Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is the first volume of a new series of young adult novels. Leviathan is set in an alternate steampunk past, in which the powers of the world are divided into “Clankers” ,who favour huge, steam-powered walking war-machines; and “Darwinists”, whose hybrid “beasties” can stand in for airships, steam-trains, war-ships, and subs (inclusing a giant squid/octopus hybrid called the kraken that can seize whole warships and drag them down).

Set on the eve of WWI, the story’s two main characters are Aleks, the incognito orphan of the freshly assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Deryn, a Scots girl who has dressed in boys’ clothes to join Britain’s Darwinist air-corps.

Leviathan is, (of course) a floating ecosystem a quarter-mile long, made up of whales, bats, bees, six-legged hydrogen-sniffing dogs, and all manner of beasties that make her the meanest thing in the sky.

Filled with gripping air and land-battles, political intrigue and danger, science and madness, Leviathan is part Island of Dr Moreau, part Patrick O’Brien. And to top it all off, the volume is lavishly illustrated with fabulous ink-drawings of the best scenes from the book, executed in high Victorian style by Keith Thompson.

Leviathan is available now at amazon.com

(info via Boing Boing)