A fun and high-octane dieselpunk adventure set in a world where life is precariously clinging to high mountains... because the lowlands are dominated by giant insects
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Zham Sa-Yool has a problem. Several problems, actually. He is a reprobate, a cad, a rake and an excellent pilot. He also really can’t pay his bar bills, which means when he goes to town on behalf of his sister, he often winds up in one bad situation or another. His latest visit to a bar winds up with a potential recruit for his sister’s mercenary company, and a whole lot of trouble. And, it seems, a lead to a job that will take the Last Stop and its air wing to the lowlands for a payday that could make their money problems go away... if the competition, and the giant insects, don’t get them first.
This is the world, and the story of Django Wexler’s Last Stop.
Zham’s world is not quite our own, or it is not recognizably our own, although it feels like a dieselpunk 1930s-era level of technology. Airplanes, tommy guns, sky pirates, two-fisted action and adventure, a lot of the trappings one might find in, say, an Indiana Jones movie, or the Phantom movie from the 1990s, or TV series such as Bring 'Em Back Alive and Tales of the Golden Monkey. The emphasis is on high-octane action and adventure, narrow escapes, daredevil escapes, twists and turns of the plot, and of course deadly enemies.
Wexler takes this well-worn chassis, freshens it up, and makes it his own with a couple of innovations. First off, the novel has a modern sensibility and representation as far as gender and queerness. The stock characters often found in this sort of fiction are here, somewhat, but even in the names such as Zham’s (and his physical description), Wexler reaches for more and broader models of characters. Also, the novel is unapologetic in having queer characters, and women who break, and are far more diverse than, the stereotypes they are often relegated to in works of this type. So we get a modern, diverse cast of characters for Wexler’s setup.
Next, the world. Human civilization has retreated to mountaintops and high places because of the bugs below “The layer”. What has happened to cause this is not clear (it is not clear whether an event happened to do this; reading between the lines, I get the sense that it did), but below a certain altitude, giant insects (defying laws of physics) dominate the landscape. These bugs are mindless and deadly. But they are also useful, since certain species of bug can be harvested for fuel to provide a magical lift for airplanes. Humans have to stay high and stay flying in order for civilization to continue, and occasionally delve down to get more bug blood. But no one can LIVE down there, surely.
Or can they? The Last Stop team (led by Quendra, Zham’s sister and apparently once a military hero), who are deep in debt and on their last legs, take a commission to transport a scientist to what appears to be a base below the layer, in a hidden valley. If such a place exists, a place the bugs can’t get to, it would be a boon and a treasure beyond price. What the crew of the Last Stop find, however, is a nest of intrigue and conflict, instead... and of course, as you might expect, bugs.
As interesting as the hints of culture and society that we get are, the real focus, again, is on fun action and adventure in a world constructed by Wexler to allow dogfighting, raucous action against hordes of insects, intrigue, adventure, twists and turns, and a dieselpunk aesthetic without much of the baggage that books set in the actual era on Earth would suffer. The substitution of the bugs for some of the usual tropes of the era (which often involve some rather unpleasant colonial and third-world settings, opponents and situations) also helps remove some of the sting out of such works. The bugs are, to all appearances and effects, a faceless and inhuman menace, but they are an environmental opponent. The real conflict is between factions of people seeking power and control, with the Last Stop crew caught in the middle of it.
Last Stop ends with the end of a mission, and with the crew in a place where they can have more adventures, continue to untangle the mystery, and deal with the fallout of what they found underneath the layer. I listened to this book in audio, and the production is top notch. What’s more, this sort of action adventure in an audiobook format harkens a bit back to old radio serials. It’s not written explicitly in that format and style, but it feels adjacent to it.
To be clear, look again at the cover. Airplanes and giant insects. This IS a novel where you get exactly what it says on the tin. If that cover interests you, then you want to read or listen to this book.
Besides the pulp adventures mentioned above, Last Stop puts me in mind of a number of works where traveling the skies is the only way to get around. The RPG Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies, for instance, relies on islands floating in the sky, where going too low can be absolutely deadly. Curtis Craddock’s Risen Kingdoms series, starting with An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, focuses on a similar science fantasy, with more emphasis on the fantasy approach, with islands in an endless sky. Jeff Carlson’s Plague Year is a straight near-future SF novel where the surviving human population has to live on mountains because a deadly nanotech plague exists at elevations below ten thousand feet. And of course, the ultimate pulp RPG world of Crimson Skies. There is a lot that has been done in this space, but I do think that Last Stop shows how to go forward with this aesthetic and chassis of a world in a new, inclusive way that keeps up the fun, pulse-pounding adventure. In a world and time where a brief sojourn from reality is on the menu, a trip to the world of Last Stop, be it in ebook or audio, seems to me perfectly suited to that.
Highlights:
- Diverse and rich cast of characters
- Fun and fresh Dieselpunk adventure without the baggage
- You get exactly what the cover promises
Reference: Wexler, Django. Last Stop [Podium Publishing, 2024].
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
