All of this is rendered with Walton’s usual power and beauty, establishing firmly that both Patricias are valid, fully realized women with stories worth knowing. The alternate-history elements grow stronger as the stories progress, yet it’s this haunting character complexity that ultimately holds the reader captive to the tale.

Within the sphere of steampunk there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless “neo-­Victorian” novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness. In the same vein as Kay Ken­yon’s “A Thousand Perfect Things” and Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, here comes Marie Brennan’s THE TROPIC OF SERPENTS (Tor, $25.99), Book 2 of the fictional memoirs of Lady Isabella Trent, a well-born alterna-Englishwoman who braves war, ­nature and propriety in pursuit of her passion for naturalism. Though Lady Trent is prevented from joining the pre-eminent scientific societies of her era because of her gender, she’s well on her way to achieving fame anyway, as the book’s frame narration implies. (The older Trent describing these events notes that her memoirs are quite popular.) This is probably because she’s chosen to focus her formidable intellect on cataloging and understanding the world’s dragons.

That alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain a fantasy series, though, so in this second Lady Trent outing (after “A Natural History of Dragons”), we follow her to Eriga, Brennan’s stand-in for the African continent. There she and her companions, including a young runaway heiress who also wants to devote her life to science, become embroiled in local politics. This portion of the story is a little slow, in part because the heroine is forced to isolate herself when she menstruates per local rules. This means that after a promising opening in which mysterious antagonists steal the formula for preserving dragon bones, there’s a long lull in which Lady Trent meets with this or that important personage to gain support for her cause. Eventually, however, the action resumes as Lady Trent and her party are sent into dangerous territory on a quest for dragon eggs. A set of lovely illustrations, maybe meant to evoke Darwin’s texts, accompanies this quest.

Even when the action resumes, however, it’s all surprisingly unengaging. This may be a flaw of the medium and not the work itself. The problem lies in the need to keep the era recognizably Victorian, when really, it shouldn’t be. Actual Victorian mores and politics were a reaction to a specific series of historical events, technological and scientific developments, and ethical trends in which the commodification of people was de rigueur. In “The Tropic of Serpents” (as in similar neo-Victorian works), these ugly bits of real history are elided. There’s little mention here of an international slave trade, no British Raj. There’s some space allotted to a push by Western powers to get access to the iron of other lands, but this is relevant only in how it threatens the protagonist’s goals: Properly treated, dragon bone is stronger than iron. She fears a speculative run that could wipe out the beasts. In a way, this illustrates the niggling problem with neo-Victorian fiction. That Isabella frets so obsessively about conservationism while the nation around her ratchets toward war is ­actually spot on as an example of a colonizer’s patronizing attitude — but not enough actual colonialism exists in this world to support that attitude. And meanwhile the story’s focus on the liberation of only wealthy, white and otherwise highly privileged women ignores the grassroots-driven, labor-movement-inflected struggle that actually took place in our own world’s England. All of this actually serves to emphasize what’s been left out of these idealized Victorian worlds, and trivialize the struggles and complexities that made the era fascinating in real life.

Which is fine, for readers who aren’t especially interested in engaging with those complexities. In that case, the story is exactly what it says on the tin: a rollicking adventure in which women wearing unnerving amounts of underwear tromp through jungles on dragon-hunting safaris. Really, that should be more than enough for just about everyone.

The most praiseworthy thing that can be said about Daniel Price’s novel THE FLIGHT OF THE SILVERS (Blue Rider, $27.95) is that it borrows from the best. There’s something admirably audacious in the way Price attempts to blend superhero comics, portal quest fantasies, science fictional “other Earths,” thrillers and Hollywood summer tent-pole films. All of these things can be entertaining on their own, but any attempt to put them together stands a solid chance of turning into a jumbled mess even in the most skilled hands. Price’s book could have been worse, but not by much.