Alright, I’ve read too much high fantasy and epic fantasy in this Martha Wells Book Club. I need something more fun, more adventurous, more teens-getting-into-trouble. It’s also been a long time since I picked up anything steampunk. Tordotcom has been re-releasing Martha Wells’ back catalogue, and in May 2025 they put out an omnibus of her only two young adult novels, Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World. As Reactor’s resident YA connoisseur, I was eager to dive into these novels, and oh my god did they exceed my expectations.
Emilie’s adventures begin with a mistake. Or, really, they begin with an argument. After their parents died, Emilie and her brothers were sent to live with their aunt and uncle. Years later, her older brother took off to become a sailor. Emilie is left behind to become the repository for all of Uncle Yeric’s patriarchal bullshit. Every day, she feels her world getting smaller and smaller as more choices are taken away. Finally, she can bear his condescension and accusations no longer and she runs away. Her plan is to stowaway on a ship that will take her to the town where her cousin runs a school and become a teacher or something. Whatever. It doesn’t matter as long as she gets away from her uncle. The night she tries to sneak on board, she gets caught up in a pirate attack and ends up on the Sovereign, a “magic underwater steamship,” aka an airship capable of riding aether currents. Aboard the vessel is Lord Engal, Miss Marlende, Dr. Barshion, the crew, and Daniel, an apprentice sorcerer. They’re joined by Kenar, a strange human-like being with deep blue skin covered in patches of scales and fur. He’s Cirathi, one of the species who lives where the ship is headed: the Hollow World.
The Jules Verne references are plentiful in this novel. It’s explained better in the second book, but basically our world is one of many worlds that can be accessed by traveling aether currents. There is at least one world below Emilie’s world, and, as we learn in the sequel, at least two above, although there are likely more on either side. The Hollow World is below Emilie’s world, but even though it can be accessed via a volcano or deep sea fissure, it’s not inside the Earth. Marlende’s team is going to the Hollow World to rescue another team of scientist adventurers. They’d met the Cirathi, got into trouble, and sent Kenar and another human (who tragically died on the return journey) back for help.
Once in the Hollow World, things are more complicated than the team realized. Miss Marlende is searching for her father, Dr. Marlende. As they sail over the vast sea, they pass strange predators, uninhabited islands, and underwater cities. But neither the Cirathi nor the humans are anywhere to be seen. Eventually they encounter another humanoid species that can live both on land and in water. Queen Tath-alare is locked in an ongoing conflict with defectors. She strongarms the humans into joining her cause by holding the crew hostage and forcing Lord Engal to join her army with his airship. But they’re not the only ones trapped down there by her politics. Dr. Marlende and the Cirathi were also caught in her web. Lord Ivers, whose men attacked the ship in the beginning of the book, has also snuck into the Hollow World and made a deal with the queen. He wants the fame and fortune that comes with discovering a new world, and is willing to trade the lives of everyone else to get it. It takes all of Emilie’s strength and bravery to take him down and help her new friends escape the queen’s clutches.
I wonder how much of The Hollow World was stuff Wells couldn’t fit into the Raksura books, because it feels awfully apiece of the Three Worlds. I kept expecting to see a sealing or waterling turn up. Heaven help us all if Pearl and Queen Tath-alare ever had to engage in diplomatic relations. The world of The Sky World feels unlike anything else I’ve seen thus far from Wells. It’s a strange, unsettling place. Maybe it was just me, but I never could get a sense of what the world looked like in this book. Not a clue what that mixed up land or Hyacinth looked like. I could picture everything about the world in the first book, but in the second I was totally lost.
Speaking of Emilie and the Sky World, this book starts immediately after the end of the first. Emilie is back in her world, with Lord Ivers handed off to the magistrates to face charges and the Marlendes returning to their home in Meneport. Daniel, who is only a couple years older than Emilie, tags along with her to her cousin Karthea’s boarding school in Silk Harbor, a town not far from Meneport. Happily, Emilie has a job now working as Miss Marlende’s secretary—even if she has no idea what the job entails—and isn’t consigned to spend the rest of her days herding children. The next day, Daniel takes Emilie to visit Professor Abindon, a grumpy, pragmatic older woman. Although Emilie could attend university if she wanted and continue her aetheric education, Abindon grew up in an era when women weren’t allowed in higher education, something that hasn’t stopped her from being one of the smartest people in whatever room she’s in.
