Steampunk Scholar

Teaching Soulless by Gail Carriger

2012-01-27T11:24:00.003-07:00

The first time I read Soulless, I was still getting my sea legs, or airship legs, or whatever one would call still working out just what I was doing with my blog, my research, and my approach to both. I was still engaged in quasi-snark mode, that way that 99.666% of the web approaches evaluating a book, film, or piece of music. I was still in my first year of teaching, and was learning as much about the practice of reading well as my students were. So my original review of Soulless was as lacking in essential spirit as any preternatural.

I hope this time around, I'll do a better job of being a steampunk scholar, and less book reviewer.

C.S. Lewis said that if a book wasn't worth reading a second time, it wasn't likely worth reading the first. By that criterion, I have a stack of steampunk that wasn't worth reading the first time around, but Soulless certainly isn't among them. I've read Soulless four times now, five if you count adaptation as a reading. The first reading was a quick page-turning read to churn out a review; the second was out-loud to my wife; the third was as audiobook, the fourth with my Winter 2011 Introduction to Literature students, and the fifth, as Manga from Yen Plus. Each experience taught me new things about the book, and I can say without reservation that there's a sixth reading in the offing. For now, I want to talk about the experience of teaching the book, since that was easily the most illuminating experience of the book.

My favorite cover, from the Japanese release.

While it would have been ideal to teach the novel in the fall, in proximity with Halloween, I ended up teaching it to two classes primarily comprised of business students in the Winter of 2011. I paired it with Bram Stoker's Dracula, and as a result found myself thinking of the relationship between Lucy Westenra and Alexia Tarabotti: Lucy characterizes two Victorian female types, first as the chaste innocent, exemplar of propriety and manners, and then later as the "suddenly sexual" vampiric "dark woman" (check out Phyllis Roth's "Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula" for more on this dichotomy). Alexia is puerly neither of these things; rather, they act as polemics which Alexia occupies a space between. She is the model of societal propriety in manners, fashion, and appearances. Beneath that surface, she actively pursues, with alarming sexual aggression for her day, an unconventional relationship with the werewolf Lord Maccon. This was the beginning of the chapter titled, "Useful Troublemakers: Social Retrofuturism in the steampunk novels of Gail Carriger and Cherie Priest," in which I argue that both writers have "realized" (insofar as a fictional character realizes anything) the fin-de-siècle phenomenon of the New Woman: While it must be readily admitted, as Lyn Pickett states in her foreword to The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, that the New Woman never existed, but “was (and remains) a shifting and contested term. It was a mobile and contradictory figure or signifier” (xi), the idea of the New Woman can be understood as the hope for social regeneration, a striving towards a future through the conception of “new, or newly perceived, forms of femininity which were brought to public attention in the last two decades of the nineteenth century” (1). Alexia Tarabotti is a unconsciously the New Woman, and as we'll see in upcoming posts, also exemplifies another fictional female type of the late Victorian period: the fallen woman. Anyone looking to do feminist studies in steampunk would do well to consider the intersections between Soulless and the New Woman as places to begin. For essay writing, many students utilized Carol Senf's excellent article, "Dracula: Stoker's Response to the New Woman," comparing Lucy Westenra and Alexia Tarabotti.

The German edition.

Something I've ruminated on since teaching the novel is the contrast between Dracula, the Transylvanian nobleman become monster, and Lord Akeldama, flamboyant fashionista and flibbertigibbert (if any male can represent that word, it would be Lord Akeldama). Whereas Dracula hides in the shadows and seeks to overthrow London by stealthily murdering its women, Lord Akeldama basks in the spotlight, and holds power and influence in London by openly flaunting conventional fashion while openly holding court over a bevy of toffs and dandies. The following quotation, which I made the blasted mistake of not citing--but I'm hellbent on tracking it down now--perhaps approximates why Lord Akeldama succeeds where Dracula fails:

"Vampirism stands a fair chance of being regarded as essentially an eccentricity in England, provided of course the vampire observes good form, adheres to what is proper, eschews excessive public displays, and doesn't harm birds or animals" - David L. Hammer

We also did a hypothetical casting of the major players, discussing who we'd have play each persona as a way of understanding their character better. I've used this exercise with a number of novels, always with good results. Our results weren't glaringly different from Carriger's, and I'm still holding out for Sean Bean as Maccon, since he needs to play at least one major character who doesn't die before the end of the series. I would also recommend comparing and contrasting the characters as described/conveyed in the novel with the design sketches of the Yen Plus Manga edition, as an opportunity to further discuss character, or possibly the process of adaptation.

I made a number of observations about VIXI during our class study, that even as mix of Steampunk terminator and golem, he's still effectively a creature of magic. Gail has said she went with a Latin word rather than Hebrew to avoid magical connotations, but I'm not sure that's entirely avoidable with a golem, Latin or not. If the rules for killing a monster involve nothing more than erasing the text on its forehead, that's magic, end of discussion. It was a good opportunity to explain techno fantasy as an aspect of the Steampunk aesthetic, as well as discuss how much authority we should give an author when critically analyzing their work. I teach students to treat the text as artifact, not an author's intentions. While an author can illuminate the process of creation, once they complete that work and release it into the reader's grasp, we become partners in the making of meaning.

Ultimately, the majority of students thoroughly enjoyed the experience of comparing and contrasting Dracula and Soulless. There was one particularly outspoken naysayer, but he admitted disliking the text because Alexia reminded him of a former flame, which gave us the chance to discuss how a text "reads" us, even as we are reading it. One male student related his embarrassment at reading it on the bus: being an Albertan male with what appears to be fully chick-lit was a challenge, though he was quick to add, not deterrent enough to keep from reading to see what happened next. This allowed us to do a cover comparison, which is also an excellent study. We talked about how the original cover plays off the design of the Marie Antoinette film's marketing; we discussed how covers play into audience expectations, and construct a horizon of expectation, which many remarked Carriger subverts. While they expected "a sappy romance," they were surprised to find adventure, mystery, and comedy.

Omnibus Edition

All in all, the experience of teaching Soulless was very rewarding, both pedagogically and personally. My sole regret is that I forgot to bring my camera to class to capture an image of my students with Gail's book in hand. She collects pictures of her books in stores or odd places. I figure a University classroom constitutes an odd place. And clearly, to get that photo, I'll have to teach the book again. In the meantime, I'd encourage anyone looking for a whimsical intertext to Dracula or anything by Jane Austen to consider bringing Soulless into the classroom.

Reading with Gail Carriger - Steamcon II

2012-01-20T10:49:00.003-07:00

I met Gail Carriger at my first steampunk convention, Steam Powered in fall of 2008. I was on a panel about writing steampunk, which was funny to me, moderated by Ann Vandermeer, and co-paneled with Jeff Vandermeer, Ryan Galiotto of Legion Fantastique, and Gail Carriger. At the time, my impression of Gail was striking, confident, and tea-spoon dress. Yes, that infamous teaspoon dress. She spoke of the book she'd sold, set to be released the following year, and of how her writing process involves serious tea drinking. At some point, Gail and I had a photograph taken together. I'm very thankful for that photo, and wish I had a full print size of my own, since it marks the beginning of a very cool and completely unforeseen friendship.

In the following year, we traded sporadic emails about the release of her book, and my interest in potentially using it as a companion novel to teaching Dracula in the spring of 2010. Sadly, with the release of the book coming too close to textbook order deadlines, I had to forgo teaching it until Winter of 2011. In Spring of 2010 at the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition, Gail provided some much-needed encouragement in the wake of a significant publishing disappointment. We didn't sit on any panels together this time around, but during one of our informal chats over the weekend, I mentioned how cool it would be to do a reading from one of her books together. She agreed that the next time we were at a con together, we'd make it happen.

On the flight home, my wife started reading Soulless. Jenica rarely reads fiction, and rarer still does her reading elicit bursts of laughter. I've been reading out loud to her before bed for years, and The Parasol Protectorate became the primary series in our nightly reading from that flight onward. This proved opportune, as it provided me with ample practice with the character voices before the fall of 2010, when the stars aligned to find Gail and I at the same conference once again.

Steamcon II was a blast, since it was the last time I sat around a table and shared food and drink with many West Coast steampunk friends: Chris Garcia, J. Daniel Sawyer, Paul Guinan, Anina Bennett, and Gail. I didn't know until the end of the weekend that friendship had been one of the big reasons Gail made the trip, and it was a humbling realization. While the con only gave us thirty minutes to read to a packed salon, it was worth the trip.

My sister, Deanna; me; and my niece, Rio at Steamcon II.

The reading was made doubly significant by two attendees from Texas: my sister Deanna and my niece Rio. I inadvertently interested my niece into Gail's books when I'd bought Soulless for my sister. When Rio learned Gail was going to be at Steamcon, the Texans made the trip, both to support the geeky Uncle/brother, and for Rio to be the fan girl. In a moment of serendipity, Rio had the opportunity to sit next to Gail around the table Friday night while our group sat and waxed nerdoquent.

Gail and I never really planned what we were going to read until the day of the reading. We'd batted ideas around, but Friday night involved copious amounts of wine, conversation, and laughter, and that's hardly the time to be hatching a plan of any sort. We settled on the opening chapter of Soulless: I played the male voices, and Gail was Alexia and narrator. My research has given me an opportunity to meet some great people and do some great things: reading with Gail combined both.

I've uploaded most of that reading on You Tube. The only reason it's incomplete is my camera ran out of room. My niece has the whole thing, but we've never arranged to upload it.
Gail Carriger and Mike Perschon reading from Soulless:
Video 1 - Video 2 - Video 3 - Video 4 - Video 5

I interviewed Jim Blaylock that weekend, but my clearest memories are of our little group, comprised of Gail and the Bay area folk, Texans, this Canadian, and Airship Ambassador Kevin Steil; it's the weekend I realized I wasn't attending cons to "network" anymore. I was attending them to raise a glass with friends (follow this link to see a video by Christopher Garcia chronicling some of these moments).

It's the reason I've been remiss to post on Gail's books since Soulless. I didn't want my endorsement to smack of favoritism. Thankfully, the world now knows how fantastic the books are, so my tribute, while late to the party, merely joins the myriad voices already praising her praiseworthy work. I don't know how long it will be before I get the chance to raise a glass with Gail in person, but until then, here's me raising a virtual one to a fantastic author and a good friend who has provided so many of us with laughter and entertainment these past three years. Let's begin the countdown to Timeless!

Sherlock Holmes: The Breath of God by Guy Adams

2012-01-14T10:02:00.001-07:00

The first post in a year of Holmes' pastiches, one month at a time!

Even a nominal fan of the world's greatest detective knows that unlike his creator, who was a dedicated spiritualist, Sherlock Holmes is a dedicated cynic, evidenced by his reaction to a supernatural explanation for the mystery in "The Sussex Vampire":

"Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy . . . are we to give serious attention to such things? This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."

Consequently, I found myself intrigued by the cover and title of Guy Adams' Sherlock Holmes: The Breath of God, a new pastiche from Titan Books that finds Holmes and Watson embroiled in a case that challenges Holmes' cynicism. "The dead are rising," the back cover announces while the front features three shadowy figures amidst fog littered with occult symbols. The plot précis on the back informs us that Holmes and Watson will be teaming up with some of the most famous supernatural investigators of the nineteenth century: Algernon Blackwood's Dr. John Silence and William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, as well as two occultists: the fictional and less-well-known Julian Karswell from The Night of the Demon (1957) and the historical and notorious Aleister Crowley.

The afterword explaining Adams' use of these characters--what he refers to as "fictional theft"--has me interested in reading the John Silence stories, as I'm a big fan of Blackwood's "The Wendigo" and "The Willows" short stories. But many steampunks will be more interested in Thomas Carnacki, whose Electric Pentacle is an interesting example of technofantasy, being a clear blend of technology and magic:

There was a brief whine that built into a solid, low hum. In his hands the glass tubes were now constructed as a mirror of the chalk shape we stood in. Surrounded by a fan of metal shutters, the tubes glowed brightly, powered by the acid battery in the wooden box, cables hanging between the two as he strode forward. 'The Electric Pentacle,' he explained, his face bathed in the blue light the device cast. 'A weapon of my own design, the gas in the tubes has mystical properties, the light it casts is hugely powerful.' He moved to the furthest point in the pentangle. 'It burns,' he said finally, pointing the pentangle out towards the darkness and flipping a large brass switch that dangled from one of the wires hanging around him.
The light from the Electric Pentacle pulsed and Carnacki triggered a switch at the rear of the device that brought the shutters down, surrounding the tubes like the petals of a flower, focusing their light in a steady beam directly into the darkness. (188)

Adams says the Electric Pentacle was Hodgson's invention, so a number of other occult tech, such as a revolver with silver and rock salt rounds, are Adams' creations. Carnacki employs the Electric Pentangle in a scene which stretches the boundaries of Watson's worldview. As with Doyle's stories, Watson focalizes the action, and he has become increasingly dubious of his handle on reality as the narrative progresses. Holmes is absent in this scene, so Watson is surrounded by occult investigators and practitioners preparing to fend off a creature of darkness. Adams' choice to use Watson's first person perspective finds us as the reader in the same place, so long as we have given ourselves over to the novel's conceit, with any "faith in the logical and rational . . . almost entirely stripped away" (133).

Crowley, Silence, and Karswell are pure spiritualists, believing the paranormal activity to be pure magic, where belief and conviction are key. Carnacki has a more rational explanation, that "it is nothing more a warped branch of physics" (200). And lest the Holmes purist should worry, Holmes remains Holmes, the dedicated cynic: while Watson has witnessed the occult activity, the great detective has been conveniently absent, and so remains conveniently dubious. As a result, without the guidance of the cynical Holmes, Watson becomes a fictional reflection of Arthur Conan Doyle, as is the case in Mark Frost's Holmes pastiche, The List of 7. Part of Doyle's interest in spiritualism was the desire to speak with the ghost of his dead wife; Watson has visitations from his wife's ghost, which further shatters his realist convictions. I won't give any more information, as those would simply amount to spoilers, and Adams' has constructed a fun ride that challenges readers to judge for themselves what is really going on.

As a neophyte reader to Holmes (I've only read a scattering of the short stories, and enjoyed some of the film and television adaptations), I found The Breath of God very accessible without resorting to exposition to deliver the quirks and habits of Watson and Holmes. While the mystery will be somewhat obvious to longtime mystery fans who are used to looking for the clues and aren't distracted by misdirection, the book is still enjoyable even after one has figured out what sort of game is afoot. Adams is a capable writer who has constructed a solid page turner: it's exactly the right book to bridge the gap between the modern tone of Ritchie's movies and Doyle's originals, which modern readers sometimes find difficult.

Adams has a sequel to coming out in July titled Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Doctor Moreau: "Following the trail of several corpses seemingly killed by wild animals, Holmes and Watson stumble upon the experiments of Doctor Moreau." Based upon my enjoyment of Adams' first outing with Holmes and Watson, I for one, am looking very forward to a trail of vivisection, crude genetic engineering, and mysterious animal hybrids.

All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen

2012-01-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

I love a colourful title, but I've done my best to keep the blog post titles very simple and direct when looking at individual works. If I were writing this article for Tor or another blog, I'd have called it "All Men of Genius: Steampunk Epiphanies on Twelfth Night."

Last night was Twelfth Night, and today is Epiphany, and thus the end of the Christmas season for those who follow liturgical calendars, or who are simply too remiss or lazy to take down the tree before the first weekend of January. I like to drag my Christmas out as long as I can, and this post will be the final Christmas post of the 2011/12 season. Given All Men of Genius' use of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and a wonderful scene at Christmas riffing off Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, I thought it seasonally appropriate.

I must begin by confessing that I was conflicted about reading All Men of Genius. I wanted to read it because Lev AC Rosen had informed me it dealt with Twelfth Night after I posted on the steampunked Shakespeare here in Edmonton last summer. But I couldn't pick it up because I loathed the cover. It's not the design: I like that very much. If your book is supposed to be steampunk, then by all means let me know with a deluge of cogs. But the flawless-heroine-as-boy on the cover reminded me too much of a marionette, and they terrify me. So I didn't pick it up for some time for that terribly petty reason. (I've also read reviews where the cover was the reason picked it up, so clearly this an entirely subjective comment, but one I had to voice).

