(Now that would be) Telling - Steampunk Guests

(Now that would be) Telling brings together contemporary art, literature and history through a big dollop of imagination. The project features site-specific artwork made by Hayley Lock and texts written by Jessica Hart, Lucinda Hawksley, Ben Moor, Hallie Rubenhold and Liz Williams for five stately homes.

Using the portraits and collections in the houses as starting points, Hayley created parallel worlds through her work. She used the documented histories as much as rumour and hearsay, mining the lives of the people living, working and visiting the houses for inspiration. Hayley has also collaborated with a different writer in each house to bring out a different aspect of the work.

At Ickworth, Ben Moor wrote Please Wait Here, a contemplative and often absurd tale of a questionnaire writer suffering a block for the remarkable and barmy Ickworth House in Suffolk. Historical novelist Lucinda Hawksley created stories of those In the shadow of Ruskin for Brantwood in Cumbria. Romance novelist Jessica Hart created a bodice-ripping yarn full of torrid affairs amongst the noble classes; broadcaster. Novellist Hallie Rubenhold penned The Johnsonian Mysteries, including an entirely fabricated contents page full of wry references for scholars of Dr Johnson. Finally, science fiction and fantasy writer Liz Williams wrote the lifetime in a day of the Parminter cousins who built A la Ronde in Devon, their octagonal house created to have a room for every function throughout the day.

Hayley's works are densely layered in terms of their references and their facture, with a mix of digitally manipulated imagery, hand drawn and collaged surfaces decorated with intricate lines of glitter, gems, feathers and textiles. The references threaded through the writer's texts too, with tartan squirrels appearing in Ickworth and characters dancing from one form to another. A dark glass appeared in every house and in several stories, a connecting principle with occult undertones. The Claude glass was originally a drawing tool - a darkened convex reflective glass - but became synonymous with the all seeing eye and various connections to another world. We have brought them to the houses as part of a meta narrative and darkened heart showing views of other worlds.

Historical houses offer guided tours and information about what visitors are seeing, interpreting their own histories. Part of our aim is to inspire visitors to create their own versions of history, to see the rich heritage of the UK as starting points for adventures and magic. The stories take different forms - visual, written - and hopefully don't stop with the work created by the artist and writers, but continue with each visitor's imagination.

We are delighted to bring some of these works into a dramatically different context to The Kitchies’ Steampunk Evening at Blackwell’s, an entire event celebrating the folding of history through imagination. We're looking forward to seeing the works on their own and reading the texts in a space where books are king. I suspect that, whilst you can take the work out of the homes, you can't take the homes out of the work, so I like to think we're bringing them too.

Catherine Hemelryk is the Curator of (Now that would be) Telling and is on the panel of judges awarding The Kitschies’ Inky Tentacle.

Young Adult and Middle Grade Steampunk

We were super pleased to be asked to write an article about Steampunk for the site and have opted to do some recommendations for both middle grade (9 – 12 years) and teen (and older) readers.
Our list is by no means exhaustive but shows there is a strong market for books of this genre for a young audience. The books below above are all superbly written and character driven novels; where the setting helps enrich the world but where the world isn’t everything.

Teen & Young Adult 
Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (Atom)
The Looking Glass Wars, Seeing Redd and Arch Enemy by Frank Beddor (Egmont Books)
Clockwork Angel, Clockwork Prince and Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare (Walker)Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore (Bloomsbury)
Incarceron and Sapphique by Catherine Fisher (Hodder)
Airborne, Skybreaker and Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel (Faber and Faber)
Arcadia Snips and the Steampunk Consortium by Robert C. Rodgers (Steam Powered Press)
All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen (Tor)
Corsets & Clockwork: 13 Steampunk Romances (Constable & Robinson)
Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (Walker UK)

Middle Grade 

Kaimira by Monk & Nigel Ashland (Walker)
Airman by Eoin Colfer (Puffin)
Monster Blood Tattoo: Foundling, Lamplighter and Factotum by DM Cornish (Corgi / Random House)
The Mortal Engines series, as well as Larklight, Mothstorm and Starcross by Philip Reeve (Scholastic)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Scholastic)
The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle, The Obsidian Dagger and The Doomsday Thief by Catherine Webb (Atom)
Leviathan, Behemoth and Goliath by Scott Westerfeld (Simon & Schuster)


