Leviathan Themes

None of our characters are really ones to sit around talking or thinking about their friendly feelings for one another, so in Leviathan, we see evidence of friendship mainly through actions. There...

So many lies, so much deceit, and secrets everywhere. No really—every major character in this book has at least one thing they don't want other folks to know about. Alek and Deryn are lying to mo...

Leviathan is a steampunky alternate history set in the summer of 1914, during the build up to, and first days of, World War I—so we're not stretching things a bit to say that warfare is on everyb...

Most of the overt focus on gender in Leviathan stems from Deryn's disguising herself as a boy in order to fly in the British Air Service. Deryn reflects quite a bit on the unfairness of this: she's...

While gender issues are expressed most overtly through Deryn's experience, we see other identity issues mostly from Alek's point-of-view. Dude has some serious identity crises going on: you might s...

Ideas about nature, natural philosophy, and Darwinism are huge in Leviathan. After all, one of the sides in the fight calls themselves Darwinists. Don't get the concepts of Darwinism described in t...

The Prince and the Pauper it is not, but Leviathan does feature two protagonists from vastly different societies and social classes. Most of our reflections on society and class come from good old...

Okay, so if you look at a helpful map of Allied versus Central powers in World War I, you'll see that the Darwinist (Allied) countries and Clanker (Central) nations are all kind of mixed together,...

We don't really need to tell you that Deryn and Alek are both pretty skilled at handling their respective war machines, because they will quite happily tell you themselves. We guess there are worse...