Floating Through Fiction

Where Airships, Dirigibles, and Adventure Take Flight in Fantasy and Steampunk

Airship (n.) – broadly, any lighter-than-air craft kept aloft by a gas-filled envelope and propelled under power, rather than left to drift like a balloon. Dirigible, from the Latin dirigere, “to steer,” is the more technical cousin of the word.

Somewhere above the clouds, an engine is always running. This collection gathers steampunk, gaslamp fantasy, and romantasy where invention is as dangerous as magic, and every airship carries more than cargo-stolen secrets, fugitives, curses passed down for a thousand years. The crews are just as varied: reluctant heiresses, hunted spies, necromancer detectives, sky pirates with something to prove. Whether the vessel is a gleaming diplomatic dirigible or a smuggler’s patched-together rig, the real cargo is always the same-danger, desire, and the kind of trust that’s hardest to earn at high altitude.

Yasmeen, mercenary captain of the airship Lady Corsair, has kept her heart as cold as steel—until the treasure hunter she once tossed to a pack of zombies turns up alive, determined to reclaim the stolen da Vinci sketch that’s the only thing he wants more than her. Their pursuit drags them into Horde-occupied Morocco, where old scores and new desire collide. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble

When a mysterious plague strips London’s vampires and werewolves of their powers, Alexia Maccon boards a dirigible north to investigate—trailing her own vanished husband to Scotland. What starts as detective work becomes a tangled mess of sabotage, scandal, and one very persistent vampire suitor. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble

Druis Avalina Llahenór guides lost souls to the afterlife—until she learns she’s part of a thousand-year-old secret, one that explains why she alone can see a silent, stormy-eyed stranger named Thorben. As a curse binds them together and a delusional commodore plots to tear down the barriers holding the island realms—and their airships—aloft, Ava must claim her own hidden past to save everyone she loves. Amazon | Apple | Barnes & Noble

A steampunk spin on Rapunzel: Persi has spent her life as a seer for the sinister organization MOTHER, hunting down others like her. When Manu Kelii—charming captain of the airship Defiant Duchess and member of the rebel Uprising—recruits her to help bring MOTHER down, Persi finally gets the chance to choose a side. Amazon | Kobo | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble

Inventor and airship mechanic Amelia Darcy crash-lands her homemade kitecycle into the airship of Tucker Gentry, the infamous “Sky Cowboy”—and finds herself racing him toward Leonardo da Vinci’s lost ornithopter to save her family’s name and fortune, with sky pirates in hot pursuit. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Barnes & Noble

Freight-dirigible pilot Elle Chance just wants to make her deliveries and study physics in peace—until her scientist father is kidnapped by Alchemists, and she’s forced into an uneasy alliance with the enigmatic Warlock Hugh Marsh. Their chase runs from Paris to Constantinople, with a war between Light and Shadow hanging in the balance. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble

Art historian Veronica Devine just wants to recover a valuable collection and move past her husband’s betrayal—until she’s saved from thieves by Luc, a marquis whose survival is bound to an enchanted family portrait. Aboard a luxury airship, cryptic messages, a clockwork automaton, and airship pirates threaten to sink their fledgling romance for good. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Barnes & Noble

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After a financial scandal costs Claire Trevelyan her home and family, she becomes den mother to a gang of London street orphans—brilliant, resourceful, and entirely out of her depth. In this installment, an airship voyage across the Atlantic goes wrong when sky pirates board the ship, forcing Claire and her wards to survive a harsh new world on nothing but wit and daring. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble

Young healer Octavia Leander is en route to her first posting when murder and sabotage strike her airship. As she’s pulled into a deadly conspiracy, she realizes the ship’s charming steward may be one of the Queen’s own assassins—and the danger reaches all the way to the crown. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Barnes & Noble

In an alternate Victorian Sheffield, Constance Haltwhistle secretly runs a boutique arms business as the “Brass Queen”—until a bumbling American spy saves her from assassins and pulls her into a hunt for a stolen invisibility serum that could spark a global war. Amazon | Kobo | Google Books | Barnes & Noble

Second place isn’t the worst thing that happens to airship racer Lily Stargazer on the last day of the 1823 Grand Prix—that comes when a stranger in harlequin motley presses a strange kaleidoscope into her hands, whispers one word, Venice, and throws himself to his death. Grieving, opium-hazed, and half in love with an exiled poet who can’t seem to stay, Lily follows her only lead. Amazon