More titles are due in 2012, including Tiffany Trent’s The Unnaturalists, which sounds fantastic:


"The City of New London is all Tesla’s fault. If his experiment had not broken the walls between London and Fairyland, New London would not be here at all, and Fairyland would not be in jeopardy. The tear in the fabric of space and time brought things from every era of London—Vauxhall Gardens, the Tower, Nonesuch House. With it also came the belief that Science would cure all ills. Soon, the descendants of Tesla learned how to turn magical energy into power, using a substance called myth. Just as Old London relied on coal and gas, New London relies on myth. It’s in everything from lanterns to sealing wax. It powers machines. It provides heat and light.

But all of this comes at great price.

In the Museum of Unnatural History, fifteen-year-old Vespa Nyx has spent the last two years since her expulsion from Seminary learning to identify, catalog, and mount rare sylphs. Even as the black desert of the Creeping Waste threatens New London, young Syrus Reed seeks Vespa at the behest of the mysterious Manticore. Whether they can learn to trust each other and work together in a race against time and greed is at the heart of this steampunk adventure."


Doesn’t it sound simply superb? We couldn’t be more excited. Long may writers continue creating Steampunk stories to enjoy and talk about. It is one of those sub-genres where it feels like literally anything can happen... and it usually does. All the writer has to do is ask: what if...

Liz - creator and instigator of My Favourite Books. Her tastes in reading material vary from picture books to YA to crime and fantasy novels for adults. She also has a penchant for literary fiction, but don't hold that against her. Find her online as @LizUK on Twitter.
Mark - Mark is an avid gamer who has a penchant for archery, fencing and medieval sword. Mark's reading is as eclectic as his taste in music - he enjoys fantasy, crime, science fiction (and is a Black Library devotee) and historical novels. Find Mark on Twitter as @Gergaroth.
Sarah - Sarah is My Favourite Books' YA guru. As an aspiring YA writer, Sarah has made it her goal to read every single YA book in existence and she loves the challenge. She knows more about vamps, witches and weres than your local priest. Find Sarah online as @esssjay on Twitter.

Cory Gross on Steampunk Part Two

If comic books appeal to your beloved Steampunk, then one might invest in Rapunzel's Revenge and Calamity Jack by the team of Shannon and Dean Hale with artist Nathan Hale. Fairy tales fuze with a Weird Western setting, retelling the stories of Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk with a progressive attitude. Unlike many modern failed efforts, these are neither gratuitously perverse nor artificially hip whilst being genuinely stylish.

Not that I am one to slander Disney by any means. I would highly recommend a copy of the two-disk DVD special edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This film almost single-handedly brought Jules Verne back into the public consciousness when it was released in 1954, and 20K collectors Larry and Paul Brooks did a fantastic job working with Disney to extract rare material from the vaults. If one really wanted to go the extra mile, enclose a ticket to Disneyland Paris or Tokyo Disneysea with that DVD, as both themeparks have attractions based on Captain Nemo's exploits. If not that, then perhaps Hallmark's recently-released Nautilus ornament as a consolation.

After Disney's film, perhaps the most critically-acclaimed was Michael Todd's 1956 adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days. Shot on location around the world – from the bull rings of Spain to the Great Buddha of Kamakura to the vistas of the American frontier – this star-studded epic cleaned out the Oscars, including a victory in Best Picture over The Ten Commandments. Warner Bros. has released a very nice two-disk DVD profuse with archival and documentary features.

If aural adventures playing across the mind's eye are more one's style, visit AlienVoices.net to download mp3 dramatizations of Verne, Wells, Conan Doyle and more. Alien Voices was founded by Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie, employing the talents of fellow Star Trek alumni to revitalize interest in the beginnings of the genre that made them famous. Such talented performers do the source material proud.