I recently heard a lecture where Michael Drout stated that plot summaries should be avoided when we're writing about literature, which I found refreshing, as I rarely give them: I'd prefer to talk about the book's themes or ideas, or how it relates to the steampunk aesthetic. If you are intrigued, then I have done my work. If you want a plot summary, it is available at Amazon.

Accordingly, I am less concerned with making the nigh unavoidable comparison others have to Harry Potter: write a story about young people at a school of the fantastic, even if you replace magic with machines, and you'll find yourself being conflated with Rowling. This is a plot device, and Hogwarts was neither the first, nor will it prove the last of such schools. Instead, I'm interested in how the fantastic is handled at Illyria College, where one can attach bat wings to a ferret without any appeal to biology (54). In Rosen's steampunk school, the creation of a three tailed snake (133) is a side-note, while the heroine's work at creating a perpetual motion machine takes some time and thought. This is not because Rosen is valuing, to use Westerfeld's designations, Clanker over Darwinist technology, but because it works for the story. Rosen's heroine works with machines: had his heroine been the creator of three-tailed snakes and bat-winged ferrets, I imagine the problem of creating them would have required greater rigor. This is once again steampunk technofantasy, and thankfully, it is largely backdrop to Rosen's tale of gender-bending romance.

I say thankfully because when steampunk writers spend too much time explaining their technology, when it ceases to be part of the setting and becomes instead the reason for the writing, the story often suffers. Rosen's story is always his foremost concern. There's certainly enough steampunk technofantasy here to satisfy those who need the technology to play a large role, but it serves to advance the plot, not draw attention to itself. At any rate, what's clear is that Rosen is using one of the elements of the steampunk aesthetic: technofantasy.

Further, Rosen uses social retrofuturism by positing yet another steampunk "New Woman" in the way we've already seen writers like Carriger and Priest do. Heroine Violet Adams' solution to be admitted to male-only Illyria College is to dress as a man: yet her long-term goal is to "show the world--or at least the scientific world--that women were men's equals in every sense" (160). Rosen engages in other expressions of social and technological retrofuturism, but they are secondary to Violet's quest for recognition as an inventor. This is one of the book's greatest strengths, that Rosen successfully pairs his use of technofantasy with his use of social retrofuturism:

"In her mind, she was building a marvelous machine. Not just a machine, but a dress. A dress for men and women alike, with marvelous long arms that stretched our farther than Violet was tall. A dress that would give anyone who wore it the same strength, strength enough to build carriages, regardless of gender or age . . . But most important, it would look like a woman. Her machine would be more beautiful than the loveliest mechanical dancing girl, but its purpose would be more beautiful, too. It would make women into a symbol of strength." (159-60)

Finally, the book is obviously Neo-Victorian, without any need to caveat that category by delimiting either temporal or geographic concerns. That is to say, while I mean it to include any evocation of the Industrial Era in a global sense, Rosen's story takes place in nineteenth century London, and while Rosen attends to many historical aspects, such as the inclusion of a Christmas break, we would have the sense this is not the London spoken of in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, even without the elements of technofantasy or retrofuturism. It evokes the period, but does not slavishly recreate it.

"So," some might say, "Lev AC Rosen's All Men of Genius is clearly a steampunk book!" And they'd be right, but not in the sense of hitting or missing a target. Instead, I would say that Rosen utilizes all aspects of the steampunk aesthetic, artfully weaving them into the fabric of his story. In a recent review in Science Fiction Studies, Jess Nevins speculated that instead of working with a binary, is/not is approach to steampunk, steampunk texts will be considered as "more" or "less" steampunk on Cherie Priest's idea of the aesthetic as a spectrum (517). It's an idea I've been considering as well, not of positing works as steampunk or not, but analyzing instead how much of the aesthetic they use, and to what degree.

I'll deal with this more in the coming year, but for the time being, I wanted to introduce a Venn diagram as food for thought. I'm not convinced it's the best way to chart this, but as this blog has always been about the discussion, I'm hoping it will generate some.

Top Steampunk of 2011

2011-12-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, I published the first post here at Steampunk Scholar. At the time, I was still amassing my own steampunk library of primary sources. Now, I'm so flooded with ARCs I fall behind in my reviews. Thank you to the publishers who honour the blog by keeping me reading. I'm doing my best to give your authors more than a cursory or dismissive glance.

I think I'm finally back on track with posting for the blog, but anyone who's been with me for more than a year knows how tenuous a statement that is. I struggled this fall with keeping up with reviews and trying to finish a new article for publication, and edit and revise the first draft of the dissertation. While some say I need to drop the blog and focus on getting done, I gently remind them that without the blog, I wouldn't be where I am in my studies. So as an introduction to this post, thanks to everyone who keeps reading and commenting.

In 2010, I made my first "best of the year" list, since previous years simply didn't contain enough steampunk books to warrant such a list. 2010's list contained only five books, and although this year's deluge of steampunk permitted a lengthier list, I decided to keep it to five. This was a tough year in that respect, as I enjoyed many of the books I read, and wish I could include more. There's no point in suggesting "the best" if you're not being exclusionary. I should also note that this cannot be considered a comprehensive list: I haven't read all the steampunk published in 2011. My criteria is simple: the book must utilize the steampunk aesthetic as a core element of the book, it must be published in 2011, and cannot be a re-release. Otherwise, Titan Books' reprinting of Captain Nemo: The Fantastic Adventures of a Dark Genius by Kevin J. Anderson and Anno Dracula by Kim Newman would have made the list.

Steampunk! - Candlewick anthology edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant - check out my review at Tor.com to see why.
Heartless by Gail Carriger - I'll be writing a series of posts leading up to the release of Timeless, the final book in the Parasol Protectorate series. In the meantime, I'll simply say that anyone who has naysayed Carriger's inclusion in the steampunk fold due to a lack of technofantasy should be reviewing their crow recipes. This is the best book of the series since Soulless, and was a delight to read.
Curious Case of the Clockwork Man by Mark Hodder - read my review to find out why Hodder is one of the strongest voices in second wave steampunk fiction.
Goliath by Scott Westerfeld - check out my retrospective on the Leviathan trilogy for why this was such a satisfying ending to one of the best steampunk series, and why it shouldn't be dismissed simply for being YA.
Empire of Ruins by Arthur Slade - another YA novel you shouldn't be avoiding, and the reasons why.

Honorary mentions:

Biggest surprise: How much I love the Vampire Empire series. If I'd had a sixth slot on the list, The Rift Walker would have been on it. While the covers made me think teen paranormal romance, the books are a superior blend of pulp-adventure, romance, steampunk, and neo-gothic elements. This is both a return to the monstrous in vampire fiction, while retaining the courtly machinations of Vampire the Masquerade and the young love story of Twilight. I am not understating when I say these books have everything most steampunk fans love in their fiction.

Biggest disappointment: Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time. See my review to see how this book got lost in translation, even with a map.

Best Audiobook: While the audiobooks for Carriger's Parasol Protectorate and Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy continue to be of the highest calibre, the best release on audio this year for steampunk fans was Keith Roberts' Pavane. I don't consider the book steampunk per se, but as alternate history it fits both the inspirational antecedent for longtime steampunk fans, and must-read for new ones. These seven linked tales are a beautifully written (and narrated) alternate history where the Catholic Church still holds significant power in the 20th century: electric power is outlawed in a neo-Medieval Britain, but a Reformation of sorts is in the offing. Pavane is set for print re-release as well, and I'll review it properly when that comes out. In the meantime, check it out on audio.

Best Re-Release: While it was certainly a boon for the steampunk reader to have K.W. Jeter's seminal Morlock Night and Infernal Devices available from Angry Robot, Kim Newman's Anno Dracula from Titan Books is by far a superior work. Arguably, it works with less of the steampunk aesthetic in the area of technofantasy than Jeter's works do, but makes up for this lack with loads of social retrofuturism and dark neo-Victorianism. At the very least, we can say it's a book steampunks will love, and I can't recommend it enough.

Sheer Panache: Lev AC Rosen's All Men of Genius, for the audacity of playing in Shakespeare and Wilde's sandboxes and largely getting away with it.

Best Steampunk Memory: Meeting and hanging out with Gary Gianni at Steamcon. When I picture myself sitting at my sister's dining room table slaving over a term paper on Captain Nemo, I know that guy hasn't a clue how many cool experiences are lying ahead in the next three years. I gave up on getting to know the big celebs in my first year of convention travels, being content with making friends rather than being a fanboy. So I was pleasantly surprised to hit it off with Gary at the Steamcon Airship Awards banquet, and get some really fantastic opportunities to hang out and talk Conan, Doc Savage, Verne, and many other shared interests. It was like an early Christmas present.

A Happy New Year to my readers: I look forward to a leisurely stroll beside and inside the Nautilus in the new year, as well as looking back on two and a half years in Gail Carriger's wonderful Parasol Protectorate series. And, God willing and my schedule permitting, I'll see the end of the five year mission in the fourth year.

Christmas Past by Jonathan Green

2011-12-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

Obviously, this is not the cover for Jonathan Green's steampunk short story, "Christmas Past." However, it is written by him, and is far more festive than any of the Pax Britannia covers. Those are kickass, but not festive.

Having read two of Jonathan Green's novels, his collection of short stories, and now his short Christmas tale, I find him hit-and-miss. I nothing short of detested Unnatural History, and while I enjoyed much of Leviathan Rising, I was nonplussed by its unnecessarily stereotypical treatment of asians-as-villains. I find Green far easier to take in small doses. Green's writing is the literary equivalent of your favorite junk-food - it's bad for you, but you enjoy it anyhow.

"Christmas Past" is one of Green's short works, available for free download from the Pax Britannia site. It's a no-risk venture, but so as not to waste anyone's time, I'll give you a quick sense of its flavour. It's a bloody tale of revenge and murder, complete with a slasher Santa. The mystery isn't half-bad, though not at the level of Sherlock Holmes, though it's clear Green wants his series' hero, Ulysses Quicksilver, to come off as a combination of Roger Moore's James Bond and Sherlock Holmes with a libido. That isn't to say it isn't worth reading - it's a nice diversion, and a good introduction to Green's style - if you like "Christmas Past," you will likely enjoy the Ulysses Quicksilver Short Story Collection. You may even wish to try some of Green's novels, though I can't vouch for them myself. I haven't given up on the man yet, though. He certainly takes things to a gonzo level in his steampunk world, as you'll see when I talk Leviathan Rising in the new year as part of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea series of posts, and I still own one more of his earlier Quicksilver novels (Human Nature, where I originally found "Christmas Past"). I love the underlying ideas Green plays with, but I have mixed feelings about the execution. Who knows, YMMV.

If you enjoy "Christmas Past," here's an idea taken from Gail Carriger's blog, where she suggested the following as a stocking stuffer:

Find some nice sepia tone or other fancy printer paper, buy a $0.99 short story by your friend's favorite author in .pdf form (or whatever) and print it out. Roll up and tie with a little ribbon. Pop into top of stocking, so cute! (Of course, for all the nay-sayers out there, I am not suggesting distributing or profiting from these print outs.)

Perhaps you'll use "Christmas Past." If it wasn't to your liking, why not try Carriger's short story, or Cherie Priest's free short story, "Tanglefoot: A Story of the Clockwork Century"? Or if you have your heart set on keeping it festively seasonal, try "If Dragon's Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear" by Ken Scholes. For those who hate reading, and want some arts and crafts on Christmas eve or morn, try Desktop Gremlins' Steampunk Santa!

Well, it's time to leave the blog until the new year - the year's "Best of" post will be out next Friday, but that's already written and waiting a scheduled posting. The best of the season to you all. Thanks once again for dropping by the blog, and making it one of the go-to-spaces on the web for steampunk reading.

I'll be Holmes for Christmas, or Sherlock Holmes and the case of the missing holiday

2011-12-14T16:28:00.001-07:00

For those interested, the new seasonal top bar contains images from Macy's Steampunk-themed holiday-window displays.

With tonight's release of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and the Christmas season upon us, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, by introducing my Sherlock Holmes series while simultaneously riding one of my scholarly hobby horses, the use or absence of Christmas/Christendom in steampunk.

Doing a series of Holmes posts was inspired by the release of the new Guy Ritchie film, as well as by Titan Books' line of Holmes' pastiches, both in the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series, marked by an asterisk below, and in the stand-alone riffing of Adams, Kowalski, and Newman.

January 13: Sherlock Homes: the Breath of God by Guy Adams: Holmes and Crowley!
March 02: *Sherlock Holmes: The Veiled Detective by David Stuart Davies: Holmes' Secret Origin!
May 4: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles by Kim Newman
June 01: *Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors by Edward B. Hanna: Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper!

September 07: The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Leslie Klinger: Holmes for SMRT people!
October 5: *Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds by Manly W. Wellman and Wade Wellman: Holmes vs. Martians!

I'm not a Holmes scholar, nor could I say I'm a die-hard fan, but I've always been interested, and I wanted to take the opportunity to look at the world's most famous detective in earnest. However, there are already many sites dedicated to the canonical Sherlock Holmes, and to avoid needless duplication, I'm dealing with pastiches instead of canon.

As a steampunk scholar, I've had many people ask "Is Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes steampunk?" According to my aesthetic definition, there are certainly steampunk elements. The costuming and Holmes' fighting style are neo-Victorian, trading historical accuracy for stylistic verisimilitude. The uber-weapon in the film's climax has some level of retrofuturism and technofantasy, albeit light doses when compared to most steampunk tech. It's certainly no clockwork steam-spider. But that is the extent of my analysis of Ritchie's Holmes as steampunk, at least until I see the new film.
With that question so quickly answered, I am then asked if I think Downey's Holmes and Law's Watson are any good; people assume that because I deal in steampunk, I must know every work of popular Victorian and Edwardian literature intimately (I don't, but I'm working on it!). Subjectively, I think they're a brilliant spin on the odd couple Holmes and Watson have represented in their many iterations. Objectively, it's glaringly obvious that the letter of Doyle's canon has been abandoned for something closer to spirit. That said, this is nothing new in the history of Holmes onscreen. Just compare Nigel Bruce's "buffoonish portrait" of Watson in the Petrie Wine radio series, specifically "The Night Before Christmas episode" with David Burke's splendid performance in the UK Granada TV series Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which "finally [does] justice to the 'old campaigner' as a man of courage, intelligence, and compassion" (Klinger lvii). Or compare Peter Cushing's performance in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," one of the few surviving episodes of the '60s BBC series with Jeremy Brett in the UK Granada version of the same episode. As Klinger notes, "while Brett is not the Holmes of everyone's imagination, his larger-than-life characterisation will certainly stand for a generation as the screen Sherlock Holmes" (lvii). One might say the same for Downey and Law. But this is not the object of my inquiry either.

In preparing this post, I listened to the radio episode "The Night Before Christmas," read "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," and watched the Cushing and Brett versions of "Carbuncle" on YouTube, these Holmes' tales (the former pastiche, the latter canon) for their seasonal relevance, which resulted in reengaging my ruminations on the absence of Christmas and Christendom in steampunk.

Two years ago, I pondered the absence of Christmas, and by extension Christianity, in the majority of steampunk literature. At the time, J. Daniel Sawyer's "Cold Duty" was the only steampunk story I'd read that referenced that most Dickensian of holidays. Surprisingly, of the over one hundred steampunk books on my shelf, less than half include Christendom as a facet of their steampunk world building. Of those that do, Jay Lake's Mainspring and sequels figure most notably, since Lake's alternate world takes the nineteenth century conceit of God as the cosmic clockmaker quite literally. I recently came across "Christmas Past" in Jonathan Green's Human Nature, where Christmas is simply backdrop. This year saw Lev AC Rosen's All Men of Genius, which appropriately includes a scene of festive cheer in addition to its references to Twelfth Night, as well as the release of A Clockwork Christmas, an anthology dedicated to steampunk holiday tales. Despite these few steampunk settings augmented with Yuletide cheer, references to Christendom and Christmas are less common in steampunk than one might imagine.

