Traynor’s World™ is partly in the steampunk tradition, because it’s a world colonized from Earth that lost its higher tech and is just now getting back to the age of steam and electrics but has aspirations to recover “older” advanced science. So, lots of room for invention, and there’s a scramble for power and advantage, as in the days of the robber barons and empire builders that led up to our present-day crises (social, political, and environmental). Was all that inevitable? Well, that’s where it’s fun to imagine choices and alternatives.

If you haven’t sampled steampunk individualism, dystopia, utopia, or just plain tinkering, go back to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and check out some works such as K. W. Jeter’s Morlock Night and The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (an alternative history of the Industrial Revolution). Today, Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris write Victorian spy novels with a comic flair in The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series, and Sarina Dorie caters to a younger audience with steam-powered spaceships exploring wormholes.

Traynor’s World™ shares some of the features of the steampunk genre, but it lacks the lace. It’s slightly more “modern” than that, but Jon and Kathrin have their buckles to swash nonetheless – as well as an orbiting artificial intelligence to deal with!