A wry commentary on Steampunk is made by Mark Hodder's Burton and Swinburne series of novels. The trilogy begins with The Strange Affair of the Spring-Heeled Jack, continued with The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, and concludes with Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon. Hodder's history diverges from our own when a time traveller form the future accidentally makes the 1840 assassination attempt on Queen Victoria successful. The result is a wretched, polluted Steampunk age spiralling towards apocalypse, whose heroes desperately search for a way to restore the proper timeline.

If a more obvious satire is to your taste, you might prefer the Larklight trilogy by Philip Reeve. Though he undervalued the young adult novels Larklight, Starcross and Mothstorm in his quite public – and spot on – denouncement of Steampunk's staleness, they are an uproarious and fond riff on the pretensions of high Victorian-Edwardian planetary romances and boys-own-adventure.

There is so much more I could recommend, from James Gurney's fully painted Dinotopia books to Edward Erdelac's stories of a demon-hunting Jewish gunslinger begun in The Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter to fun mid-century films like Twentieth Century Fox's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Five Weeks in a Balloon to Paul Guinan's Boilerplate. Suffice this list to give a good starting point for explorations beyond the usual scope of Steampunk fashion, into the richness of the Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romance tradition, its adaptations, and playful responses to it in the modern age.

A quality Christmas, for those wont to celebrate it, is not as well served by culturally bland stories of sterile starships. Humbug! The warm comfort of the Yule log begs for the equally warm stories of pith-helmeted and petticoated adventurers.



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Cory Gross is a museums and heritage professional from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In addition to working at or volunteering for a number of science, nature and cultural history organizations in the city, he also runs the weblog Voyages Extraordinaires dedicated to Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances and Retro-Futurism. It can be visited at http://voyagesextraordinaires.blogspot.com

Cory Gross on Steampunk Part One

Ah, Steampunk Christmas... Ash falling lightly like snow, the tree bedecked with gears hanging from each bough, striped stockings tacked on the mantle of a gas fireplace built entirely of brass plumbing fixtures from Home Depot... What a horrible idea!

I am a firm believer that nothing needs to be Steampunk'd that actually existed in the Victorian Era, and nobody perfected Christmas like the Victorians. Christmas became a symbolic victim of the centuries of sectarian squabbling between Puritans and Catholics in the United Kingdom, the latter for it and the former against it. By the beginning of the 19^th Century this had finally calmed down and the Victorians began to rediscover the holiday, looking back nostalgically at the days of Merrie England. The poem popularly known as Twas the Night Before Christmas was composed in 1822. The tradition of Christmas carolling began here, with many songs composed or printed for the first time. Charles Dickens cast a long shadow with his 1843 tale of hearth, home and the redemptive power of human fraternity, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge, his ghosts, and their mid-19th Century winter frivolities have become as central a Yuletide fixture as Santa Claus, Rudolph and the Christ child. The first Christmas cards were printed that same year. As recreationists clamber over each other to lay primeval claims to the Christmas tree, we know for certain that it was Prince Albert who introduced the Tannenbaum to Buckingham Palace, and the rest of the kingdom followed suit. Though presently an act of consumerist gluttony, Boxing Day was originally invented in the Victorian Era as an act of charity to those caught under the grinding wheels of industrialization.

Over here in the colonies, my favourite winter activity is visiting the Banff Springs Hotel. Nestled into the Canadian Rocky Mountains, this Baronial castle completed in 1928 is truly resplendent in its Christmas outfit. Without, silent snow thickly blankets the fir trees and limestone peaks of Canada's first national park, created in 1885. Within, roaring fires in stone fireplaces warm eggnog sipping lovers. Mediaeval battlements constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway are jewelled with spruce and golden ornaments while beloved carols performed on bagpipes stir my 1/8th of Scottish blood. Such a beautiful experience could not happen without the unique intermingling of European heritage and North American landscape shaping Canada's cultural traditions.

