Elizabeth Bear: Karen Memory

I'd seen Elizabeth Bear's novel Karen Memory referred to as a "lesbian steampunk western," which made me a bit hesitant to read it because while I'm completely down with stories about lesbians, steampunk is something I can take or leave, and western may be one of the few genres I really don't much enjoy. But Bear is one of my favourite authors, and I was promised lesbians, so...

I'm glad did, because Karen Memory is a delightfully wild adventure featuring a diverse cast of outsiders foiling a plot to not only take over the fictional northwestern port town of Rapid City, but destabilise the political balance of the Pacific Rim. Western and steampunk tropes are not overwhelming, but serve as the background to the characters and their exploits.

Karen Memery, the narrator/protagonist, is an employee of Madame Damnable, who owns the Hotel Ma Cherie, a high-class house of prostitution. Madame Damnable runs her house in the fine tradition of Spider Robinson's Lady Sally, or Kage Baker's Nell Gwynne - her employees are, by the standards of the time, well paid, well treated, and happy in their profession, though Karen, like some of her associates, is saving money for a future outside the sex trade.

Madame Damnable may be a good employer, but others in the city are not, particularly Peter Bantle, who owns the dockside cribs where poorly fed, ill-treated sex workers, mostly Indigenous and Asian women, are held in captivity to service the dock trade.

The story starts off slowly, letting us get to know Karen and the other inhabitants of Hotel Ma Cherie, both the working women and the other employees necessary to keep such an enterprise functioning. But things speed up when Madame Damnable and her house give shelter to a wounded Chinese woman named Merry Lee who has rescued Priya, a young South Asian girl, from Peter Bantle's clutches - and Bantle decides to teach the women a lesson. But the women and men of Hotel Ma Cherie are more resourceful and more formidable than Bantle anticipates, and they soon discover that Bantle is up to much more than appears.

Behind the pulp-style adventure, Bear delivers a few subtle lessons in tolerance and understanding. As the plot intensifies, Karen and the other women gain allies in the form of black US Marshall Reeves and his posseman, Tomoatooah, of the Namu nation ("but you would say Comanche"). The interactions of the white characters, including Karen, and the characters of colour illustrate a range of ways to behave that signal respect and a desire to learn without appropriation or race-based assumptions.

I am very glad I decided to take the plunge and read this.