This dearth of reference to religion in London is odd, given the "revival of religious activity, largely unmatched since the days of the Puritans" that swept England in the nineteenth century:

This religious revival shaped that code of moral behaviour, or rather than infusion of all behaviour with moralism, which became known as "Victoranism." Above all, religion occupied a place in the public consciousness, a centrality in the intellectual life of the age, that it had not had a century before and did not retain in the twentieth century. (Klinger xx, emphasis added)

Klinger argues that it is this religious revival that provides nineteenth century society with the propriety we see so many steampunk characters engaging in: the unflappable manners of Alexia Tarabotti in The Parasol Protectorate are arguably the result of a society built on this revival of religious activity. Thankfully, Gail Carriger's books feature religious establishments to support Alexia keeping up appearances, from American Puritans in Soulless (140) to the scheming Templars of Blameless.

One might argue more strenuously for references to Christmas in steampunk, since "what we think of as Christmas was actually invented, for the most part, in the Victorian era."

Prior to the 1800s, Christmas, which had evolved from winter solstice festivals, had often been an occasion of raucous, drunken celebration. The publication of Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 1843, with its message of goodwill and charity, helped to transform the holiday into an appreciation of family and community. The words to many Christmas carols were penned in the 1800s, both in England and the United States, and the Christmas Tree was popularised by Prince Albert, who brought the practice over from his native Germany in the 1840s. (Klinger 198)

Klinger wrote this footnote for "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" in his New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, and in returning to Holmes I hope to clarify what I mean by inclusion of Christendom, Christianity, or Christmas in steampunk. Aside from Holmes' reference to Christmas as "the season of forgiveness," there is nothing particularly sentimental about "Blue Carbuncle," unless one finds "the evident warmth of the friendship between Holmes and Watson" (Klinger 197) to be so. Holmes' allusion to the religious significance of Christmas are not the words of a believer: unlike his creator, Holmes is a man of science, not spiritualism. However, as befit the times he lived in, Doyle produced a Christmas story, one which Holmes scholar and writer Christopher Morley referred to as "a Christmas story without slush" (197). If steampunk is set in the Victorian period and London locale, or seeks to evoke said period or locale, than it must needs address at the very least the religion that spawned the holiday, if not the holiday itself from time to time, either by reference to presence or absence thereof.

Steampunk set in an alternate world closely resembling earth needs to deal with the problem of the Church, especially when set in England. Let me be clear: I'm not advocating for a steampunked Pilgrim's Progress or nineteenth century Narnias. Painting the church in a positive light is not the issue at hand: I'm a fan of Philip Pullman's Golden Compass, which goes beyond the church as villain to God as Evil Overlord. I'm simply nonplussed at the common erasure of Church from steampunk: get rid of the Church if you like, but then deal with the ramifications of that absence. Or keep it, and let it be a power that holds back progress, giving reasons for steam technology in the 1960s, as in Keith Roberts' brilliant alternate history Pavane. That said, don't limit yourself to the stereotype of Church as the Big Bad; while certainly involved in numerous historical atrocities, Christendom was responsible for a lot more than the Crusades and Inquisition. If you're going to steampunk the emancipation of slavery, you'll be playing both sides of that coin. Or, you can simply ensure it's sitting in the background, as Kady Cross has in The Girl in the Steel Corset, citing romance fans' eye for historical detail. Obviously, there's no need for references to real-world religion in the fully secondary steampunk worlds, such as the world of Stephen Hunt's Court of the Air and its sequels. Yet even Karin Lowachee's secondary world in Gaslight Dogs has an all too familiar religion bent on colonial proselytizing that creates a instant familiarity with her ostensibly unfamiliar world.

Whatever you do, do your homework, and know your history. Whatever one's attitudes toward institutional religion, it was a major facet of Victorian life. Even if it's only present in blasphemy, as in the dialogue of Cherie Priest's heroes and heroines, ensure you haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater, or manger straw, for Christ's sake.

Steampunk: Gears, Gadgets, and Gizmos by Thomas Willeford (2012)

2011-12-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

For those who celebrate Christmas, it's Advent, and if you're like many, you're counting the shopping days remaining, or like me, are lighting advent wreaths and opening cardboard doors to find chocolate treats. As ecumenical as I am, I celebrate Christmas, so the blog gets a festive makeover, and with teeth gritted, I emerge from end-of-term grading binges to write a few holiday-themed posts.

We begin our Christmas series for 2011 with Thomas Willeford's Steampunk: Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos, "A Maker's Guide to Creating Modern Artifacts." As anyone familiar with the blog knows, I am not a Maker, nor do I comment much on what Makers are up to. They are an aspect of steampunk for another scholar's academic scrutiny. I must admit, I cringe whenever someone says that steampunk is about making things with your hands, since I live the life of the mind; all my steampunk contributions have been virtual, with my hands involved only in typing on a decidedly non-steampunk keyboard.

That said, I harbor a secret hope for the time and wherewithal to someday mod a Nerf Maverick: I've owned one since before my research interests took me to conventions where I saw scores of the toy guns, day-glo colours buried beneath a patina of paint, and I'd love to try my hand at it, cliched as that may be. Likewise, in looking through Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos (GGG), I'm optimistic I could, with Thomas Willeford's help, make my own goggles.

I have friends who would benefit more from owning Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos, and it was thinking of them that I imagined an alternate history of my life where I had more money and time. In that alternate history, I buy these friends, these amateur tinkerers, people who are much better with their hands than I am (insofar as making things go - I am very good with my hands at a number of other things), a copy of Willeford's GGG. With the list of "Must Have Tools" found on page 8 in hand, I go shopping. I then shove the coping saw, metal files, rotary hole punch, and fine-point magic markers, along with the rest of the "Tools of the Mad Scientist" into a very large and very durable stocking, and place it under their tree after having broken into their house by drilling out their front door lock with the Electric Power Drill Willeford recommends, in addition to an Electric Rotary Power Tool and Reciprocating Handsaw under "Handheld Power Tools."

Getting the picture? Imagine, instead of buying your favorite burgeoning steampunk Maker a pair of goggles for Christmas, buying them the tools and materials to make their own. Odds are, if they're handy people in a Tim Allen vein, they'll already own half these tools. If they are very handy, they've been eagerly waiting for an excuse to use these tools. Willeford's GGG offers a whimsical solution to the tools collecting dust in your handy friend's workroom.

If that seems too costly, then consider buying the book along with a dead cuckoo clock and allowing that neophyte Tinkerer to enjoy the process of "Gear Mining--Or How to Dissect a Cuckoo," outlined in Chapter 4. Or buy them the materials need to build one project.

Alternately, if your Steampunk-Maker-in-the-Making is someone you have your romantic eye on, buy them the book, and make a coupon book for date-nights to the Antique Shop or Flea Market. Willeford devotes space to collecting all the necessary paraphenalia for the Tesla wannabe.

I recall a nonplussed artist at Nova Albion in 2010, bemoaning the copycat nature of steampunk art. I'm more in Kirk Hammett's camp (yes, the guitarist from Metallica), who once said that "imitation is creation." I'm sure he wasn't the first to say so, but he's the one I remember. I remember because I learned to play bass with Metallica tabs. I learned to draw by tracing my comic books. And I think I can learn to make goggles with Thomas Willeford's help: that, and my friends' tools.

Head over to Amazon.com to look through sample pages, which include those crucial tool lists!

P.S. Don't take this recommendation from a non-Maker alone! Nathan Hays (@thegeo) of Fortune's Ember, said the following about GGG on Twitter: "I can't recommend this Steampunk craft book enough! http://amzn.to/vxKG8s Has REAL projects, rayguns/arms/etc . . . It isn't another shitty "Lets take a chain from Hobby Lobby and glue a gear to an octopus pendant and hang it on it. Steampunk!" . . . It is a book of actually cool, useful, unique, and CREATIVE ideas . . . My copy arrived today, once it warms up in a few months I have quite a few things to try out now."

The Hunter by Theresa Myers

2011-11-15T10:35:00.005-07:00

When I saw the cover of Theresa Myers' The Hunter, I thought, "I should get my mom to do the review on this one." She's a huge fan of westerns, and with a tag line like "his father warned him about girls like this," I figured this would be a standard western with steampunk flavors. Besides, the idea of having the steampunk scholar's mom weighing in on a steampunk western seemed fun.

You'll note that she's not the one writing this review, and the story of why begins with the cover for the Hunter , itself an interesting case of reader expectations and marketing strategies, especially for steampunk fans. Rather than the "gears 'n grit" so much steampunk is currently packaged with, The Hunter's cover is very shiny, in a Boris-Vallejo-paints-SF-way. It appears to be banking on the hope that Cowboys and Aliens would do well at the box office. Compare the cover for Devon Monk's Dead Iron to see what I mean. My guess is that some steampunk connoisseurs will turn their nose up at the Hunter, with its neon-glow pistol and gleaming clockwork horse, and maybe that's for the best. The Hunter isn't steampunk written for those who consider The Difference Engine and its direct offspring as quintessential steampunk. Rather, The Hunter is entry-level access to the steampunk aesthetic for neophytes like my mom.

The self-appointed door wardens of steampunk were disappointed when Katie MacAlister's Steamed stormed the steampunk market outside the subculture. I expect Myers is in for some of the same disdain. The Hunter is certainly working with the steampunkaesthetic, whatever criticism supercilious exclusivists may level at it. It takes place in the nineteenth century (neo-Victorian), albeit in America, but any publishers still under the impression steampunk only happens in London need to wake up and smell the phlogiston, because steampunk has been set outside London since Rudy Rucker wrote The Hollow Earth in 1990. Further, even Myers' demon lord Rathe, despite decidedly mythic roots, "part vampire, part fallen archangel," dresses in neo-Vic fashion: "he was dressed like a dapper Englishman, with a great black overcape, freshly pressed black pin-striped suit with matching vest, crisp white high-collar shirt, and blood-red silk tie" (21); the heroine's attitude and desire for freedom displays anachronistic attitudes for a woman in the Old West, even if she is a demon (retrofuturism), and impossible technologies (technofantasy) like Tempus the clockwork horse, vampires' dirigibles that exemplify Arthur Evans' category of Vernian "vehicular utopias," and the ubiquitous goggles, rendered here as "spectro-photometric oglifiers" (16). It isn't literary or high minded: it's mostly good bodice-ripping fun, and while some critics are interested in creating taxonomies for steampunk based in ideologies, I will once again beat the proverbial dead horse here at Steampunk Scholar: steampunk is an aesthetic, an empty tea cup ornately decorate waiting to be filled. In the case of Theresa Myers' The Hunter, it's filled with the smell of leather saddles and gunpowder, mixed with sweat and other bodily fluids generated by the hero rubbing up against a busty red headed succubus a lot.

And that's why you're not reading my mother's review of The Hunter.

While taking a bright 'n shiny brass veneer approach to the cover will only mislead those who prefer their steampunk gritty, The Hunter's cover misleads those seeking out steampunk that's a little dirty, and by dirty I mean steamy. The Hunter, in addition to being steampunk, is paranormal romance. About a succubus. Perhaps appealing to Cowboys and Aliens fans didn't involve a red-headed devil-lady bursting out of her corset on the cover (much to my disappointment). However, given the level of steam Myers generates in The Hunter, an image of a red-headed devil-lady on the cover might have given me fair warning. Despite my mom's familiarity with Western types, she would be unlikely to recognize the Hooker with the Heart of Gold in Lily the Succubus. Further, I didn't want to have to explain what a succubus is to my mom. That's a conversation for a father and son.

Which brings me back to that tag line: his father had warned him about girls like this. It's clever, because Colt, the male protagonist, really was warned by his father about women like Lily the succubus, a female Darkin. As a hunter, Colt was trained by his father to kill Lily's kind, but in great paranormal romantic tradition, he can't: first, because he needs her to help him find the Book, and second because he wants her. Herein lies the problem for our hero and heroine: "Colt was a Hunter. She was a demon. The two would never mix, so why did she suddenly yearn for it to happen?" (47). He's no choir boy, but she's the Bad Girl turned all the way up to eleven.

This must be a trope of paranormal romance, though I'm no expert: our hero and heroine have a powerful desire for each other, but cannot act on it for fear of starting the apocalypse, or turning one of them into a mindless monster, or something equally bad in a life writ large kind of way, to use Joss Whedon's terms. So while the plot is recycled adventure-quest-for-the-lost-relic, it's ancillary to the real crisis, which is how Lily and Colt can get to the passionate embrace without Lily consuming Colt's soul in the process. As Robert Irwin stated in The Arabian Nights: A Companion, "the romantic and erotic fiction of any culture is always constructed from conventional plot motifs, literary stereotypes and stock themes (Lovers often swooned in medieval diction, but did they do so in medieval reality?)" (161). Those seeking unconventional plot, literary innovation, and challenging themes would do well to look elsewhere. However, those seeking to enjoy a fun romp in the saddle and the sack involving some steampunk adventure along the way to a number of climaxes, both narrative and naughty, would do well to check out Theresa Myers' The Hunter.

Which is once again, why I'm the one writing about this book, and not my mom. I'm not up for a conversation involving "bodies in unison in a run to the finish" (290) with my mother. That's a conversation for me and my wife.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, then edited in Blogger.

Victorian/Steampunk Monsters

2011-10-28T11:13:00.000-06:00

Above model: Candace Miller Photographer: Richard Fournier

At the end of this year's Airship Awards banquet at Steamcon III in Seattle, Diana Vick announced the theme for 2012's Steamcon IV: Victorian Monsters. Shortly after the announcement, I told Diana it was "dirty pool" to go having yet another fun theme for the fourth year in a row. That famous quote from the Godfather III is rolling around in my head, given I thought this was likely my last Steamcon: "Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in."

Get yourself one of these Steampunk Vampire Slaying kits from Dr. Jubal at Deviant Art!

I don't know who Diana's planning to invite as Guests of Honor, but the website has further clarified the theme as "All the Classic Monsters born during the Victorian period." Arguably, we're looking at Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, the Martians from War of the Worlds, Dr. Moreau's hybrids, Varney the Vampire, Carmilla, and Dorian Gray. If I'm in attendance, I'll be bringing along a Wendigo from the Great White North, courtesy of Algernon Blackwood. Given steampunks' love for H.P. Lovecraft, I'll be shocked if we don't see the whole damn Whateley family in attendance, or at the very least, a copy of the Necronomicon.

Still, that's a whole year away, and in the meantime, Halloween is just around the corner, and I've been pondering the intersection of steampunk and horror for a week and a half now. To that end, here's a list, in no way meant to seem comprehensive, of books combining steampunk with monsters:

Zombies
Obviously, Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century books immediately jump to mind, with the Dust-driven revenants of Boneshaker, Clementine, Dreadnought, and Ganymede. While they sometimes serve more as part of the setting than overt plot device, Priest's zombies are an interesting twist on the zombie as victim of addiction. Steampunk naysayers nonplussed by the anachronistic inclusion of these mutant offspring of the atom should remember that Priest was not the first to include zombies in steampunk fiction: that distinction goes to James Blaylock, who brought us zombies of a kind in the steampunk classic Homunculus back in the '80s. Gunslinger Johnny Ringo returns from the dead to shamble into Tombstone in Mike Resnick's Buntline Special, while other steampunk works that include the walking dead, or close cousins thereof are Tim Akers' Dead of Veridon and George Mann's The Affinity Bridge.

Vampires
Dracula, the king of all vampires, makes but a cameo in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula; yet the absence of the big-D is compensated by the sheer volume of nineteenth century vampires parading through the pages of this classic work of horror and alternate history. Titan books reissued Anno Dracula earlier this year, and it's the Halloween treat that will do the trick if you're a fang-fan.

