and momentum: banter, betrayals, monsters assembled in an afternoon, and a heroine who solves problems by inventing something appalling under pressure and apologising later. Start with Agatha H. and the Airship City and read them in order. The prose versions are self-contained, and any reader who falls in is handed several thousand pages of comic to fall further into.