"Cyborg Ivy" is an epistolary Victorian steam-punk series. All of which means that it’s a story told in letters set in a very classical era that also has fantastic magical science centred around dirigibles.
The dirigibles can travel to different worlds through portals that fold space (tesseracts) and the armies have steam-powered mecha. However, everyone dresses in bowler hats and fluffy dresses. The best part of the site are the "photographs" featuring the fantastic elements side by side with the traditional ones in sepia. They’re very well done.
However, when the best part of a story is the pictures, that’s a bit of a problem for a reader. First, I personally find epistolary writing a bit of a bore—it takes a lot of work to make letters as interesting as a narrative. The biggest problem with the style is that it’s too easy to "tell" and harder to "show" and that’s mainly because in real life no one intends to "show" anything in a letter—they’re writing to someone they know about the things they want to tell them. Such a structure is not conducive to entertaining story writing, which requires actions, character and setting to be displayed to the reader.
Second, if you’re going to have letters between different people, they should sound like different people. Personality should come through, because when narrative is limited, character is everything. Unfortunately the letters I’ve read are all of a very similar rambling and effusive about the wonders of the steampunk technology. There’s not much distinction between the voices of the characters.
Third, just to make matters worse, I kept running into grammatical errors like "an" in front of a word with a consonant at the start instead of "a," words like "site" in place of "sight," etc. Some errors are forgivable, but it happened often enough to irk me. I think it’s particularly troublesome because the author has gone to great lengths to work on a Victorian-style vocabulary, and which is certainly broader than the average, and then ruins the "educated writer" effect with simple errors.
I’ve rated it three-stars "worth a look" because the pictures are indeed worth looking at, and it’s somewhat interesting trying to see someone integrate old-fashioned letter writing with science fiction terminology. However, that interest lasts about two letters, because after the interest in "neat concept" wears off and the lack of interest in the story itself takes over. Sustained interest in epistolary style writing just isn’t in the cards—there’s a reason most novels aren’t written that way anymore—and there’s nothing about this that shouts out "original and fascinating" other than the creative pictures.
I’ve never understood the recent trend towards a fascination with steampunk among some audiences—to the point that it’s becoming a genre—and this isn’t the best example of the bunch.
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