While nowhere near as serious as Anno Dracula, Gail Carriger's paranormal romance series, The Parasol Protectorate, is the antidote to the viral spread of sparkling vampires for that teen who's tiring of Edward Cullen. Carriger's vampires don't lurk in the shadows: they cavort through London in bright coloured waistcoats, setting fashion trends. Her werewolves are an interesting study of machismo and alpha male stereotypes, and her protagonist is a preternatural, a woman without a soul who cancels out the supernatural. Don't let the laughs fool you, though: Carriger can write creepy when the occasion calls for it, from the waxen faced golem VIXI in Soulless to the poltergeists in Heartless.

While it's not steampunk, fans of steampunk writer Tim Powers will do well to check out his The Stress of Her Regard, which combines a vampire of sorts with the story of how Frankenstein came to be written. Other steampunk novels with bloodsucking include Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam; while I haven't read these yet, I'm excited to get around to Clay and Susan Griffith's Vampire Empire Series, The Greyfriar and The Riftwalker; finally, Dracula makes another brief appearance in Joe Lansdale's Zeppelins West.

More Monsters!
China Mieville's Perdido Street Station provides us with monsters galore, and monster hunters in pursuit, in what is effectively a steampunk Aliens/Blade 2/Mimic tale: a bug hunt in a fantastic steampunk setting. Jonathan Green's Leviathan Rising fulfills our fear of giant monsters in the water abysses, and Canadian Arthur Slade takes Quasimodo's monstrous visage and renders it heroic in The Hunchback Assignments.

And finally, while I'd hesitate to call Mike Mignola's Baltimore: The Steadfast Tin Solider and the Vampire steampunk, it has the right look and feel for the steampunk crowd. It's a hybrid homage to classic monsters: a pastiche of Victor Frankenstein's obsessive pursuit of his creation, of the vampire hunters who stalk Dracula, and Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth, with poetic prose references to Andersen's fairy tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier. I haven't had an opportunity to read Mignola's comic series of Baltimore, but the original book was a joy to read. And if a certain con promoter is listening, I think Mignola's the man to have as artist GOH next year at Steamcon IV. Since his tale isn't particularly steampunk, it might fit the bill for "monsters birthed in the Victorian period."

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Steampunk! - An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

2011-10-17T10:56:00.003-06:00

This is the cover on the ARC I received: Not the marketing strategy I'd have chosen for a YA targeted anthology.

Halfway through reading Candlewick Press’s Steampunk! anthology, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, I was pining for a course to teach on steampunk. While some might be dismissive of an anthology marketed toward young adults published by a press best known for children’s books (The lion’s share of my son’s primary readers are Candlewick books), they’d be remiss to do so. The talent collected by editors Kelly Link and Gavin Grant is considerable, and not a one has written a throwaway tale with a few cogs and gears slapped on. Instead, each story challenges the boundaries of the steampunk aesthetic, while standing on its own as thoughtful, insightful works of short fiction.

The usual suspects for the constitution of a steampunk work are present in the early stories, but the further in one reads, the farther from London we journey, and only on rare occasion and in dire need, by airship. The technology is still here, but it often takes a back seat to the characters, or as a delivery device for thematic content. Instead of an explanation of how the gizmo works, we’re getting reflections on how the world works.

Read the whole article at Tor.com!

Cassandra Clare informs me this is the UK cover. Lucky blokes!

Steampunk Gilgamesh: The Annotated Version

2011-10-07T18:42:00.001-06:00

The origin of this exercise is perhaps as odd as the idea itself: while weeding my devastated Mad-Max-style front yard in preparation to lay sod this past summer, I was listening to the audio version of Stephen Mitchell’s lovely Gilgamesh: A New English Version. As I listened, I imagined the how the story would look if it were steampunked. Who would Gilgamesh be? What would Enkidu look like? What city would replace Uruk? I never seriously pondered writing it down, until I hit 800 followers on Twitter, and decided to celebrate the landmark with 80 tweets comprising an outline of a steampunked Gilgamesh. As part of Steampunk Week here at Tor, here is that outline with annotated explanations.

1. I’ll be using Stephen Mitchell’s excellent Gilgamesh text as source for the direct quotations in these tweets. I used Stephen Mitchell because he fills in the gaps in the text, making it far more readable than literal translations of a single version of Gilgamesh. If you’re going to read the Epic, this is the version to start with. If you’ve never read Gilgamesh, either take the time to read Mitchell’s version, or read an online summary – the steampunked version will make more sense.

2. Instead of walled Uruk, we behold a skyscraper in New York, early 20th century: “Doc” Gil Gamesh’s achievement. The Gilgamesh Epic (GE) as written by Sin-Leqqe-Unninni begins with a sort of frame narrative, asking the reader to behold the wonders of ancient architecture manifest in Uruk, the city Gilgamesh built. I chose New York over London because New York’s skyline exemplifies the pinnacle of industrial ingenuity better than London’s. Further, I was thinking of how Lester Dent describes New York in Land of Always Night, a Doc Savage adventure: “In the center of New York City, the skyscrapers jut up like silver pines, each seemingly striving to overshadow the other; but there is one building taller and finer than all the rest, an astounding mass of polished granite and stainless steel towering nearly a hundred stories into the sky, a structure that is possibly man’s proudest building triumph.”

Read the whole EPIC at Tor.com!

An Interview, Steampunk Week, and Steamcon III

2011-10-03T10:48:00.003-06:00

My sister, me, and my niece at Steamcon II last fall. (Photo by the Steamcon Photo Booth Guy)

While the Steampunk Scholar blog has been largely silent this past month, I have not. Earlier this month I was interviewed at Albertan YA writer Judith Graves' website, covering some old ground for my long time readers, but new for Judith's YA paranormal romance audience.

I was also writing and submitting articles and abstracts to academic anthologies that are in the offing (that's all I can really say at this point). I submitted three posts to Tor.com: a longer version of my "Steampunk Gilgamesh" for steampunk week (Oct. 3-7, 2011), and two appreciations: one for Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, and the other for Candlewick's Steampunk! anthology. I'll link to all of those as they go live.

Reading from Soulless with Gail Carriger at Steamcon II (photo by Rio Jones)

Finally, I've been prepping to present at Steamcon III, coming up in less than two weeks on October 14-16. Here's my presentation schedule for the weekend:

Friday, October 14
4: 00 p.m. Steampunk Lit to Watch For - Regency C
What writers and new fiction should we be looking out for this year? (Here's the rub - I know a few, but I want MORE! So if you're a steampunk writer with something new to release next year, give me the skinny.)
I'll moderating, with authors Ren Cummins and Andrew Mayer as panelists.

Saturday, October 15
10:00 a.m. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in under an Hour - Grand B
Hurtling forward at Nautilus-like speed, this session will both summarize and illuminate key points from Verne’s classic novel, as well as social commentary and character development excised from most translations.

11:00 a.m. Meet Gary Gianni - Grand E-G
An interview with Artist Guest of Honor Gary Gianni.

Sunday, October 16
10:00 a.m. Steampunking 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Grand I
This session catalogues and summarizes steampunk novels using Verne’s classic work as their basis, such as Arthur Slade’s The Dark Deeps, Jonathan Green’s Leviathan Rising, Mark Mellon’s Napoleon Concerto, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Joe Lansdale’s Zeppelins West, and Thomas F. Moteleone’s The Secret Sea.

11:00 a.m. Captain Nemo: A Biography - Cedar
Combining the fiction of Verne’s novels with historical facts about the British Raj, Sepoy mutiny, and historical figures, this session treats the enigmatic figure of Captain Nemo as a real person, a complex hero and villain, and arguably the protagonist of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

If you're at Steamcon and come to any of the panels or presentations, please introduce yourself! I'll be milling about in the afternoon and evening.


What I look like between panels, because I'm in such a bloody hurry. (Photo by Taja Blackhorn-Delph)

Empire of Ruins: The Hunchback Assignments III by Arthur Slade

2011-09-15T16:05:00.001-06:00

When I was a kid, I stumbled into reading Doc Savage novels because I mistook them the basis for the fictional character Mark Savage from the short lived television series Tenspeed and Brownshoe. Thankfully, my error produced a better result than I'd anticipated, throwing me into the pulp world of Clark Savage and his team of heroes. My first Doc Savage book was a Golden Press hardback of The Sargasso Ogre, which was mostly green for obvious reasons. Both my perception of Doc Savage as epitome of globetrotting explorer-adventurer and my nostalgia for those Golden Press hardbacks were both evoked (the greenery, and the very feel of the Canadian edition hardback!) by Empire of Ruins, the latest installment in Arthur Slade's The Hunchback Assignments.

This won't translate well for Stateside readers picking up the trade paperback editions from Random House, which utilize that YA Photoshop approach that renders Modo as a sort of Goth-styled hero, more pale than hideous. Those covers never captured my imagination nor inspired my nostalgia like the Canadian editions from Harper-Collins, which are hardback with a cartoon style cover by the masterful Christopher Steininger. I'm not sure what it says about the difference in markets between our countries, but despite receiving the first two from Random House as ARCs, I have since bought Canadian editions of the first two books because of my love of the covers.

These are books you can judge by those covers: Slade produces what Steininger promises. In the case of Empire of Ruins, that means an expedition in the Australian rainforest, with Modo's close companions along for the adventure. Tharpa, Modo's combat trainer, and one of my favorite characters in the series, finally makes the cover! The pith helmets, Mr. Socrates rifle, and Modo's enigmatic new mask put me in mind of Alderac Games' The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac boardgame, and by extension, Indiana Jones and all the bad direct-to-video spinoffs Raiders spawned.

My love of the "into the jungle" exploration adventures was definitely a motivator in my interest in steampunk.And as I opened Empire of Ruins to the first page, I wasn't disappointed. We find Modo in media res, having just fallen into the Australian rainforest from an airship engaged in battle far above him, pursued by men in the trees using animal sounds for signals, about to fall into a pit trap filled with spikes. And then he takes us back nine months earlier, to wend our way back to that moment with Modo. The journey is filled with Slade's usual mix of light-hearted humour, engaging characters, high adventure, and near-death escapes. There's nothing philosophically earth-shattering here, but it's well written escapism filled with personalities this reader has come to love.

Like the earlier installments, Empire of Ruin is both plot-driven for those seeking the page turner, and character driven for those who couldn't care less about one more moment of derring do (in some ways, the difference in the US and Canadian covers realizes this dichotomy). Readers of the earlier books will be pleased to know that like Scott Westerfeld, Slade has no intention of stringing along the relationship between his leading man and lady ad nauseum. Modo and his fellow agent, Octavia. It's no spoiler to reveal that Octavia finally sees behind Modo's mask: it would be a spoiler to say whether or not she sees beyond it. It's an emotional moment, but that's as much as I'll reveal. Modo continues to work out the complexities of the father-son relationship he shares with his boss/benefactor, Mr. Socrates, who represents the "for Queen and Country" man in the series. Modo provides the oppositional "punk" perspective, trusting to instinct rather than blind obedience, which produces a number of tense moments for the young man and his mentor.

Sadly, even with my endorsement, many will pass Slade by because his work is classified as Young Adult reading. Some of the best steampunk written in the last ten years is aimed at the Young Adult market: Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, or Philip Reeve's Larklight. Two of my favorite series have not only been Young Adult, but also Canadian: Kenneth Oppel's Airborn trilogy, and Slade's Hunchback Diaries. Maybe I just like them because of where they take me: back to a simpler time in my life when summer afternoons were filled with hours of reading stories of adventure and exploration, followed by more hours of actual adventure and exploration, with hiking books, canteen, and backpack, in the coulees and creeks around my hometown of Medicine Hat. Maybe it's because that when they provide social commentary, it's rarely overwrought or in my face, but rather a facet of a character's perspective. Or maybe it's because I'm just a sucker for a book involving pith helmets and ancient ruined temples.

Whichever it is, it was a delight to journey with Modo this past summer, and my only regret is that I didn't have the time to tell you sooner. I was too busy playing Adventurers with my son, and dreaming of being an academic who wears a fedora and a satchel, and carries a whip. If that's your brand of fun, then Empire of Ruins is for you.

The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma

2011-09-02T11:39:00.001-06:00

An exercise in never-judging a book by its awesome cover or overwrought hype (based largely in the mistaken idea that any book in translation must be brilliant!), I present my review for Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time, for those of you who might have missed it at Tor.com.

I once took a course in writing science fiction and fantasy from Canadian fantasy writer Ann Marston. In it, Ann warned against explaining oft-used concepts and tropes, as they no longer required explanation. She focused on post-apocalyptic literature that rambled on about how the world had ended, rather than advancing the story. Her point was that SFF readers have a vast intertextual repository of print and screen antecedents to fill in the gaps. A few hints are sufficient for the savvy speculative reader’s comprehension. Consider Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. How did the world become this burnt out husk? It doesn’t matter – the world burned, a father and son survived, and continue to survive. This is the story. We don’t really give a damn precisely how the world fell apart because we’re wrapped up in that story, no further explanation necessary.

While reading the third and final act of Felix J. Palma’s The Map of Time, I wondered if his target audience was someone who had never considered parallel universes, or alternate history, or time travel’s ripple effect. In short, someone who has never read Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. For anyone familiar with possible world theory or Schrödinger’s cat, it feels terribly contrived. It’s like reading the alt history version of The Celestine Prophecy: characters exist only to deliver philosophical exposition. When H.G. Wells utters the words, “Does this mean we are living in . . . a parallel universe?” I couldn’t help myself. I took a red pen and wrote, “Gasp!” in the margin.

The awkward third act of The Map of Time is unfortunate, because there’s some really good writing in the first two acts. The problem is, Palma tried too hard to connect the dots for the reader, instead of letting it be a fragmented narrative involving Jack the Ripper, H.G. Wells, time travel, John Merrick the Elephant Man, and the sudden appearance of Bram Stoker and Henry James. Oh, and there’s a romance or two as well.

Check out the whole article at Tor.com.

Mission Update: Summer 2011

2011-08-30T11:11:00.001-06:00

Once again, my best laid plans are too grandiose for my workload. I had hoped to include a few more reviews/analyses in this year's Canuck Steampunk, but between taking on a new course (Introduction to Comparative Literature), staying home with my kids most of the summer (my wife had to return to work), and punching out the dissertation, there simply wasn't enough time. My biggest regret was not getting to finish my review of Peter Tupper's The Innocent's Progress (which I'll now wrap up in February for the second annual Steampunk Romance and Erotica month at the site), and introducing you to Adrienne Kress, author of Alex and the Ironic Gentlemen, which while not being specifically steampunk, should appeal to steampunk fans. Adrienne did forward a copy of her short story, "The Clockwork Corset" from Corsets and Clockwork: 13 Steampunk Romances. It's a delightful love story set during World War I, and if it's any indication of the quality of the rest of the book, it's well worth your time.

I'd also hoped to get to Arthur Slade's The Dark Deeps and The Empire of Ruins, but my brain put me on forced vacation during the month of August (I'll be covering The Empire of Ruins in September as part of the Fall New Releases series of posts). I took a steampunk hiatus, trying very hard to be fully on holiday, which was really good for me, but bad for the completion of Canuck Steampunk. Oh well. As we say in Canada, c'est la vie. (While I was on my steampunk break, I read mainly high-fantasy and re-read Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. I also completed Canadian J.M. Frey's Triptych, which was a brilliantly challenging piece of pure SF. Frey has some steampunk in the cooker, so she's an author to watch for.)

For those who are interested in these things, a little commentary on this year's Canuck Steampunk banner. I love David Malki's Wondermark, and wanted to pay homage to it. I knew I wanted some iconic Canadian elements, and chose the beaver and moose, and went from there. The beaver is a tip of the hat to both the Parks Canada logo, and Cory Gross's submission for the Steampunk Canada logo (which wasn't chosen, but was a clever idea). The finished image is the final frame of a cartoon I did for The Dominion Dispatch, which I'll post a link to once I have one. It's the punchline frame, and it struck me as the funniest. Most of the images that really made the banner "steampunk" came from The Sum of All Crafts, where Valerie B. has collected some really crazy images.

