Please tell me someone on here read the Larklight trilogy growing up! I feel like whenever I mention it to people, no one seems to have come across it, so then I have to start explaining like "...well, it's set in the Victorian era, but in space. And there are hyperintelligent albino spiders, badass blue lizard people who ride moths and have a matriarchal society, a race of pandimensional women who can switch from one body to another and are responsible for making galaxies, Uranus is inhabited by mermaid people, there's a disease that causes people in a Martian colony to turn into trees, a Christmas pudding parasite, and the main character's father is an extremely clueless and attractive ichthyologist who studies space fish and writes obscure books on them. Also a motley crew of extremely moralistic pirates fly around space on their pirate ship after having escaped from being studied by the Royal Xenological Institute."
And I think it's really a shame, because this was such a formative part of my childhood/young-adulthood and it was my first introduction to steampunk, which I quickly became obsessed with. They are hilarious and also the illustrations are gorgeous