Steampunk loves its own reflection. Goggles polished, brass gleaming, empire aesthetics stripped of consequence. Court intrigue, meanwhile, likes its rot tasteful—backroom whispers, silk dresses hiding knives, power as a game clever people get to win. Elizabeth May takes both these indulgent genres and tightens the screws until the pleasure curdles. Her work doesn’t dismantle the tropes by rejecting them. She overdrives them. She makes them tell the truth.
May’s Falconer trilogy is where the real work happens, and anyone who only remembers it as “YA steampunk with fae” has either forgotten the books or never read them properly. Set in an alternate nineteenth-century Edinburgh, the series opens with swagger—gadgets, aristocratic salons, secret orders—but it doesn’t stay decorative for long. The city becomes a machine that chews through women, servants, and anyone unlucky enough to exist at the overlap of class and power. Steampunk isn’t aesthetic here; it’s infrastructure.
Aileana Kameron, her heroine, is not a plucky rebel cutout. She’s traumatised, obsessive, violent when cornered, and socially trapped inside the very elite that benefits from her silence. May refuses the genre’s favourite lie: that rebellion is empowering by default. Aileana’s resistance is messy, compromised, and constantly surveilled. Even her weapons feel like extensions of control rather than liberation. The corsets, the automata, the modified machines—they don’t symbolise freedom. They show how deeply the system has colonised the body.
May understands that swagger is just confidence borrowed from power, and she keeps asking who paid the interest.
Court intrigue in these books isn’t a chessboard for clever minds. It’s a hierarchy lubricated by denial. The fae courts mirror the human ones so closely it’s uncomfortable: beauty masking brutality, tradition standing in for consent, cruelty reframed as necessity. May doesn’t romanticise the fae as wild alternatives to human corruption. She writes them as another ruling class with better PR and sharper teeth. The treaties, bargains, and ceremonies are all about containment—of women, of anger, of truth.
What really twists the knife is how May handles gendered violence. She never dresses it up as character development. The damage Aileana carries doesn’t magically transmute into strength; it limits her, isolates her, and shapes her choices in ways the narrative refuses to celebrate. This is where a lot of YA fantasy blinks. May doesn’t. She writes rage as corrosive and justified at the same time. She writes survival as something that costs, every single day.
Her prose style supports that refusal. It’s fast, sharp, sometimes breathless, but never careless. Action scenes don’t function as release valves. They’re accelerants. Every fight tightens the social net instead of breaking it. And beneath the pace, there’s a persistent awareness of who is watching, who is recording, who will rewrite the story once the blood is cleaned up. May is acutely aware of narrative as power—who gets remembered as a hero, who gets filed away as collateral.
It’s also worth paying attention to what she doesn’t do. She doesn’t resolve systemic violence with a throne swap. She doesn’t pretend the right ruler fixes the structure. Even when crowns fall, the logic of the court survives, hungry for new bodies. That’s a bleak position for a genre that thrives on restoration. It’s also an honest one.
The reason the tropes squeal is simple: May doesn’t use them for comfort, and she doesn’t let the reader stand safely outside the machine.
Later collaborations like Seven Devils and To Cage a God take these instincts into space opera territory, but the psyche stays consistent. May is obsessed with power that calls itself order, rebellion that gets branded as chaos, and the thin narrative line between the two. She’s not interested in balance. She’s interested in exposure.
So if you come to Elizabeth May for steampunk swagger and courtly cleverness, she’ll give them to you—then force you to watch as they grind up the people they were designed to impress. The genres don’t survive unmarked. Neither should you.