Such a scene is all the better if I can curl up with some Dickens, or Verne, or Twain. The ethos that nothing Victorian need be Steampunk'd is more than a labour-saving convenience: it is a recognition that the very appeal of Scientific Romances hinge on their historicity. It is Science Fiction that is not artificially divorced from the aesthetics and traditions of our history, a tomorrow that does not forget yesterday. Within these pages and between these celluloid frames is the opulence of railway travel raised into the atmosphere, space ships made livable with Persian rugs and potted ferns, and exotic adventure without the loss of civilized comforts. Verne declared his objective to recount the scientific history of the universe with a decadent, French sense of style that can only come from a comprehensive grounding in aesthetic traditions as well as technological innovations. On Her Majesty's Aether-Ship Enterprise, you are guaranteed that the children of Earth have not forgotten to celebrate Yuletide.

It is also guaranteed that something genuinely Victorian looks better than something Steampunk'd. Sepia was the colour of 19th century film stock, not 19th century clothing! Victorians assiduously avoided the crudity of industrial equipment, preferring to adorn their steam engines with gilt rather than themselves with ornamental gears and rivets. One could certainly do worse than place some nice, large coffee table books about Gothic Revivalism, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Japonisme, Orientalism or Queen Anne style under the tree. What would I want beneath my tree, however? Or more to the point, what would I recommend for those of you with a Steampunk to buy presents for or a list to give to your non-Steampunk relatives?

My first recommendation is the indispensable gift of an e-reader. With such a marvellous tool, classics of Scientific Romances become easily accessible. The Steampunk in your family will have no excuse not to visit Project Gutenberg and download the works of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, Garrett P. Serviss, Edward Everett Hale, Harry Collingwood, George Griffith, Rudyard Kipling, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edward S. Ellis, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Jacob Astor, Edward Bellamy, and Edgar Allen Poe.

Flicker Alley has compiled two very fine collections of pioneering French film in Georges Mlis: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) and Georges Mlis: Encore. Between the two, all 199 extant films by the auteur best known for A Trip to the Moon are preserved. The majority of these 15 hours of video are short trick films employing his techniques as a stage magician. However there are many astonishing long subjects drawing inspiration from such figures of French heritage as Joan of Arc, Charles Perrault and Jules Verne.

Speaking of France, the continental music group Dionysos released a tandem concept album and novel several years ago under the title La mécanique du cœur. The story tells of an infant named Jack, born in 1874 on the coldest night in history. To save his life, the midwife stimulates his heart with a clockwork mechanism. The unfortunate side-effect is that the frail boy can never fall in love or else his heart will break. The book by band mastermind Mathias Malzieu, translated into English as The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, tells the tale in a direct way while the album shines the poetic, musical facet. The enhanced CD also links to a site whereupon one can view the amazing video for the single Tais Toi Mon Cœur, done in the style of a Tim Burton stop-motion film.

I would be remiss not to mention volumes one and two of The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Recently republished by Fantagraphics, this French comic by Jacques Tardi is a love letter to Penny Dreadfuls, faithful in style and tone. Fantagraphics also republished Tardi's The Arctic Marauder which painstakingly replicates the effect of illustrated engravings and connects to the Adèle Blanc-Sec mythology.

To be continued...


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Cory Gross is a museums and heritage professional from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In addition to working at or volunteering for a number of science, nature and cultural history organizations in the city, he also runs the weblog Voyages Extraordinaires dedicated to Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances and Retro-Futurism. It can be visited at http://voyagesextraordinaires.blogspot.com

Bulgarian Steampunk: A Brief History in War By Harry Markov

Speculative fiction fuels itself with war. The most dynamic stories are born in troubled times. Epic fantasy and its sprawling military campaigns, urban fantasy and its back alley wars and science fiction with its fleets are all examples of large scale conflict establishing tropes and traditions in genre. Steampunk is no different. It runs on war. That's the 'punk' part. It's the mechanical force that propels the cogs of the genre onward. It's why I consider steampunk and Bulgaria to be a fruitful pairing.

It's impossible to discuss Bulgaria and not mention war. Bulgarians know war. We breathe it and live it. Through history we have conquered and we have fought to keep our land. We've lost battles. Fought for freedom. Fought to found our country again and we continue to fight, even though the wars we lead today are against our circumstances and each other.

