Empires of Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the first book of a 10-book series called Shadows of the Apt. I added it to my reading list when I was on a steampunk kick. It's classic fantasy meets steampunk, with some rather interesting concepts. The fantasy world the series is set in sounds rather generic, but the people living in it are anything but. There are different races called Kinden, who have all descended from an Ancestor Spirit and share traits with insects. They are Ants who can communicate via telepathy, spiders who can crawl walls and plot nefariously, scorpions who have claws, flies who can fly, etc. People with insect traits. Fascinating. The Kinden are split again. There are some who are apt, like beetles, who can use and create technology like flying machines, trains, and cars. Those who are not apt cannot. Some, like the moths, cling to old and forgotten magic. Yet now they all have to come together, because they are threatened by a race of kinden that comes and offers trade and prosperity: the Empire of the wasps. Master Stenwold, a Beetle-kinden teacher in the university city Collegium, has witnessed how brutally the wasp-kinden advance their empire and is organizing a spy-ring for what he thinks is impending invasion of the Lowlands. He is sending his most promising students to the industrial city of Helleron, to get in touch with his contacts there, to find out more about the plans of the wasps. But the wasps interfere with the plan, splitting the group up, and no one knows the wasps' masterplan just yet. - Yeah, so Stenwold is the Gandalf of this series, and his niece Cheerwell is a bit like Frodo. You have the classic party on a grand quest. I loved the book for the worldbuilding and the concept of insect-kinden + technology, that was very well done. The writing is probably the weakest part of the book, but I am definitely planning on reading the sequel.