The dissertation lives in its first very rough form! I'm a few pages short of the minimum 200 pages right now, but that will get shored up in revision. While I had hoped to hand something in by the end of summer, the current document is too fragmented for submission, so I'm going to spend the fall semester polishing it up to make it shiny. I have two articles submitted for publication in two academic anthologies. Whichever one gets released first will have the distinction of being the first English academic anthologies on steampunk. The first of those I cast my lot like anyone else, with fingers crossed: the second came as a request, so I'm more hopeful about the article's inclusion. The first article is titled, "Useful Troublemakers: Social Retrofuturism in the steampunk novels of Gail Carriger and Cherie Priest." I'm very excited about that one, as it looks at steampunk retrofuturism's social aspect, as opposed to the more common technological one. The second is called "Flying Towards Grace: Steampunk and the Hole in the Sky," which looks at the tension between the rational and the fantastic in a selection of steampunk novels. Both will be added to the dissertation, so it's a two-birds-with-one-stone approach, which is what I've been trying to do with all my publications, with the exception of my Nemo article.

I'm still waiting to hear on approval of my research funds for a trip to Steamcon, but I'll be at Edmonton's Pure Speculation festival in November for certain, doing some panels and presentations, as well as running a game of Arkham Horror at some point over the weekend.

The fall ARCs are already pouring in, and I'll be doing my level best to report on as many as I can. We'll see how things go come high-marking season. My plan is currently to post bi-weekly this fall, which seems like a better plan than promising weekly, and then ending up publishing bi-weekly. I'll also be participating in Tor.com's Steampunk Fortnight, with an annotated version of the Steampunk Gilgamesh I posted in 80 tweets a few weeks ago. I'll be explaining the thinking behind my choices, which should, in effect, act as a case study of the steampunk aesthetic. As always, there will be links!

Sunset Val: A Thrilling Tale of Airship Piracy by Rob St. Martin

2011-07-26T15:37:00.000-06:00

I met Rob St. Martin at the Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition in Toronto this past Spring. We were on two different panels together, and his commentary on secondary worldbuilding got me intrigued to read some of his steampunk. Rob's written a number of books, most for Sabledrake Enterprises, but the book Rob sent me to review, Sunset Val: A Thrilling Tale of Airship Piracy was published through Weird and Wondrous books. Both are small press, so it's unlikely you'll find Rob's books at the local Chapters, which is too bad, because, as I tweeted back in May I thoroughly enjoyed Sunset Val as a fun crosshatch fantasy with a steampunk flavor, targeted at the YA or Young at Heart market.

I used the term crosshatch somewhat incorrectly in that tweet, as the Encyclopedia of Fantasy defines crosshatch fantasies as those where the demarcation line between worlds isn't clearcut, "and two or more worlds may simultaneously inhabit the same territory" (237). That's what I get for not checking my sources. But I think the word itself conveys what I was trying to say, which is that Sunset Val is a crossover tale, a tale of portals, like The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe or Abarat. Calling a novel a crossover fantasy would be terribly confusing, in this world of hybridized genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres. I should have said "portal-fantasy," but that sounds clunky. Steampunk doesn't often use portals as a trope - usually all the characters are from this world. Exceptions to this convention seem to come from writers outside the SFF genre, such as Katie MacAlister's Steamed, or Nathalie Gray's Full Steam Ahead. The portal approach works well for writers seeking to introduce non-aficianados of steampunk to the aesthetic: the focalizing character provides a commentary that is familiar, to help situate the unfamiliar.

The book begins in our world: Valerie Ventura is an oddball kid who goes in for fencing lessons and goth fashion who finds herself summarily yanked through a portal generated by electricity by the evil Dr. Sweetwater. It sounds terribly contrived and cliched, and when seen in summary, it certainly is. However, what makes Sunset Val a treat to read is Valerie's (Val's) character voice. She's smart, creative, and thankfully, something of a geek. When she is asked by Dr. Sweetwater if she's ever heard of alternate worlds, Val replies, "Only in like, a hundred thousand movies and books" (17). As fantastic genres become more mainstream, it can only follow that fictional characters will have to stop responding in ignorance to such questions. Let's face it: we all know what a lightsaber, a blaster, warp drives, and time machines are - so while it might remain somewhat more literary for characters to be dumbfounded by the appearance of the undead on their block, many North Americans know more about what to do in case of a zombie invasion than they do if someone is choking in a restaurant. Val is largely unsurprised by her situation, and given the character voice St. Martin has written her in since page one, we aren't surprised by her unflappable response.

Val's ironic first-person character voice transforms moments that would be clunky in third-person into opportunities for witty humor. Even when he's resorting to canned exposition, St. Martin is clever enough to deliver it via Dr. Sweetwater, thereby rendering it an out-of-control mad-scientist's monologue from Val's point-of-view.

The plot follows Val's adventures as she collects the steampunk equivalent of Charlie's Angels crossed with the Power Puff Girls. St. Martin has definitely embraced the girl-power aspect of steampunk, where a woman can grab a sword or flintlock and be the protagonist of a high-flying adventure. Along the way, Val meets Eve, a patchwork girl ala Frankenstein's monster; Serena Heartlace, a vampire, whose Slavic accent keeps turning our heroine into "Sunset Wal"; an animal-cat hybrid ala Moreau with a French accent named Meliora Fantastico Lyon, a.k.a. "Gigi"; and Argenta, an "automaidon". What was interesting to me was that these secondary characters were the ones who wanted a revenge, while Sunset Val, whose name is repeatedly commented upon as odd or notable, doesn't have the usual issues a young adult character does. She is not seeking a dead parent, or railing against a bad one: she's just a somewhat odd teenager who doesn't get along with her teacher. By the end of the book, a transformation has occurred, but it hasn't solved her drug problem (because she didn't have one) or mended her broken heart (because she wasn't chasing any sparkly boys). In short, Val is a pretty well-adjusted main character who finds herself in an alternate world. The crises are plot-based, not character-based, though there are definitely moments of character. The crises of character are related more to Val's band of heroines, especially Eve, whose loyalty to her "father," Dr. Sweetwater, proves especially problematic.

Some brilliant interior art from Sunset Val by Karine Charlebois. I hope we'll see more from Karine in future volumes! I'd love to have coloured this image, but I simply didn't have the time this week - perhaps in the future!

It is this character stability, of a girl "from a world without institutionalized slavery, without airships, where women were able to vote" (172), that permits Val to, as Serena says, bring change wherever she goes. Like her chosen name, the sunset is a time of change, and that is what Val brings to this secondary world of steam. You might say she's the punk in St. Martin's steampunk.

What's also of interest to this stability is the element of the portal in Sunset Val. Whereas Lucy Pevensee chooses to go through the Wardrobe, Val is yanked through, effectively kidnapped by Dr. Sweetwater. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy states that portals are often warded with conditions and prohibitions:

"...to pass through a portal is likely to pass through some kind of test, to gain a new level of understanding of power, to demonstrate oneself as a chosen one, whether through birth or actions or some other merit: in fantasy, it is very often the case that a character who finds a portal has in some sense been found by that portal. Portals are a part of the grammar of a significant story. Portals represent acts of selection and election." (776)

Again, Val does not choose to go through - she is forced. But it is her ensuing choices in St. Martin's steampunk earth that has her fulfilling her tests -- Val is a sort of Messianic figure, but not in a destined sort of way. There are no fulfilled prophecies here: rather, it is a process of becoming by virtue of individual choice that determines Val's position by the conclusion.

Despite such high-minded analysis, Sunset Val won't go winning any literary awards. It lacks that Governor General's feel, that literary hauteur. I don't think St. Martin was shooting for such an award with Sunset Val, though. I think he was looking to write a fun adventure tale, and in this, he succeeded. This book excels at fantasy-as-wish-fulfillment, providing the sort of grand escapist yarn we yearn for to take us away from the daily drudgery. I'm glad to announce that the sequel came out on Canada Day, making both Sunset Val and Sunset Val Flies Again obvious choices for this year's Canuck Steampunk series, even if Rob St. Martin wasn't from Quebec. Rob recently reported that we can expect a lot more of Val's adventures, as he plans for five books in total. If you find Sunset Val to your liking, you can check out more of Rob's steampunk writing in Princess Smith and the Clockwork Knight.

The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade

2011-07-22T14:39:00.002-06:00

The Canadian cover for Hunchback Assignments. I far prefer Christopher Steininger's comic-style covers to the U.S. ones.

I'd like to go for lunch with Arthur Slade.

Not just because he's Canadian, although that came as a pleasant surprise to me when I first read The Hunchback Assignments in preparation for last year's blog tour promoting The Dark Deeps. I'd just finished up the first Canuck Steampunk series here at Steampunk Scholar, and was excited to find another writer for this year's series.

Nor because I tend to enjoy young adult steampunk more than the ostensibly mature and grown up steampunk. I also tend to enjoy romanticized steampunk adventure better, and the YA market seems more welcoming to such adventures.

No, I think hanging out with Arthur Slade over food would be a good time because he loves monsters, in a way that reminds me a little of Mike Mignola's work, albeit with a focus on the classic Universal monsters from the nineteenth century. Maybe it's just my imagination, but those monsters seemed more popular back in the 70s, with Warren Publishing and a heap of movie magazines devoted to old school monsters. Or maybe it was just my own preoccupation with them. I resonated strongly with Mark Petrie in Stephen King's Salem's Lot, who knows how to deal with vampires, steeped in their cinematic lore, and prepared with a cross to ward them off from a monster model kit. I never built the models myself, but I gazed at them longingly.

By the time I was in grade three, I knew who Lon Chaney was, both junior and senior, and tried to dress up as the silent era Phantom of the Opera for Halloween, only to be repeatedly mistaken for a fangless Dracula. I wanted badly to try to make costumes in the way Lon Chaney Sr. had as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but my mom wouldn't let me use an egg white to blind one eye, the silly putty I used to make prosthetics wouldn't stay on my face, and the pillow I used for a hump kept shifting. I don't know if it was an odd choice for playing pretend, but it was my choice.

Slade admitted his fandom of these classic monsters, and watching the silent Hunchback with Chaney Sr. as inspiration for the hero of The Hunchback Assignments, Modo, Quasimodo reimagined in delightful recursive fantasy. While it's a bit of a spoiler to reveal Modo's powers, they come early enough to act more as a teaser. Modo is as hideous, perhaps moreso, than his silent-era cinematic twin, but unlike all Quasimodos before him, is able to transform his body into any human shape, facial features and all. Mr. Socrates, a mysterious agent of the crown, discovers Modo as an infant and buys him, effectively rescuing him from a life as a sideshow freak, to become the ultimate spy. Slade adds these shapeshifting powers to Quasimodo's trademark climbing ability, pairing that with a Spider-man like ability to navigate the rooftops and spires of London: "He'd spent nearly every night of the past six months on these rooftops. They belonged to him now, the only place he felt free. he had each dormer and slanting surface memorized. He could get from his room to Trafalgar Square faster than any cab" (65).

The plot is standard, as many young adult novels are. Instead, as with most successful young adult novels, the focus is on character development. Close escapes are not reason enough to turn the page and see what happens next. The reader must care deeply about the character, and Slade has written an endearing one in Modo. Modo provides the reader with the social retrofuturism of Hunchback Assignments, challenging and questioning the unswervingly British Mr. Socrates, giving the twenty-first century reader a window into the nineteenth century that doesn't feel antiquated. Further, Slade provides Modo with the character foil of Octavia Milkweed, the requisite romantic interest for Modo. Their ongoing relationship is one of the best aspects of the series, since Octavia finds herself attracted to Modo, but wonders at his true face: she only ever sees him in disguise, transformed and handsome. Octavia also provides an aspect of social retrofuturism, since she is a girl with initiative, spirit, and drive. Like many other steampunk heroines, she is a realization of the fin de siècle "New Woman," as teenage girl.

And although The Hunchback Assignments' high adventure is targeted at Young Adults, Modo's is not an idealized world: his experiences would fit well alongside those of the Baudelaire children from Lemony Snickett's Series of Unfortunate Events, albeit bereft of the ironic tone. The relationship between Mr. Socrates and Modo is a difficult and complex one, hinting at Socrates' past, and openly declaring Modo's need for a parental figure. Modo's desire for love is one of the main themes of the series. Slade proves a deft hand with this part of the story, never giving the reader a trite or easy solution to Modo's problem. His appearance is hideous, but his soul is beautiful. As such, he challenges conventional young adult heroes and their stories. Unlike Kenneth Oppel's Matt Cruse, Modo has more than just social status to overcome: while he can change his appearance, the transformation is temporary. For Modo to find love will be to find someone who can love him as his true self.

In this way, Modo moves through the same stages of Margaret Atwood's survival and victim I talked about last year in relation to Oppel's Airborn series. Modo's story focuses on the third position of Atwood's theory: "To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that this role is inevitable" (37). Modo constantly struggles to live above seeing himself as only his appearance. Atwood states that it is in this position is about "repudiating the Victim role," moving from anger towards oneself or fellow-victims to "energy channeled into constructive action." Modo's journey is towards Position Four, "to be a creative non-victim"(Atwood 38). In this journey, Modo is aided primarily by two teachers, the maternal Mrs. Finchley, who discourages Modo from changing his appearance for her while she teaches him acting, history, and literature, and Tharpa, a former untouchable from Bombay, who does not cringe when he sees Modo: "Your disfiguration, it is not your true self," he tells Modo (Slade 32). These characters provide Modo with the encouragement he needs to move towards becoming a creative non-victim.

This is what sets the high adventure of The Hunchback Assignments from lesser steampunk fare, although it's arguably always what makes a book worth reading: good characters make for good stories, and The Hunchback Assignments is full of great characters, both heroes and villains. Sure, it's got the requisite steampunk elements: there's technofantasy (though I can't reveal what it is, as that's the mystery Modo and Octavia are trying to unveil), the largely social retrofuturism I've already mentioned, and a neo-Victorian setting in a fantastic London of the nineteenth century. At the core of it all though is a monster's heart, that beats with heroic purpose, and it's why I've devoured every book of the series since my introduction to it last summer.

Here in Canada, we're lucky enough to have already seen the release of book three, The Empire of Ruins, but Stateside readers will have to wait until this fall. Either way, if you haven't started reading this excellent steampunk adventure series, there's still time to catch up. You've got your assignment, now get to it!

While I'm a fan of Chris McGrath's photomanipulation approach on the U.S. cover, it doesn't feel right for the tone of the book. That said, the Canadian cover seems to play up the adventure, while the US ones go for a sort of neo-Gothic romance.

Steampunk in the Park: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

2011-07-19T09:49:00.002-06:00

While there's nothing inherently Canuck about steampunked Shakespeare, my attendance of Twelfth Night at the Hawrelak Amphitheatre in my own city of Edmonton, Alberta, was indicative of Lee Ann's article on the spread of steampunk here in Canada.

"What's with the gun?" whispers a lady behind me, as one of the Officers draws a brass Nerf Maverick on Antonio in the last act of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

This far into the play, I wondered why she hadn't asked the same question about Viola/Cesario's goggles-on-bowler hat, or Feste's aviator's cap and early 20th century army regalia. While it was a delight to see Edmonton's Freewill Shakespeare Festival perform Twelfth Night in brilliant steampunk attire as part of my 15th anniversary celebration with my wife, the academic couldn't entirely stay at bay.

'Why choose steampunk?" I wondered. Clearly, there's the sheer fun for costume designer Narda McCarroll, to wonder how to use the steampunk aesthetic to convey something about the characters. Some costumes were more successful than others in this regard. Olivia's transformation from mournful to love-struck was the starkest contrast, going from all black to frilly pink-and-white, but the ludicrous Andrew Aguecheek seemed the best bit of character-through-costume, given how much colour ran riot across his costume.

