Hello, again!
I had previously brought up the first book in this series here (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9901.0.html), and now the sequel is out.
This time around our trio of young supervillains are leaving L.A. and heading out...INTO SPACE! :)
After the events of the last book, The Inscrutable Machine (TIM) are back in school – and bored to tears. Well, fortunately for them, Spider (the "Godmother" of supervillain crime in L.A.) has a mission for them – to investigate a mysterious, apparently human, radio transmission that originated from out near the moons of Jupiter. With Spider arranging to cover their absences from home and school, they eagerly hop into a living spaceship that Penny builds and set off into space.
As it turns out, there are humans living on and around the moons of Jupiter. And if you love steampunk, you'll love the Jovian moon colonies, who, having been cut off from Earth for many years, haven't figured out that the golden age of Victorian Mad Science (and Victorian society) actually ended some time ago. However, while they have the aesthetic, and the "aetheric" tech to match, they've also retained the worst aspects of Victorian society as well. The Callisto colony is actually a rather disturbing, Orwellian dystopia with obedience to the "automatons" (self-aware Victorian-era robots – I'd recommend checking out the Girl Genius webcomic for further details) that actually run the colony harshly enforced at every possible level, with every aspect of the residents' (prisoners?) lives highly-regulated; they're even told whom to marry, as part of a breeding regime to produce more people with mad science superpowers.
Naturally, it takes less than a day for TIM to decide that this place needs a revolution, stat! They end up bouncing between Callisto, Io, and other Jovian moons before the story's end, meeting a wide assortment of mad scientists, local heroes, and ultimately being used and betrayed by just about every person they meet; it's enough to make a young supervillain think that the "boring" L.A. superhero/supervillain scene wasn't so bad after all!
It's only $5 on Amazon Kindle (and is also available in print), so I highly recommend this book as well to the CoH community.
As per last time, their Alignments are still Rogue, but this may have counted as an Alignment Mission towards going Hero. (I actually suspect Vigilante would suit them best as they seem to enjoy palling around the villain community in Chinatown.)
Picked this up as well, the moment I saw it in my Recommended list. Nothing I can really add to your review, Janessa, except my own enjoyment of and endorsement of this book. Excellent and entertaining read - I can't wait to see where the series takes The Inscrutable Machine next...
I enjoyed the book a lot. I admit it wasn't quite as good as the first book to me, but while some of the stuff half way through started to bug me at the end the author tied up a lot of the 'loose ends' that were bugging me and made me very eager to see the next book.