Abindon is in a tizzy, having discovered a hole in the aether currents but getting no response from the Marlendes (they were captured by merpeople at the time). The three of them head back to the Marlendes to alert them, and things go sideways almost immediately. News of their exploits has hit the papers, and Emilie’s family reunion is ruined by the arrival of her awful Uncle Yeric and her stubborn brother Efrain, who is about a year younger than her. With the help of her new and politically powerful friends, she temporarily gets him off her back. Efrain, on the other hand, stows away on the Sovereign when they sail it up to the hole in the sky. (Lord Engal says with all exasperation, “So it runs in the family, does it?”)
They end up finding a mostly abandoned ship from another aetheric plane and its sole inhabitant, a multi-limbed figure that communicates through text. Disruptions in the aether currents drop them onto a world built from pieces of other worlds where another team of scientists have been stranded for the last year. And, as they soon realize, there are two other entities in the area, beings from another aetheric plane who can possess others and force them to do their bidding. They can also manipulate the minds of humans they aren’t possessing. As in the first book, Emilie goes on a big journey with her companions, this time her brother and the creature from the ship she dubs Hyacinth. They need to rescue their party from the other party who is being controlled by one of the two hostile entities. Also like the first book, there is death, tragedy, and hard conversations. They manage to survive and return Hyacinth to its family before descending through the aether currents back to their own world.
What always frustrated me with steampunk was how white (and cisallohet) its view of the Victorian era was. The books were often framed from the perspective of the colonizers. The only real social issues were sexism against women and poverty, but oh well, can’t really do anything about it. I was so pleased with how Wells deconstructs the worst aspects of steampunk with this duology. Even just having Emilie have dark brown skin and curly hair pushes back against steampunk tropes. This world has sexism and classism for sure—everything involving Emilie and her uncle and brother Efrain is wrapped up in misogyny and the patriarchy—but the characters themselves have built a community where those issues don’t exist. Characters under the nonbinary umbrella exist, as do characters who are otherwise queer, and no one has a problem with it. (I’m half convinced Emilie’s interest in her friend Porcia, who we never meet, is romantic.)
It’s unclear what the political system is in Emilie’s world. We know they have a merchant navy, but not who’s in charge of society, how it’s structured, or even what it’s called (the people are Menean, but that’s all we’re told). Colonization certainly exists, given Lord Ivers’ interest in the Hollow World and the way Emilie reacts to the people there. She’ll have some initial problematic thought, acknowledge that she’s being uncharitable, and recenter herself in acceptance. For example, when she meets Kenar, she recognizes that her initial reaction of horror at his appearance is wrong. “He doesn’t look monstrous… He looks like this is how he’s supposed to look.”
In the sequel, much of the underlying moral lesson is about what to do with difficult family members. From her older brother Erin, Emilie thought her only way out was running away, and she didn’t stop to think about what message that sent to the other brothers she left behind. She and Efrain spent so long talking at each other instead of to each other that they default to bad faithing every interaction. Her relationship with him mirrors that of Professor Abindon and Miss Marlende. At one point Emilie notes about the two women, “She thought the professor was just being sarcastic out of nerves, and not meaning to aim it at anyone in particular. But it was always easier to see that sort of thing when you were standing outside looking on, than when you were one of the people involved.” It takes Emilie a while longer to realize the same thing is true about herself and Efrain. Wells doesn’t try to wrap these relationships up in a tidy bow. The characters all come around to each other by the end, but peace is well-earned. The characters all grow with each other and own up to the harm they caused. Wells doesn’t insist that blood is thicker than water or that Emilie must forgive someone who hasn’t done the work of apologizing, but she does allow room for not cutting people off entirely who might eventually come around. She leaves room for nuance, for teaching kids to decide for themselves what they’re willing to tolerate and when to step back.
The Emilie Adventures is a strong contender for a place in my top 3 favorite Martha Wells books. The vibes were reminiscent of Rachel Hartman and Diana Wynne Jones. Emilie isn’t the typical Wells’ protagonist. She’s spunky and daring, but also behaves like a real teenager. She knows her limits, from when she can push past them to when she can’t. The nods to queerness, the majority of the cast including Emilie being brown, the way Wells deconstructs the patriarchy and shows readers that there are other ways of organizing society, all of it is engaging stuff. I wish we’d gotten more from this series. I could see this world going on for several more books, easily. This would be so fun as a streaming adaptation aimed at young adults. I loved everything about this series. What a joy to read!
Next up in the book club, we’re finally getting to the main event: Murderbot! Y’all have a few more weeks to catch up with the first season of the Apple TV+ show before we deep dive into the books, starting with All Systems Red, of course.
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All Systems Red
When you said you’d be reading these next for the MW book club, I wasn’t feeling it, being a bit burnt out on YA and never having been a big steampunk fan. But this review has stirred some interest for me.
I adored YA, but steampubk was never my favorite subgenre. This is definitely worth it. Worth giving it a try!