But there's no thematic reason to choose steampunk for Twelfth Night, unless it's merely another expression of the play's subtitle, What You Will. That phrase could be the ethos of steampunk fashion and art in a nutshell: how many times have I been told steampunk can't be defined, and that it's whatever you want it to be? Thankfully, this clearly wasn't the case for the minds behind this steampunked Twelfth Night, as their description of steampunk in the programme was rather good:

[Steampunk], the style in which we have chosen to set Twelfth Night, is a style borne out of fantastical ideas from the Victorian age of mechanics, where dreams of utopian flying machines and other ideas of "futuristic" technologies existed. The style reflects an assertion of the individual, and a rejection of the mass-produced for the finely crafted. (11)

While I find the last sentence dubious as representing all of steampunk, the first statement is rather good. It encapsulates the aesthetic: fantastical ideas (technofantasy) from the Victorian age of mechanics (neo-Victorian) and dreams of "futuristic" technologies (retrofuturism). Whether steampunk is really an assertion of the individual or a rejection of the mass produced for the finely crafted is a discussion for another day.

What was of interest to me was watching a play that had nothing inherently steampunk about it, done in a steampunk style. The only moment where a narrative element was translated into the aesthetic came at the outset of the play, when the ship that founders and splits, leaving Viola and Sebastian stranded in Illyria, was designed to look like Harper Goff's Nautilus. The true pedant protests, wondering how in the world Nemo's fantastic ship could be split! It is the perfect vessel for ocean travel, a "vehicular utopia" as Arthur B. Evans put it.

And yet, in a Shakespearean comedy meant to express the bacchanal and revels of Twelfth Night, it was perfect. Further, as a way of letting an audience largely new to steampunk, it would say, "this isn't a masted ship - we're not in Verona anymore people." What ship is better suited to introducing a North American audience to the use of steampunk than that particular iteration of the Nautilus? As the play's programme stated, the setting of Twelfth Night is Illyria, "an ancient name for the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea," going on to add that "Shakespeare intended this to be a country free of time or borders," a seemingly open invitation to use the timeless and borderless aesthetic of steampunk.

A show-stealing Feste reclines. This is the costume I chose in our post-play discussion

Ultimately, the use of steampunk in Twelfth Night isn't going to expose class issues of the nineteenth century, or comment on colonialism. The particular style of steampunk employed had a What You Will approach to it: evocative of the nineteenth century, but accented with lots of gonzo retrofuturist paraphernalia. Discussion with my wife on the way from the open-air theatre wasn't "what did the aesthetic mean," but "if you could have any of the outfits, which one would you choose?" I wanted Feste's, and she wanted the maid's, and sometimes, despite all academic musings and political leanings, that's all there is to someone's interest in steampunk: they want to wear the cool aviator's cap, or have the opportunity to play the coquette for an evening. It's an expression of carnivale, of baccanal, and masquerade. It's a little bit of that Twelfth Night revelry, the whole year through.

"Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?" asks the stoic Malvolio of the band of partying fools, a question that echoes the sort of pedantic questions myself and other serious minded folk pose of steampunk. Place: Does it have to be London? Persons: Would Tesla really have done such a thing? Time: Does it have to be nineteenth century?

I write this, not as a denunciation of the serious study of steampunk, but to clarify that despite my probings and ponderings, I enjoy steampunk for the hell of it. I enjoy it for the chance to dress up, to have a bit of fun, and not think too hard. While I seek to define it on paper, I enjoy the way it plays fast and loose with place, persons, and time. And as Toby the Belch replies to Malvolio's question, "We did keep time, sir, in our catches. Sneck up!" in reference to keeping the time of the boisterous song they were singing at the top of their lungs. And so reply those who enjoy steampunk as just a bit of fun, riding, to quote Feste the Fool the "whirligig of time" and spouting a good deal of "bibble babble."

Twelfth Night runs for another week here in Alberta's Capital city, until Sunday, July 24. It's well worth braving the mosquito clouds, so Raid Up, and get thee to the Hawrelak Heritage amphitheatre!

Steampunk in Canada - Guest Post by Lee Ann Farruga

2011-07-01T06:00:00.001-06:00

I remember the first time I got an email from Lee Ann Farruga, informing me of her website, Steampunk Canada. At the time, I was dismissive: most people who inform me they have a new website or blog dedicated to steampunk don't last very long. There are exceptions, and Lee Ann proved to be one of them, and then some. I've gone from dismissive to dedicated. I'm a big fan of this classy lady from Central Canada, and was lucky enough to spend some time with her at the Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition earlier this year. In a moment of weakness, I stated on Twitter that I wouldn't be writing for the month of August, and welcomed guest posts. Lee Ann stepped up right away, and this post is the result. While I'll still be taking a bit of August off, I'll be doing Canuck Steampunk all summer, and wanted to kick off with Lee Ann's post for two reasons. First, because she is one of the most notable Canadian faces of steampunk, if not the most notable. Second, because it's Canada Day, and Lee Ann just let me have the day off. Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Steampunks in Canada are a special group of people. Canadians in general stand out from the rest of the world with our friendly disposition, unique sense of style, and pride in being Canadian. We are a country of adventurers. All families, except those who originate in Canada (our native peoples) had an adventurous soul in the family who decided to come to the wilds of Canada to start a new life. We are a country of free thinkers. Our freedom of expression is greatest here than anywhere else in the world. We are a country of people who like to have fun and who do not take ourselves too seriously (it makes wrinkles, eh). We like things that are old and new and unique. Canadians make fabulous steampunks!

The first local steampunk group was started in 2008 in Toronto, Ontario. A few months later a local group started in Ottawa, Ontario in 2009. That same year, local groups were started in Vancouver and Victoria, B.C.; Edmonton and Calgary, Alberta; and Montreal, Quebec. Since I started Steampunk Canada in 2010 more local groups have sprung up in Niagara, Ontario; Regina, Saskatchewan; St. John’s, Newfoundland; and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Second and third groups have started in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Montreal. Very recently a group was started for the whole Province of Quebec as well.

Although it would seem that we are growing quite quickly, if you look at the United States or Britain, you can see that Canada is still merely a steampunk cogling. In the United States there are many groups in each state. In Britain, there are many smaller groups who gather regularly together as one large mass of steampunks for events such as the Asylum. Still, being so young, what Canadian steampunks have is a fresh spirit. People are starting and joining groups with new ideas and the excitement of finding their place.

Local groups are as varied as our country. An interesting phenomenon that has happened across Canada is that the median age of each group varies and it generally dictates the style of events, art, outfits and even cost concerns. Another factor that makes our groups different is that across Canada each area has a very different history with very different museums, homes, parks and so on. This leads to a great variety in events. Victoria – castles and teas, Vancouver – art and music, Edmonton and Calgary – pub nights, weird west and dinosaurs, Niagara – meetings and movie nights, Toronto – club nights and photo shoots, Ottawa – picnics and workshops, Halifax – art and jewelery fairs (I would love to attend a beach event here) and Montreal, Regina and St. John’s are just beginning to set up events . This, of course, is not to say that each local group only holds these types of events, but if one looks at the list of events over a long period of time a pattern emerges. As well, once again, age groups come into play. Different age groups steer toward more favourite activities and so these are chosen more often. As local groups grow and embrace more age groups their variety of events will surely grow with them.

For a detailed view I can only look at my own local group in Ottawa. We have quite a wide range of member ages and this has lead to a wide variety of events. For the last three years we have held an event (and sometimes more) each month. The first was a tea. I still suggest this, or a pub night, to groups just starting out as a great way to meet people interested in joining or just looking to learn more about steampunk. Everyone has a chance to greet each other and chat over the course of the evening. Since our first tea we have had movie nights, museum tours, picnics, concerts, workshops, poker and whist nights, a swap meet and barbeque, pub nights and a murder mystery and have attended as a group at a book signing, winter balls, a storytelling evening, a Chautauqua, a movie premiere, an art exhibit opening, a carnival and much more. We had a very large event of over 100 people for our first anniversary and a smaller pub outing (40 people) for our second.

Local groups are a wonderful way to meet new friends and find amazing local artists and artistic folk right in your own backyard. Amazing talents that you many never have known of before. Of course Steampunk Canada will continue to help steampunks find each other, promote local groups and their events, and get the word out about Canadian artists, authors, musicians and other artistic folk looking to tell everyone about their newest steampunk creation.

As the number of local and provincial groups grow and spread across Canada, my hope is that many will work together – this is just starting in Vancouver between Black Steam and Vancouverites for Steampunk. They are organizing and informing each other of events in their area. As well, Calgary’s two local groups have in the past had combined events. We are also beginning to see larger events bring local groups and solitary steampunks together. The first was the Victoria Steam expo. This past spring saw the Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition in Ontario. Soon there will be a second Victoria Steam Expo. It would be wonderful to next have a larger event held in the Prairies and in the East. Weekend events provide a great opportunity to those in outlying areas to attend since the travel time involved makes more sense when staying for a longer period of time. It also gives the attendees more time to greet and get to know each other....like a longer and grander tea.

The Ulysses Quicksilver Short Story Collection by Jonathan Green

2011-06-27T14:22:00.002-06:00

A few years back, I reviewed Jonathan Green’s Unnatural History, the first in Abaddon Books’ Pax Britannia series. I had just finished Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and needed lighter fare. Based on Mark Harrison’s cool cover art, I had high hopes for the Pax Britannia series, especially Leviathan Rising. I took the first two on vacation as potential beach reading. To my chagrin, Unnatural History was nigh unreadable, due largely to writing style and the lead character, Ulysses Quicksilver, with all the ruthless and rakish behavior of a steampunk James Bond, but none of the charm. On the upside, I found the second book in the series, Al Ewing’s El Sombra, much better, fulfilling my penny-dreadful/pulp fiction expectations without requiring me to ignore style and grammar. Having sampled the series, I moved on to other steampunk, promising myself I’d return to reading the remaining novels I’d purchased.

Two years later, I’m staring down the barrel of another summer vacation, pondering my reading choices. Enter The Ulysses Quicksilver Short Story Collection as ebook, reprinting three short works originally published in early Pax Britannia novels.

That I can make the distinction of early novels is noteworthy. Despite my low opinion of Unnatural History, Green has gone on to publish six sequels. Clearly, this series deserves another look, even if only to ascertain whether I was just in a foul mood when I read Unnatural History.

If you’re unfamiliar with the premise of Pax Britannia, it’s ludicrous but simple: Queen Victoria’s reign has persisted into the 1990s, along with Hitler’s Third Reich. While any serious student of history and culture will roll their eyes at this, it’s best to ignore how batshit improbable this premise is and let the fun ensue. Otherwise, you’ll be saying things like, “What the hell do they need a horse and cart for? They have high speed vehicles!” or “Seriously? The waistcoat and cravat are still in style?” From where I’m sitting, Green is going for an “ain’t it cool?” factor, not a “is it counterfactually probable?” one.

Read the whole article over at Tor.com!

Dead of Veridon by Tim Akers

2011-06-17T10:32:00.005-06:00

The very idea of recommending summer reading to steampunks seems a bit odd. It conjures images of those cumbersome full body swimsuits of bygone years; while such swimwear might drag one straight to the bottom, it also eliminates the need to apply sunscreen.

Nevertheless, I suppose if one was thinking of steampunk reading for the beach, in bikini or bloomers, they could do far worse than Tim Akers’ Dead of Veridon.

Summer reading, by my own definition, should be light reading. The beach is not the place for Proust. (I’m dubious as to there being any place for Proust, but that’s another discussion.) The beach is where I read Clive Cussler, Stephen King, and stacks of Conan, and Doc Savage paperbacks. So when I recommend Dead of Veridon, I hope you’ll understand that I’m not endorsing it as the best bit of steampunk fantasy I’ve ever read, or even read this year. That said, I found it an engaging, page-turning read, despite some shortcomings that only bother pretentious academics.

Read the whole article here at Tor.com!

Buy Tim Aker's Steampunk at Amazon!

Anno Dracula by Kim Newman

2011-06-10T11:20:00.001-06:00

Apologies to anyone who was looking forward to seeing a Blaylock post today. Aside from doing Canuck Steampunk, I'm likely returning to posting reviews and analyses of whatever I've just finished, as working on the dissertation, writing for Tor.com and steampunk fanzines, and gearing up to be a DM again are occupying more and more of my time. In addition, no one should read Blaylock at high speed. The man's words are meant to be savored. So, for those who missed it, and because I use the blog as a hub to all my steampunk writing, here's my analysis/review of Anno Dracula from Tor.com:

I think Kim Newman would agree with me when I say, “Once you go Drac, you never go back.” Or perhaps more accurately, “you might leave Drac, but you’ll definitely be back.” For my generation, there weren’t a lot of bloodsucking alternatives to the big D, aside from the Count on Sesame Street, or if you were older and not a Baptist, Warren Comics’ Vampirella. In the 70s, if you said “vampire,” people thought of Dracula, and “Dracula,” usually meant Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee’s onscreen portrayal. I got my first copy of Dracula in grade four: Leonard Wolf’s annotated version. I never got past the first four chapters. Jonathan Harker’s story was riveting, but the Austenesque switch in voice to Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra writing about their love lives was lost on my pre-adolescent self. The illustrations by Sätty gave only a surreal window into the story’s later events.

As I grew up, more accessible options abounded: books like Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire; films like The Lost Boys and Near Dark. But when Francis Ford Coppola released Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I returned to Transylvania. Despite the film’s numerous digressions from the novel, my love of its visual splendor helped me finally finish the entire novel, finding to my surprise that final chase scene wasn’t a Hollywood addition. That same year, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula hit the shelves, likely hoping to generate sales off the new film’s popularity, but somehow escaped my attention.
It wasn’t until beginning my steampunk research that I became aware of this wonderful piece of recursive fantasy, and I was thwarted in my first attempt to read it by some devious party, who had folded a space of some 70 missing pages together so well it escaped the notice of the used bookseller I purchased it from, and me buying it, until I turned page 50 or so and discovered the missing section. I tried soldiering on, but found myself somewhat confused, and abandoned the reading until I could find a complete copy.

Finding a complete copy up until this past weekend was a formidable task. Paperback copies on the Internet sold at collector’s prices ranging from $50-200. With the rabid interest in vampires via Twilight, and the growing interest in steampunk, Anno Dracula was clearly an in-demand-but-out-of-print treasure. Neophytes and veterans of Anno Dracula can rejoice at the new edition released by Titan Books. Sporting the best cover I’ve seen of it yet, this lovely trade paperback boasts a number of extras, including annotations, the afterword from the paperback edition, the alternate ending from the novella version first printed in The Mammoth Book of Vampires, extracts from a screenplay treatment, an article called “Drac the Ripper,” and a short story set in the Anno Dracula universe, “Dead Travel Fast.” Unless you’ve been the most assiduous collector of Newman’s Anno Dracula works, this book offers a number of treats, even if you already own a previous edition. For those who have never read it before, it means you won’t have to pay through the nose to experience Newman’s wonderful alternative history of Stoker’s fiction world.

The premise is hardly original; any writer reading the line in Dracula when Van Helsing says, “if we fail,” to his vampire hunting companions has wondered at the counterfactual ramifications of those words. Stoker himself posits the outcome, and this speech is reprinted as an epigraph in Anno Dracula. What if good had not triumphed? What if Dracula had succeeded in securing a place on Britain’s foreign shores? Worse yet, what if he had somehow seduced the Queen, and become the Prince Consort of the greatest empire on the planet in the nineteenth century? Further, what would you call a man who murders the new citizens of this half-human, half-vampire Britain? A hero? A serial killer? Who then, is Jack the Ripper, if he’s only killing undead prostitutes? These are the questions that drive Newman’s story, and while others may have considered them, may even have written them, Newman, like Dracula, will continue to stand as a giant among many peers, given his encyclopedic knowledge of vampire lore, both literary and pop culture.

Read the rest of the article at Tor.com!

