enemies, the arrogant matriarch Ma Bromley. Everett helps sabotage Bromley's airship, and a thankful Sixsmyth agrees to help him save his father. The Everness crew break into the Tyrone Tower on zip-lines and the Singhs are reunited, but Charlotte arrives with her jumpgun and demands the Infundibulum. Everett places his laptop in front of her, and she decides to be rid of the Singhs forever. Charlotte jumps Tejendra to an unknown plane, but Sen intervenes before Charlotte can do the same to Everett. He grabs his computer and Charlotte's jumpgun, and escapes to the Everness with the crew. They are soon intercepted by Charlotte, who has commandeered a Royal Air Navy carrier. Everett uses the jumpgun to jump the entirety of the Everness to another plane, and they find themselves in a frozen tundra, with ice and snow as far as the eye can see. Development McDonald has classified the Everness series as "steampunk without steam. Teslapunk. Steampunk without the messed-around Victorian values." He said, "I came up with the image of an airship that can travel between parallel universes, which is probably something every writer's thought of at some point, and I just followed it through." Of the move to young adult fiction, McDonald noted, "It was a nice break to do something different ... I didn't want to get stuck doing the same SF books over and over, successful though they may be. I didn't want to keep writing books about the developing economy of the year—India, Brazil. I could feel myself getting trapped in that ... The kids' book series gives me a chance to play off the leash a bit." Adding that he has been approached about adapting Planesrunner for television, McDonald said that the series "is aimed at the Dr. Who audience quite deliberately. The series has the go-anywhere machine, which is what the Tardis is, but I also wanted a crew like you have in Star Trek." Reception Though deeming lead character Everett Singh "too perfect", Publishers Weekly praised the novel's "nonstop action, eccentric characters, and expert universe building". Writing for The Telegraph, Anna Lisinski praised the detail with which McDonald describes E3, including the theme that prejudice is an ever-present potentiality in any culture, no matter its development. However, she found it difficult to empathise with Everett, and called the other characters underdeveloped. Susan Carpenter of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Planesrunner