Siobhan Carroll Books In Order

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Siobhan Carroll is a science Fiction author specializing in British literature from 1750 to 1850. It was a tumultuous historical period known as the Romantic Century and recent science fiction and fantasy.

Carroll is interested in how literature has shaped people’s understanding of community, empire and the natural world.

Her debut novel, An Empire of Air and Water, describes the complex relationship between science, literature and exploration during the Development of the British Empire.

Spaces like the atmosphere and the north pole were at one time inaccessible to humans, but during the romantic century, some inventions brought the spaces within reach of humans.

For He Can Creep

Christopher Smart is a nineteenth-century poet committed to St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, believing God had visioned him to write the Divine Poem. However, years back, he bargained with Satan, and the devil has come for his pay- a poem that will bring about the apocalypse.

Saving Smarts’ soul and the world at large is in the hands of Jeoffry, the poet’s cat with demon fighting powers and Satan would be foolish to underestimate. However, one night the devil comes to have a conversation with Jeoffry and unluckily, the cat is no wiser than a human. Satan has come to demand that Smart finally write and deliver his poem.

Jeoffry is the champion of the streets when it comes to tormenting demons and imps, and he currently has a new challenge. He has to resist Satan’s blandishments, fight and maybe defeat him. But how can one do all that?

Jeoffry is clever and tricky with friends like him, and Christopher Smart values him as a loyal friend. The cat has to save Christopher’s soul from the devil’s machinations.

The two have differences in how they correct their mistakes and how the cat can fight with claws. But, can sharp claws and teeth be enough to win the battle against Satan and save a soul?

The story is entirely told from the cat’s point of view, where Jeoffry the cat belongs to a poet confined to a ridiculous asylum in 18th century Great Britain. Jeoffry constantly fights the demons tormenting the inmates at the asylum. However, when Satan shows up with a plan of using the poet’s abilities to end the world, Jeoffry might be overmatched.

Siobhan draws her readers in with the insightful storyline, keeping them hooked to the end. While telling the story from Jeoffry’s point of view, she captures the elusive essence of cats.

Jeoffry knows he’s a good cat and a bold and pretty fellow. There are numerous marvelous elements in the story, including Turkish Delight. When he is tricked into a bargain with the devil, Jeoffry has no choice but to reconsider his life choices and realize that battles must be fought, especially when a human’s soul is in danger.

Jeoffry is an annoyed, self-centred, feline warrior who takes out mice and rats, demons and Satan, and anyone who crosses him. He doesn’t mind about the apocalypse but gets angry even if anything crosses him, harms his human or cheats him out of treats. The logic of cats fighting Satan to save a human’s soul is unique and entertaining.

For He Can Creep is a short story about a traditional face-off with the devil but a cat twist inside it. Cat lovers will find the story more exciting, but that doesn’t mean non-cat lovers can’t enjoy the novel.

Jeoffry is a cat of his kind and has all the qualities you can expect to find in a cat. The author appears to have good knowledge of cats with how she gives fine details about them.

An Empire of Air and Water

Planetary spaces like the poles, the oceans and the subterranean regions caught the British imperial imagination. These spaces are inaccessible, intangible and inhospitable in what Siobhan calls atopias, and they exist beyond the boundaries of familiar and inhabited areas.

In the eighteenth century, these geographic outliers were conceived as the natural limits of imperial expansion. However, the naval and scientific advances in the nineteenth century created new possibilities to control them.

The development preoccupied British authors who expected to see atopic regions as out worldly marvels in fantasy stories. These spaces are the same that an empire couldn’t colonize, and literature might claim that literary representations of atopias later came to reflect their writer’s attitudes towards the growth of the British Empire and the way in which literature played a role in the expansion.

Siobhan Carrol questions the role these blank spaces played in developing British identity during an era of unstable global circulations. The author checks into the examining poetry of Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens, George Gordon Bryon and Samuel T. Coleridge and some newspaper pieces and voyage narratives to trace how Romantic and Victorian writers conceptualized atopias as vulnerable and threatening.

The study of the earth’s highest points and secret depths bring light on persistent facets of the British global and environmental imagination that dawdle in the twenty-first century.

Siobhan traverses the atmosphere, oceans, the subterranean and a blend of familiar and unfamiliar fanciful texts. The novel describes the British Empire’s confrontation with various kinds of uncolonizable space, which she names atopias.
Atopias resist conversion into colonizable space through their climate. These planetary spaces are dialectically defined conceptions of home and Britishness while challenging imperial ambitions through their complicated nature.

Siobhan’s assertion that by the end of the 18th, atopias eventually erupt in the chaotic sprawl of metropolitan spaces is thought-provoking. Other scholars have told the same history where issues like waste and wilderness re-emerge in urban spaces.

Even though the spaces were not colonizable and represented a limit to empire, the British still mined, sailed and fished in these spaces. They had some control, even if it was virtual, conditional, partial and open to contestation sometimes.
The author takes the reader on a voyage of discovery using some unusual texts to prove a patient and trustworthy guide. She throws in scholarship on literature’s representation of some foreign places.