Queen Victoria's rule coincides with Bulgaria's most turbulent historical period. During her reign, Bulgarians started upheavals, organized a resistance, fought wars for liberation and then unity. After centuries of slavery and slave mentality, a transition in this mentality was forced from two sides. The perseverance of Bulgarian culture and religion and the subsequent fierce oppression from the Ottoman empire, which went as far as to kidnap first sons and train them as Muslim soldiers with no trace of their heritage and no compassion for Christian slaves. The subsequent establishment of the Apostles of Freedom and the Freedom committees, whose aim was to mobilize all Bulgarians for one massive rebellion, can host a cat and mouse game between Bulgarian revolutionaries and Ottoman lawmen.

Bulgarian Steampunk could sit comfortably against the backdrop of political and military unrest after our first insurrections. The April Uprising - a planned nation-wide rebellion, which failed when the Ottoman Empire discovered the plans before the scheduled date - could be the best setting for a story of betrayal. On this note, I can recommend Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazov as an example of how preparation for the April Uprising in Bulgarian villages ran and the demise of a village, which managed to join the rebellion.

Under the Yoke is a book every child in the Bulgarian school system has to read and study twice, once in middle school and once in high school. Vazov captures the spirit of the time, the mentality and the way the Bulgarian spoke and behaved at the time. If you want to have a glimpse into how an enslaved nation battled a century long fear, then this is an appropriate read and it has been translated in more than thirty languages worldwide.

Although I haven't read any papers in this field, I know there are many of these. My own knowledge about Bulgarian history comes mostly from my high school history textbook, History and Civilization, written by Ivan Lazarov, Ivan Tytyundjiev, Rumyana Mihneva, Luchezar Stoyanov, Milko Palangurski and Violeta Stoycheva. (I doubt there is an English translation yet.)

Now imagine if all these events occurred in a world of zeppelins, mechanical mounts and automaton armies. Where revolutionaries swing swords along with steam-powered rifles. The adventurous motives are already present and provide fertile ground for a multicultural reimagining of a genre that preoccupies itself with aesthetics - though I imply nothing negative with it. The Balkan passion, as well as the patriotism that accompanied this Bulgarian National Revival, would provide soul and fire for the characters.

For more reading suggestions on this topic, please see 'War, Steampunk, Bulgaria' at Beyond Victoriana.

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Writer, reviewer and columnist, Harry Markov has most recently become the official minion of one Jaym Gates, publicist extraordinaire. His personal soapbox is Through a Forest of Ideas, and you can follow him on Twitter @HarryMarkov. You can find Harry Markov's non-fiction at Innsmouth Free Press, Beyond Victoriana, The Portal, Pornokitsch and The World SF blog.

Kim Lakin-Smith on Dustpunk

'We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real."

Avis D. Carlson: The New Republic magazine, 1935

The dust storm is one of Nature's deadliest, rising up from the wastes to suffocate the landscape. But alongside the devastation, there is something captivating about dust's dark beauty, from the apocalyptic streak of grey at the horizon to the quiet drift of motes in the atmosphere. Despite its natural origins, dust has a creepy, alienesque quality which appeals to me as a reader and a writer. The dustbowl is the perfect setting for offbeat, character-driven narratives. Dust speaks of poverty, barrenness, vigilantism, lone gunmanship, makeshift mechanics, and the endless search for hydration aka salvation.

In literary terms, dustpunk is a grittier, desert-based alternative to steampunk. The term is sometimes applied to stories set in 1880s America, specifically the Wild West. For me though the subgenre borrows from 1930s American dustbowl narratives. The landscape is bleak, the people forced to colour it with travelling shows, miracle elixirs, sit-up-and-beg trucks, tumbledown farmsteads and religion. Think Carnivale, The Wizard of Oz's pre-twister Kansas, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, but with a generous dose of the science fictionally weird and mechanically corroded.

