What's Up, Doc?

Aaron Allston: Doc Sidhe (Baen Books; 1995; ISBN 0-671-87662-7; cover by David Mattingly).

Available for free online here.

I had not encountered anything by Allston before this and actually had this book on various eBook readers for a couple of years: it is available with Baen's Free Library, so I downloaded it and pretty much forgot about it. Now that I am dipping into a lot of Baen this year, I read it.

And I'm glad I did.

Harris Greene seems to be washed up. He has lost a fight, his manager has fired him, and his girlfriend has dumped him. Then his ex-girlfriend gets kidnapped by a mysterious group and while Harris is trying to rescue her he gets sent into another world, a place like Earth, down to the continents but without our powers and principalities. Instead there is a whole other society there, a kind of mix between (mostly) Celtic magic and a sort of Victorian/Steampunk level of technology. He's caught up in a war between the forces of good and order (lead by the "Doc Sidhe" of the title) and Duncan Blackletter and The Changeling.

Propeller-driven airplanes, fancy cars, airships, lifts, brick-lined streets, swordplay, golems, friends, sacrifice, true love, "the fair folk" and more. I enjoyed the book so much that even though it is from the Free Library at Baen Books, I've bought it and the sequel. I'm not sure what Allston is up to these days, but his name is on the list of authors I'm looking for when I step into a bookstore.