Murdoch Mysteries: Curse of the Lost Pharaoh

2011-06-07T14:57:00.002-06:00

Murdoch Mysteries: The Curse of the Lost Pharaohs is an exclusive 13-part original online series created as an extension of the fourth season of Murdoch Mysteries on Citytv. Featuring the stars of the series and illustrations by acclaimed comic book artist Francis Manapul (The Flash, Superman/Batman), the online adventure brings to life Constable George Crabtree’s first novel, "The Curse of the Lost Pharaohs." In each installment, Crabtree must work alongside Detective Murdoch, Julia Ogden and Inspector Brackenreid to battle mummies and evil villains in a valiant attempt to save the Queen of England and - in turn - the world. Produced using a hybrid of live-action video and breathtaking animation, this groundbreaking transmedia project will feature a new chapter of Crabtree's tale each week. The storyline of The Curse of the Lost Pharaohs has also been woven into the plot of the new season of Murdoch Mysteries, creating a unique 360-degree experience for fans. The first episode of this thrilling adventure will be launched on Citytv.com on Tuesday, June 7 following the premiere of season four on Citytv on June 7 at 9 pm ET. - From the CityTV Press Release

I realize my seminal steampunk series has been punctured many times by other posts, but it's been a busy month filled with many reviews, the unexpected brouhaha of bustlepunk, and now, a public service announcement regarding a steampunk web series: Murdoch Mysteries: Curse of the Lost Pharoah. In short, the web series is a glimpse inside the imagination of Constable Crabtree who writes fanciful Penny Dreadful style stories. The web series is those stories. I've only seen Murdoch Mysteries twice, but I'm familiar enough with the character of Crabtree to see the brilliance in making him the focalizer of this steampunked version of Murdoch Mysteries.

We're not seeing a period police drama, but a steampunk Penny Dreadful, a perspective reinforced by the inclusion of animated segments drawn by Francis Manapul. Watching a regular episode of Murdoch Mysteries and then watching Curse of the Lost Pharaoh is a little bit like seeing the difference between the layers of reality in Sucker Punch. Murdoch Mysteries strives for historical accuracy: like much steampunk, Curse throws it out the window. With a good dose of whimsy, the lead characters have been transformed into romanticized versions of themselves, with the funniest contrast being Dr. Julia Ogden's. On Murdoch Mysteries, Ogden is described as "a pathologist who works with the Toronto police force. She’s a forward-thinking, modern woman who can be quite blunt and straightforward." In Curse, she's a "comely heiress," who keeps abruptly showing up like Madame Yes, woman of mystery from that episode of The Flintstones.

The folks behind Murdoch Mysteries: Curse of the Lost Pharoah are going to be giving away some very cool prizes every first Tuesday of the month for the next four months.

The first prize available is a copy of the screenplay for the first episode of Curse of the Lost Pharaohs, signed by writer Patrick Tarr and Yannick Bisson (Inspector Murdoch). Head over to their Facebook page for details on how to win! You can check out the first episode of Curse of the Lost Pharoah HERE tonight!

I'll be posting more on Curse of the Lost Pharoah as more episodes are released!

The Digging Leviathan by James Blaylock (1984)

2011-06-03T14:32:00.003-06:00

Edward seemed to be continually clambering along rainbows, pursuing fallen stars, suspecting that some monumental wonder was pending, riding on the tide, obscured, perhaps, by a sketch of thin cloud drift. He was the most foolish of the lot, but Ashbless had always liked him. (177)

When I started my research in the fall of 2008, the Wikipedia article on steampunk contained one of the most extensive lists of steampunk reading outside Steampunkopedia, which I hadn't yet discovered. On that list was a book I remembered from my teens. I remembered it for the insane James (Dinotopia) Gurney cover, featuring a preteen boy wearing a snorkel/scuba mask and riding a cobbled-together digging machine worthy of Looney Tunes's Coyote. I loved the cover, but I was at that point in life where I didn't want to read about kids my age any more. I wanted to read about real men like Conan the Barbarian and Mack Bolan. I didn't want to wear a scuba mask, I wanted to wear night-vision goggles. I didn't want to drive a digging machine comprised of junk from that shed in the backyard, I wanted to drive Sonny Crockett's Ferrari Daytona. Little did I know that these ideas of manhood were as fake as that Ferrari, but struggling through adolescence, it was easier to deal in hyperbole.

It's likely just as well I didn't pick up James Blaylock's The Digging, as its languid pacing, whimsical humour, and lovely prose. I read books at Ferrari-speed in those days: books were the nerd-equivalent of sporting events. How many did you get through in a week? How long were they? How many books had you read in "one night?" None of Blaylock's works can be read in this way. Blaylock is not a Ferrari-speed writer. His prose is too carefully constructed. While he's been accused of being unable to plot a novel (this one in particular, by Lester Del Ray), he certainly knows how to write the moments. My pubescent brain wasn't interested in that pace.

However, my adult brain is interested in such a pace, despite how it frustrates the speed at which I can write about Blayock's books, and by extension, complete my dissertation. Further, at forty, I share a lot more in common with the eccentric weirdos who populate The Digging Leviathan than I do Robert E. Howard's heroes or Don Pendelton's one-man-army.

Jim spoke of The Digging Leviathan in an interview with Chris Garcia at the 2010 Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition. The anecdote is written down in Subterranean Press's The Man in the Moon: "By the time I was out of college a year I had a hundred thousand words of it, and it was evident that it could never be finished, because the plot funneled outward for the entire length of the book. A few years later a guy in Long Beach (up the coast) tied a bunch of helium balloons to an armchair and flew into the stratosphere (seriously) and the event was so inspirational that it seemed to me to suggest a focus for my long-abandoned book. I launched it again, immediately forgot about the guy with the balloons, and it turned into The Digging Leviathan." Blaylock also writes of The Digging Leviathan in "Parenthetically Speaking," the afterword to The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives. Originall titled Sanctity of Moontide, Blaylock describes an early draft as "a hybrid of Proust and Laurence Sterne ... set in Glendale and Eagle Rock [involving] Bulgarian acrobats, the mechanical mole, and a dariy that was manufacturing faux milk out of plaster of Paris" (468). This is the madness of Blaylock's writing. While he says that finishing the book required removal of Proust and Sterne, the essential mix of crazed elements remained, though the nature of those elements changed.

Summarizing The Digging Leviathan is a challenge, due to the crazed nature of those elements. My description is The 'Burbs meets '60s matinee movies inspired by/based on Verne and Wells. To bring it up to more current terms, imagine a Desperate Housewives focused on men who are vacillate between obsessing over alternative science, hollow earth theories, and protecting escaped lunatics from the authorities. Jack Horner, in a recent email, asked about Blaylock and "the literary meta-conversation, where concepts and problems from one work are taken, used, and reworked in new works by other authors." Blaylock's work abounds with these elements, all found in The Digging Leviathan, which acts as a sort of middle-path between Blaylock's steampunk and his urban fantasies such as All the Bells on Earth and The Paper Grail.

I noticed the first of these by comparing The Digging Leviathan, All the Bells on Earth, and Homunculus, : the idea of neighborhood, or tight community. It's tough to find a lone wolf like Conan or Mack Bolan in Blaylock. I haven't read everything he's written yet, but there aren't any hyperbolized alpha males with an abundance of testosterone in Blaylock's work, unless it's as a caricature or villain. Blaylock seems to prefer small fraternities of companions who work together to achieve a common goal. In The Digging Leviathan, it's The Newtonian Society. In Homunculus it's the Trismegistus Club. In Bells, it's suburbanite Walt Stebbins, his wife's get-rich-quick-scheming uncle, and a crusading clergyman. In all cases, none of these cadres are made up of the team you imagine following Doc Savage around. There isn't a Monk or Ham in sight, though the dialogue is banter-reminscent. They are bumblers in their efforts at heroism, as attested by a spying-excursion gone wrong in Chapter 14: an attempt at getting a better look through a basement window results in physical comedy, and a hasty retreat to one of the home of one of the Newtonian Society. It's not the humor of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams: it's like Twin Peaks starring Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Blaylock's heroes are everymen, every last one of them, and they are bound together by often domestic relationships, be that blood-ties or fence-posts.

The second is a cast-intertextuality between Digging Leviathan and the St. Ives' cycle of stories. In addition to Landon St. Ives' descendant, Edward St. Ives, William Ashbless makes an actual appearance (William Ashbless was the pen name Blaylock and Tim Powers wrote poetry under in University. Ashbless often makes cameos in their work). The villain, Hilario Frosticos, is a descendant of Ignacio Narbondo, villain from the St. Ives story, and the secret of extending life is once again related to fish, as is the case in Homunculus.

The newer, less evocative cover.

Trying to draw strong correlations between the St. Ives series and Digging Leviathan seems wrong-headed. Blaylock told me at Steamcon 2010 that he didn't really think things through that extensively. It's not that the work is haphazard, but rather that he never intended to make a series out them. The names just keep popping up, in a playful manner. There are certainly correspondences, but they are loose ones.

Besides, as The Digging Leviathan isn't steampunk per se, I'm not overly interested in submitting it to heavy criticism. The Digging Leviathan is like a love letter to childhood spent with the imagination wide open, but written from an adult's perspective. There are moments focalized by both youthful and mature characters alike, with a sense of romantic visions of "yesteryear," that time before our rational minds murdered childhood fantasies and consigned Pelludicar to impossibility.

When I first read The Digging Leviathan, it made me think of several friends from Legion Fantastique, people with a huge interest in old books and rainbows, fallen stars, and monumental wonder. It made me think of many people I've met at steampunk conventions, for whom the punk means little, if nothing at all. For them, steampunk is a space of wonder, an escape from plots and cover illustrations that smack of authenticity.

A few other quotations regarding the gadgetry of The Digging Leviathan, which caused me to keep imagining steampunk maker Jake von Slatt as one of the characters in The Digging Leviathan:

The two had pieced together a wonderful gadget around an old fan motor. The machine hadn't any purpose, really, beyond gadgetry. (11)

"All in all it was a sort of art deco wonder of crenelations and fins and thick ripply glass, as if it had been designed by a pulp magazine artists years before the dawn of the space age which would iron flat the wrinkles of imagination and wonder." (13)

"The diving bell itself, borrowed by Professor Latzarel from the Gaviota Oceanographic Laboratory, was round as a ball. It was almost an antique. Hoses led away out of it into great coils, and in a ring around the bell, within the upper one third or so, were a line of portholes riveted shut. There was a hatch at the top, screwed down with what looked like an immense brass valve. The whole thing was etched with corrosion and flaked with blue-green verdigris. It looked to Jim like something out of Jules Verne." (55)

Hence my suggestion that Blaylock be adopted as the patron saint of steampunk, or whatever title we'd like to give him. He's the only one of the original three from California to openly admit writing steampunk to a steampunk crowd. Powers is dubious, and Jeter ain't saying--yet. Further, in addition to his Langdon St. Ives series, steampunks have been given a book that seems at points, to be the closest anyone has come to writing a novel about the sort of people who are into steampunk. As I've already said - in my head, it's Jake von Slatt and members of Legion Fantastique running around trying to find a kidnapped boy and solve the mystery of the fantastic events and machines that keep popping up around him. The book is filled with passages, too many to include here, that seem to point toward how steampunk plays with the indeterminacy of meaning, the difficulty of knowing history with absolute certainty, and the way in which fiction plays a positive role in a world that prizes scientific rationality so highly.

"To learn the truth was to make things fall apart. Knowledge wasn't a cement, a wall of order against chaos; it was an infinitude of little cracks, running out in a thousand directions, threatening to crumble into fragments our firmest convictions. He couldn't fathom it." (96)

There has been a certain serendipity to the timing of this post. My son recently watched an episode of The Backyardigans titled "To the Center of the Earth." He asked how it was that the Backyardigan characters could tunnel deep down beneath the surface of the earth. I replied that they couldn't - they were simply imagining it - whatever the characters imagine seems to actually be happening (an intertextual link to the plot of Digging Leviathan, by the way, and not simply a cute anecdote). "But maybe someone could make a machine that could do that," he replied. My first inclination was to say, "No, that's impossible," but I stopped myself, and simply replied, "yes, someone might."
"Maybe me," he said.
I smiled. I thought of how I'd watched Doug MacClure in At the Earth's Core and Warlords of Atlantis at the Saturday matinee as a kid. How I'd sat on my front porch, designing a bathysphere to take to the Okanagan valley that summer, to search for BC's Nessie, Ogopogo. The world was filled with wonder in those days: no one had stolen it from me yet. I wasn't about to steal it from my son either.
"Maybe you," I told him.

If any of this has stirred up a nostalgia for the days when you still thought you could dig to the center of the earth in a tank with a drill on the front, then you ought to order yourself a used copy of The Digging Leviathan. I got mine in a used bookstore, and it's pretty dog-eared, but at least it's the cover I remember from my childhood, the one that takes me back in time, like the books in Edward St. Ives' library.

Edward St. Ives was a collector of books, especially of fantasy and science fiction, the older and tawdrier the better. Plots and cover illustrations that smacked of authenticity didn't interest him. It was sea monsters; cigar shaped, crenelated rockets; and unmistakable flying saucers that attracted him. There was something in the appearance of such things that appealed to that part of him that appreciated the old Hudson Wasp. (9)

An unused image by James Gurney for the cover of The Digging Leviathan. I love this one, since it has that father/son dynamic the book explores.

Bustlepunk: the softer cousin of steampunk

2011-05-30T09:20:00.001-06:00

Gail Carriger and Cherie Priest at the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition

Photo by Lois Buhalis, used by permission

A few weeks back, Tor.com published an article called "The Bustlepunk Apocalypse Continues," in which writer Alyx Dellamonica defined the term Bustlepunk as "the softer cousin of steampunk." Bustlepunk was coined by writer M.K. Hobson back in '09, and while I'd heard the term before, I hadn't given it much thought. However, Dellamonica's article went on to conflate the writing of Gail Carriger and Cherie Priest with this soft cousin of steampunk, which bothered me (It should be noted that Alyx Dellamonica has retracted her use of Priest in relation to Bustlepunk - she readily admits she was simply quoting Hobson's Bustlepunk Manifesto).

Hobson's original coinage of the "Bustlepunk" was a clever marketing strategy. Bustlepunk has a nice ring to it, and for an author looking to carve out a niche in the larger pool of SFF, serves the purpose of creating a buzz. Nevertheless, words take on a life of their own, beyond authorial intent. My concern with Dellamonica's article is that it lumped Carriger and Priest into a 'soft' category, a space reserved for women in Science Fiction and Fantasy for decades, most famously with Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. This isn't "real" science fiction, it's "soft" science fiction. My concern is shared by Deborah of The Bookish Dame, who wrote in December of last year, "By singling ourselves out, we destroy the ideal that authors are all equal in their intelligence and capabilities to confir[sp] and express their imaginations and knowledge. It's a battle women have fought for ages." Despite this critique, Deborah walks a gracious middle-path with Bustlepunk, excited by "a story written by a woman, about a woman, for a woman," but equally concerned at the ramifications of the potential for signifiers like Bustlepunk to mark women as "second best to the male author."

The outright pairing of Priest and Carriger as representative of anything other than the use of the steampunk aesthetic ignores the diversity demonstrated in their writing. None of Priest's steampunk to date features any romance. This omission of romance has angered some readers, some going so far as to perceive Priest's heroines as lesbians, simply because they don't find every man they meet (while escaping near death adventure)attractive. Priest writes hard-edged alternate history adventures with drug-crazed revenants who will chew your face off. In Clementine, one scene prominently features the removal of a bustle to accommodate firing a Gatling gun in an airship cockpit. Priest's heroines are best understood by Maria Isabella Boyd's request in that same scene: "Put me where I can make the most trouble." When Priest writes "soft," as in the moving opening chapters of Dreadnought, it's in stark contrast to the hard edges she utilizes later. It is a dynamic technique, not a uniform style.