In many ways, dustpunk is less akin to steampunk than the dystopian ecopunk of Mad Max. Fuel is a scarcity fought for and fought over. Alternatively, old tech mechanics are adapted to suit new fuels derived from minerals or self-sustaining plant life. Either way, dustpunk is not a genre suited to gleaming brass, well-greased pistons and an elegant turn of the ankle; this is a violent wasteland of make-do and subsistence. Which is not to suggest these are stories without hope or wonderment, only that the dust narrative is a rawer breed of 'punk'.

Inside its own barb-wire boundaries, dustpunk varies wildly in tone. The Book of Eli is an exquisitely dark narrative, the focus being on an epic quest through an often deserted, sometimes violent, setting. In contrast, Tank Girl is a gutsy, girl-with-gun riot laced with humour and the downright peculiar. Solipsist Films have recently brought the rights to a vampire story set in the dustbowl of 1930s America - the as-yet-unpublished graphic novel, In The Dust, written by George Mahaffey. My own stories range from the dustbowl mining planet of Cyber Circus to the desiccated coral bed of Deluge. Both are themed around scarcity, corruption and geological wilderness.

Steampunk is often accused of superficiality, in particular of aesthetics taking priority over substance. But this is where it is important to emphasise the 'punk' aspect of these alternative histories/other worlds. Dustpunk's edginess is quite literally grounded in its sore earth. Stories should be a darn good yarn, but they should also make readers think and feel. Just like the dust of Avis D. Carlson's 1930s America, they should become Real.

Kim Lakin-Smith's latest book, Cyber Circus, was released in September 2011 from NewCon Press. Kim lives on the first floor of a Victorian gothic mansion house with her mini demon of a daughter and dark lord of a husband.

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Join us on 8 December at Blackwell's for our exhibition & exploration of this fascinating sub-genre of fantastic literature. Guests include Adam Roberts, China Miéville, Kim Lakin-Smith, Jonathan Green, Lavie Tidhar, Philip Reeve and a host of amazing artists and craftspeople. Plus, Plarchie!

Turning Up The Heat – Steampunk at Blackwells

‘So what is this steampunk business then?’ asked one of the managers. And with those simple words a can of worms was opened and those worms will remain wriggling until our steampunk night on December 8^th. And beyond.

The books chosen for the steampunk promotion aren’t necessarily classic definitions of the genre, but are designed to invite discussion. Which trappings and tropes have particular authors picked to adorn their imagined worlds? Is steampunk merely about top hats, dirigibles, or moral values of a bygone age? Do steam engines and goggles get in the way of examining Victorian society, and what does this glimpse back into our Imperial past tell us about the world we live in today?

For me, personally, steampunk is lovable mutt. Not a thoroughbred like traditional Hard SF or High Fantasy, but a weird stew of influences. Which other genre mixes historical fiction with SF, frequently adds a dose of ‘boys own adventure’ and dares to examine how society functioned in a bygone age? Steampunk, like all good SF, holds a mirror up to the way we live now, not by reflecting back the possible future, but instead comparing us to an impossible past.

Let’s take a look at some of the promoted titles:

Even a punch-drunk navvie who’d fallen face-first from a Zepplin (beg pardon, dirigible) would know that William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) is the birth of this contentious sub-genre. The Difference Engine is an alternate history novel set in 1855. Much of the novel focuses on a missing set of computer punch cards, used by Charles Babbage’s analytical engines. Sterling and Gibson explore (often through the protagonists, but sometime through vignettes) how the computer-aided steam age has changed Britain and her Empire.

Heart of Veridon (2009) on the other hand is not set in this world. The City of the Cog is a vast industrial affair, and the inhabitants have learned how to fuse technology with their bodies. The protagonist, Jacob Burn, is a failed airship pilot and now spends his days among the criminals of the city. However, it is his noble birth that places him at the heart of a conspiracy and he is deceived and hounded by the authorities at every turn. Heart of Veridon is followed by Dead of Veridon, making up the first two books of Tim Akers; Burn Cycle.

