One of the formative classics of steampunk from 1987, back when "steampunk" was just a vague, exciting frontier of alternate history and the scientific exuberance of the Victorian era... before it became a codified fashion statement and set of familiar tropes.

(Note: I'm of course grateful to Angry Robot Books for republishing Infernal Devices in both paper and ebook, but I certainly hope the spent more time proofreading the paper version than the ebook edition that I read. Most of the OCR artifacts have been cleaned up -- though there is one instance of the word "dog" being rendered as "clog" -- but the number of spots in which em-dashes obviously present in the original have been omitted bespeak a haphazard copyediting unworthy of a professional and dedicated label.)