Gail Carriger’s Alexia Tarabotti novels fuse steampunk with paranormal romance. Soulless (2009) is set in an alternate history where werewolves and vampires are functioning members of society. Much of the novel is concerned with etiquette and decorum, but there’s also plenty to get your teeth into, including the mystery of several missing vampires. Carriger’s other novels in this series include Changeless (2010), Blameless (2010), and Heartless (2011).

The Windup Girl (2009) is set in Thailand during the 23^rd century. It focuses on the fate of Emiko, the titular Windup Girl. In a world controlled by calorie companies, beset by bio-engineered plagues, Emiko finds herself amid seething conspiracies and ambitious agendas. 

  

Other titles on our list include:

Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004) by China Mieville.

Retribution Falls (2009), The Black Lung Captain (2010) and The Iron Jackal (2011) by Chris Wooding.

Swiftly (2008) by Adam Roberts

The Diamond Age (1995) by Neil Stevenson

Fever Crumb(2010) and The Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve

Cyber Circus (2011) by Kim Laikin Smith

The Bookman (2011) by Lavie Tidhar

Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus (2010) Jonathan Green

What titles would be on your list? Are there novels listed above that don’t fit your definition of ‘steampunk’? Let us know in the comments or come and discuss it with us on 8^th December.

Den Patrick is full-time bookseller, part-time writer and lover of all things Geek.

An Introduction to Steampunk

Steampunk. The inexorable tension between corsets and brass-banded blasters; the tug-of-rope between Victorian themes and Victorian images; the tightrope act involved in balancing present-minded respect and past-minded romanticism while negotiating the vanishingly-thin line between. Love it or loathe it, steampunk has become an indelible feature of modern geek culture.

It seems that almost anything with some sort of Victorian-y trappings is accused of steampunkery these days – from the obvious (Gail Carriger!) to the arguable (China Miéville) to the unsustainable. (Alexandre Dumas?) And, occasionally, not even that. (see e.g, Regretsy's list of 'Not Remotely Steampunk' Etsy offerings.)

And, as with anything wildly popular, steampunk has its own faction of vocal detractors.

An informal internet poll has led to this sweeping and likely wholly unfair generalization: the anti-steampunkers have two bees in their bonnets. One: they don’t think there’s much Quality Writing in steampunk. Two: they’re just tired of steampunk.

To address the second issue first: yes, there’s a lot of steampunk around right now. A lot. And it can be exhausting – cons are drowning in steampunk panels, made up of the begadgeted and attended by oceans of the becorsetted, all waggling their brass-bound pith-helmets and solar-powered x-ray goggles back and forth at each other in a fervid mutual appreciation society. If you’re tired of steampunk, you’re not alone in that feeling. But you are, I’m sorry to say, unfortunate in it. Steampunk is everywhere, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

The other anti-steampunk argument, however, is worth considering in some detail. There is a lot of steampunk writing out there, and it’s not all great. Steampunk has rife with lousy characterization, bad science, plot holes within plot holes, and derivative ideating. Of course, the same is true of any subgenre – or, you know, all writing in general. Not all the writing in any one genre is going to be great. Or even very good. But that doesn’t mean it’s all terrible, either.

Author Catherynne Valente for example, has argued that steampunk novels are just adventure stories, not "astonishing novels that pluck the strings of the soul, [books] that make you clasp [them] to your chest and love [them] because [they] say something real and authentic about your life… books that you put in your sig file, that you quote endlessly because they said something you just couldn’t say any other way."

The fact of the matter is, most books aren’t capital-a astonishing. That steampunk hasn’t produced one person's"burst into tears at the thought of it" book yet? I’d be willing to put money down that most subgenres haven’t produced that book yet. I'd also be willing to argue that there are readers out there who have found that book, and that, in some cases, that book is a steampunk novel.

The fact of the matter is: most books aren’t astonishing. That shouldn’t devalue what those unastonishing books are.

But let’s accept,for the sake of argument, that there is not a lot of astonishing steampunk writing out there. That steampunk hasn’t had its Nabokov or its Proust, its Hammett or its Sayers, its Brontë or its Woolf; that it isn’t well-written or it isn’t thoughtful or it isn’t this or isn’t that or isn’t the brass-bound other.

That's an awful lot of isn't.

So let’s stop talking about what steampunk isn’t. Let’s start talking about what steampunk is.

My first submission: steampunk is fun. It’s about adventure, excitement, invention and derring-do. Fun is okay. Fun is fine. Fun is great. Fun is awesome, you guys. There is nothing wrong with fun. It’s time to stop bashing on unabashed escapism.

Secondly, steampunk is modern. Steampunk has given authors and readers a new way to approach older, tiresome, even moribund subgenres. Historical romance novels, for example, are a dime a dozen. But drop a dirigible and a steam-powered personal flying apparatus into your novel about Lord Thaddeus Lovejoy and the plucky middle-class second-daughter who loves him, and suddenly the creaking old romance novel is interesting again.

Third, steampunk is progressive. It walks the line between fantasy and science fiction in ways older subgenres don’t. As the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy crumble away, steampunk rides their erosion into the future – that marvelous, not-so-imaginary world where it’s okay that sci fi and fantasy have a lot in common. And steampunk can be a way of writing about society, about social structures and class and gender and race and imperialism and modernity. Those were real problems in the real nineteenth century, so pulling them out and examining them under a twenty-first century lens – which can be steampunk goggles as well as scanning electron microscopes – is as valid a way of interacting with them as any other.

Fourth, steampunk is intelligent. No, not all of it – because not all of anything is ever everything. But it contains the seeds of its own potential within its very name. Steampunk definitionally requires some sort of science to operate within its own ambit: it’s about the nineteenth century, roughly, and the great technological advances of that period, both real and imaginary. Do some steampunk authors just make stuff up and drop it into their books irrespective of whether or not that technology would work? Of course they do! Exactly like science fiction authors have been doing for a century.

Fifth, and finally: steampunk is young. Not young in the sense that it’s read primarily by a youthful demographic, or written by under-25s. Young in that it hasn’t been around very long. All the arguments laid out here are worth having – they’re not just important, they’re vital – but it’s always worth remembering that they’re about a subgenre that, in the final analysis, people are just really starting to explore.

In sum, steampunk is one of the most robust things to happen to genre in decades. Steampunk is here. It may not be here forever, but it’s here now. So let’s start talking about it like it matters.

Because it does. Steampunk matters.

Anne Perry talks the big talk over at Pornokitsch. She's supposed to be working on a Ph.D., even though she seems to spend most of her time thinking about monster movies. She recently edited Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse.


The Kitschies are an annual award for those books which best elevate the tone of genre literature.

Christmas is coming...

and here's a little taste of what we're up to.

If you've been into our shop recently you may have noticed there's a distinct flavour of Christmas happening at Blackwell's. We've decked the halls with garlands, the Christmas trees are twinkling, and we have tables groaning under the weight of exciting and beautiful books.

We've decided to get an early start on the celebrations of Dickens' birth (February 2012 is his 200th), by stocking up on a range of Victorian treats for that traditional festive feel. So we have a table of Victorian novels past and present, which includes all the classics (Dickens, Collins, Hardy) and some of our favourite modern novels set during the period (Sarah Waters, Michel Faber, Angela Carter). We've also got great books on Victorian London and social history.

Most thrilling of all we have two special late night events in December. December 8th sees the launch of our Steampunk night in partnership with the Kitschies.

There will be literary and artistic goodies galore at this special evening, including tasters of Kraken Black Spiced Rum to warm us up. More about this event can be found here and on Facebook. 

Don't know much about steampunk? Our guest bloggers will be posting scintillating articles here over the next few weeks to tempt you in, so keep on checking the blog.

The second of our late nights may appeal more to those who are not into fantastical machines and leather corsets. Historians Kate Williams (Becoming Queen, England's Mistress) and Louise Raw (Striking a Light) will be celebrating women's lives in Victorian Britain, from queens to fallen women, over some free wine and mince pies.

Both events are free and anyone can come and get into the holiday spirit with us while browsing our incredible books. We'll be dressing up in bustles and top hats, you are welcome to join in with that, too! Watch this space for more information...