Gail Carriger is often perceived as "soft:" in addition to being called Bustlepunk, her work has also been categorized as Mannerpunk, excluding her from unreservedly being considered steampunk. Again, this is why I've suggested the understanding of steampunk as aesthetic, not genre: it's a more inclusive approach. We don't get into arguments over whether a book is steampunk, but rather how much and what aspects of the aesthetic it utilizes. But I digress: Soulless and its sequels contain all the elements I've identified in numerous steampunk works. I don't think I need to argue the Neo-Victorian aspects of Carriger's work, but some may find the retrofuturism and technofantasy lacking. Carriger's retrofuturism is more often of the subtle, socio-political variety. Carriger has taken the New Woman mentioned in Stoker's Dracula, and realized it in Alexia Tarabotti in a way Mina Harker never achieves. Alexia is effectively a 21st century woman with a 19th century voice. Carriger's society of humans and supernaturals is predicated on a hierarchy of soul, and when you get into the particulars of those with an excess of soul, Carriger is seen to be making further social commentary on current issues surrounding marginalized groups. One need only read the conversation between Alexia and American scientist McDougall regarding his brother, who was hunted down by his Puritan family after becoming a vampire, to glean resonances with current discourse in North America concerning homosexuals: "I loved my older brother,you see? I saw him once after he'd changed. He was still the same person: stronger, paler, night born, yes, but essentially the same. He probably still would have voted conservative, if they'd let him vote" (141). Anyone who argues the absence of technofantasy in Carriger is either working with a narrow concept of steampunk technology, or hasn't read the books: from the clockwork golem VIXI to Lyall's glassicals, to parasol gadgetry, to airship highjinks: if Carriger isn't working with steampunk tech, then not even K.W. Jeter is. Further, her understanding of steampunk technology goes beyond industrial tech: her hierarchy of souls repeatedly references other sciences in bloom in the nineteenth century: spiritualism and medicine. In short, Carriger uses the steampunk aesthetic in spades, and doesn't need a sub-category to describe what she's doing. As for soft, where Priest has zombies chewing on necks, Carriger has a werewolf-transformation sequence explicitly describing a very gory neck-chewing at the end of Changeless that gives Stephen King a run for his money. Carriger can write the gross-out, the knock-down, and the thrilling chase as well as she writes the make-out, the knocked-up, and the romantic chase.

My concern is simply this: I don't want to see two of the premiere writers of the new wave of steampunk sidelined as anything other than masters of the aesthetic. While there are many who wouldn't see Bustlepunk or Mannerpunk as pejorative, there are many readers who will dismiss Carriger and Priest outright because they are women, and moreso if connections are drawn to a term like Bustlepunk. I have no issue with the term as something fun to further clarify a distinction within the larger classification of steampunk. But I do have issue with the blanket assumption that Priest and Carriger are involved in creating the "softer cousin of steampunk" just because they're women. Not all soft steampunk is written by women. For proof, try Matthew Flaming's The Kingdom of Ohio, a lovely story of love, loss, and nostalgia. Or as SF author J.M. Frey contests in this final word on the subject (at least so far as this post is concerned), ""Bustlepunk" has the potential to become pejorative, and without rigorous definitions of what makes Steampunk Steampunk, and makes Bustlepunk Bustlepunk (both of which are impossible as they are sliding definitions of an aesthetic that is still organically evolving), then there is the danger of separating the professional writing men from the little girls playing dress up."

The Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition

2011-05-27T10:30:00.001-06:00

Three years of research, and I’ve never attended a steampunk convention in my homeland. That is partially due to Canada picking steampunk up like last year’s fashions: we’re often behind the Stateside curve on what’s cool at a subculture level. We got Bieber same time as everyone else, but steampunk took a while to filter across the International Boundary. Our first steampunk con was arguably the Victoria Steam Exposition, a small con with the amazing distinction of being housed in the opulent Fairmont Empress. That hotel, along with the rest of the Fairmont hotels and resorts are easily the most steampunk a setting one could ask for in Canada. I was unable to attend, having just returned from the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition in California.

Thankfully, it wasn’t the last steampunk con in the Great White North. Last fall, I was invited to present at The Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition (CNSE) in Toronto by Canada’s Queen of the Geeks, Liana K. I knew Lee Ann Faruga, aka Countess Lenora of Steampunk Canada (steampunkcanada.ca) was also involved in the planning for the event, and the persistence of both these lovely ladies proved too much. Plus, there was a seat sale on flights with WestJet that decided where my meager travel funds would take me in 2011. Futurecon helped sponsor my journey, and with my tickets booked and bags packed, I was bound for Toronto.

Canada is a massive nation, geographically speaking. I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life, but never traveled to Toronto, save to switch flights on my way to Jamaica. So while I knew I wouldn’t see much more than the hotel the CNSE was in, I was excited to add Toronto to the list of places my steampunk research has taken me.

I won’t bore you with descriptions of the Great Lakes from my window seat vantage points, or gloat over the exceedingly comfortable town car I took from the airport (save to say that my driver may have been the inspiration for Jason Statham’s character in The Transporter). Instead, we’ll fast forward to me stepping out of my twelfth floor room-with-a-view in my steampunk threads to get registered before my first presentation.

I’m dressed in a Mark Ecko pin-striped brown blazer with an ornate pattern embroidered on the chest and pocket. Underneath the jacket is a light brown vest, a checked tie, and white dress shirt I picked up at a Le Chateau outlet store only days earlier (Le Chateau outlet is one of the best ways to put together steampunk fashion on a budget in Canada). I have eschewed long pants for clam-diggers (standing in for the plus fours/Tintin pants I can’t find anywhere!), and have knee-high socks to give a somewhat highland-hiker feel to the ensemble. It’s topped off with a newsboys cap my mom bought for me at Heritage Park last year (Heritage Park, along with Fort Edmonton, are spaces of historical re-creation in Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta, respectively).

I’ve itemized my threads to underscore how different my first Canadian steampunk convention was from my first American one: when I attended Steam Powered in the fall of ’08, it was with a cobbled together assortment of items from my days as an indie musician (again, notably, a Le Chateau suit with mandarin collar being the center piece). Now, I have options.

I took the elevator, the first of many such trips this weekend, down to the main floor and registration. Unlike many other cons, the CNSE was not the only group in the Markham Holiday Inn. We shared the space and most significantly, elevator with many mundanes: hockey and lacrosse teams, school groups, and their parents. I’ll spare you the joys of riding the elevator with a hockey dad in full redneck mode commenting on our steampunk attire.

Check out the rest of the report here, in the new issue of Exhibition Hall. Also included in this issue is Chris Garcia's report on The Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition, along with photos of folks wishing me happy birthday from the Con!

Photos from the Con:

My first outfit of the weekend: my own take on being a Browncoat, I guess.

Second session of the weekend: Presenting on "Steam Wars"

photo by Chris Harmouzis

Two Professors: Hanging in the Green Room with Professor Elemental

Made Green by Lex Machina

Two Professors, Take Two: Professor Elemental is a Very Funny Fellow

Photo by Jeff Long

Liana K, Queen of the Geeks, with husband Steven, Envy of the Geeks

Kicking off Saturday in Jha Goh's Roundtable, Taking Notes

photo by Chris Hourmouzis

Jha (Jaymee) Goh running the roundtable

J.M. Frey weighing in at the roundtable

Me and Jha, post-roundtable - finally, we meet in person!

How to get photographed at a Steampunk Con: stand with people wearing cooler outfits than you.

Photo by Paul Neale

Joe Giammarco's excellent steampunk bardic rig.

Kenneth Shelley, designer of cool clothes, including my forthcoming plus fours!

Lloyd Penney and his Mafioso wife. They look happier in the Exhibition Hall photo. This is right before Lloyd draws iron and starts shooting.

Steampunk Scholar with Countess Lenora, the powerhouse behind steampunkcanada.ca

Adam Smith, one of the organizers of CNSE. A man I literally look up to.

Finally got to meet Thadeus Tinker in the flesh, pictured here with "Naked Dave," and J.M. Frey

Lex Machina finally gets to "shoot me in the face." Cross one off the steampunk bucket list!

Photo by Lex Machina

J.M. Frey and the Steampunk Scholar

Photo by Lex Machina

Behind the scenes: Lex Machina works her magic with J.M. Frey

The lovely ladies of Sadistic Vanity and their storefront - great fashion!

Hanging out with Stuart Long and his longsuffering companions.

Sitting on the "Steampunk Literature" panel with Rob St. Martin, J.M. Frey, and Adrienne Kress

photo by Chris Hourmouzis

Portable antique typewriter like Mina Harker's from the collection of Martin Howard

Antique letter-press style typewriter from the collection of Martin Howard

Slipped in to the game room at the end-of-day to witness near end-of-world Arkham Horror session!

More discussion with Stuart Long (off camera) and his still-longsuffering companions

Photo by Emily Dunlop

This is the jacket and the goggles that have been with me at every steampunk convention since the beginning of my research. The jacket is from Le Chateau, from when I played in a band in the '90s; my wife sewed on the three levels of cogs, which stand for B.A., M.A., and PhD (although to be fair, I shouldn't have that third cog yet!). The goggles were given to me by Natalie Ratanen and the crew of Legion Fantastique!) This is the last photo of me before I discover the Kraken Rum.

photo by Jeff Long

Morlock Night by K.W. Jeter (1979)

2011-05-23T00:37:00.002-06:00

If you know anything about steampunk, you should know who K.W. Jeter is. He's the man who coined the label "steampunk" in a nigh-legendary letter to Locus magazine in 1987. While many have rightly noted that Jeter did not invent steampunk per se: he ironically (in every sense of the word) provided us with a term to describe those gonzo Victorian fantasies he and Californian writing mates Tim Powers and James Blaylock were creating. Arguably, Blaylock retains the distinction of having written the first of these tales among the California trio with "The Ape Box Affair," but steampunk scholars differ on who really wrote the first true steampunk work. Some would say Moorcock, writing Warlord of the Air across the Atlantic pond nearly a decade before Blaylock or Jeter. What is less ambiguous is Jeter being the man who first used the term steampunk, and so ostensibly coined the term.

Accordingly, newer readers of steampunk have a high bar of expectation when it comes to read K.W. Jeter's first steampunk work, Morlock Night (1979). They expect it to be a work derivative of cyberpunk in some way, since Jeter had written some cyberpunk. They mistakenly assume it to be serious and political like Moorcock. My most recent run-in with this flawed perception of seminal steampunk came at the Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition (CNSE) in Toronto, April 29-May1, when someone made the offhand comment that newer steampunk writing isn't as serious as the original works were. It wasn't the first time I've heard this statement, and it certainly wasn't the last. Following that session, Thadeus Tinker of UK steampunk fame and I had a chuckle at this, both citing Jeter's Morlock Night as a perfect example of how steampunk has always been a mix of the gravitas and levitas.

Readers of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine have further reason to raise the bar of expectation, since Morlock Night purported on the original cover, to explain "what happened when the Time Machine returned." Fans of Wells' serious social commentary are bound to be disappointed when they discover that Jeter's novel is pure page-turning fun. One of his characters self-reflexively warns the Wellsian faithful not to take things too seriously here: after all, it's only a story: "My good fellow, don't get so excited over a mere story! Divert yourself with whatever sequels you care to imagine, but save such passion for reality" (9). The conversation surrounding this statement should give the attentive reader the indication that this isn't Wells' agenda anymore -- this is going in a new direction.

Further, as Blaylock chronicles in "Parenthetically Speaking," his afterword to The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives, Morlock Night was written not only as a sequel to The Time Machine, but also as part of a series "that would involve the reincarnation of King Arthur throughout history" (469). Although the series was scrapped, Jeter found a home for Morlock Night with DAW paperbacks. In short, Morlock Night is a sequel to The Time Machine in story, but not in spirit, as well as a mashup with Arthurian legend.

I didn't know this when I first read Morlock Night last spring, and was accordingly surprised when Merlin himself walked into the story, when magic was used unabashedly, and ultimately, the goal was to save Christendom. I balanced this against forum discussion where I'd been told steampunk was intrinsically political, and likely of an anarchic stripe, because that's the way original steampunk literature was. And yet, here I was, reading original steampunk that shared greater affinities with C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength than anything by Moorcock. I've glibly stated that the psudeo-Judeo-Christian influences outweigh the secular political ones in early steampunk, though I have no interest in seeing any ideology conflated a priori with steampunk.

I wondered if Jeter wasn't trying to be ironic with Merlin's early speech about the call of adventure to the hero:

"King Arthur is reborn every generation in time to intercede against the direst threat facing the cherished Christian and human ideals that are embodied in England more than any other place. It's a commentary on humanity's penchant for mischief, inasmuch as there's always a threat to Christendom." (41)

But this is delivered with deadpan seriousness, despite the lead character's incredulity. There is even a moment near the end when it seems a more cynical conclusion will be delivered, when Excalibur hasn't manifested, but by the end of the book, all will have been set right in a fictional universe where there is right and wrong, without ambiguous shades of gray muddying the waters.

Angry Robot books has released a lovely new edition of Morlock Night in an omnibus with Jeter's other steampunk classic, Infernal Devices. As with the re-release of Joe Lansdale's steampunk works, this omnibus features cover art by John Coulthart, one for each story: Infernal Devices, arguably the superior work on the front, and, despite being chronologically first in publication date, Morlock Night on the back. What's fascinating about Coulthart's beautiful cover is that it continues to promulgate a horizon of expectation for Morlock Night as pure science fiction. There is no explicit indication of the magical elements in the novel; one might construe the eyes as those of the evil Merdenne Ibrahim, nemesis to Merlin, but they could just as easily be Morlock eyes. While the Arthurian elements are crucial to the narrative, they are as absent on the re-release as they were in Josh Kirby's art for the DAW edition. While I love Coulthart's approach, I wish Kirby had still been alive to produce one of his crowded, overpopulated covers in the style he is famous for with Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. It certainly would have indicated the tone of Morlock Night better: unlike many of Jeter's other books, Morlock Night does not contain dark themes: it is a romantic adventure story filled with nineteenth century tech and medieval magic.

Yet I suspect that many steampunk fans will pick up Angry Robot's re-release, and finding Merlin lurking in the pages of Morlock Night, be as disappointed as several reviewers on Amazon have been. "Magic doesn't belong in my steampunk," they'll cry. "Where's all the industrial retrofuturistic tech?" And while there is some, there won't be enough to salve the presence of the Magician of all Magicians, nor of the goal of fighting for Christendom and Old Brittania. To scrub the filth of such ethnocentrism from their palate, they'll need to turn to something darker, grittier, and laced with political subtext. Yet ignoring Jeter's contribution to the steampunk canon (and yes, I'm going to use that contentious term, because steampunk reading lists have been including Jeter for years, while it was abundantly clear most of these list-makers have never read Morlock Night, being as it was out of print and expensive to track down before Angry Robot's re-release), is like excising The Anubis Gates on the grounds Powers himself says he doesn't really think it's steampunk.

Jeter coined the term steampunk as a tongue-in-cheek response to the an inquiry of what Blaylock was doing in his Langdon St. Ives short stories and novels, what Powers was doing in Anubis Gates, and what Jeter himself was doing in Morlock Night and Infernal Devices. Current steampunks might not like their steampunk featuring reincarnated Kings and immortal wizards, but a serious study of steampunk literature must include these seminal works.

My recommendation to those who have never had the fun of reading Morlock Night is to adjust their horizon of expectation accordingly. This is only Jeter's third novel. It was written effectively on spec for a series idea. Knowing it isn't going to deal with Wells' social issues helps. Knowing there will be magic ahead of time may assist in reading and enjoying it as well. The bottom line? Steampunk has always been about the application of the aesthetic to many different approaches involving different themes and ideologies. This isn't Moorcock's political Warlord of the Air, nor is it the pure whimsy of Blaylock. It is a short adventurous romp using the plot devices of The Time Machine combined with a reincarnated King Arthur storyline. If you're expecting more, you're going to be disappointed. Go in with the same brain that enjoyed Saturday matinees of Doug McClure movies, and you'll likely have a good time. This isn't high-literature, it's high adventure based on high literature.

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man by Mark Hodder (2011)

2011-05-10T13:21:00.003-06:00

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Seminal Steampunk theme to bring you this teaser to the full review over at Tor. com.

I put off reading my copy of Mark Hodder’s debut novel, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack until the review copy of its sequel, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, arrived. We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but the covers of many PYR releases, and those by Jon Sullivan in particular, challenge our ability to reserve judgment. The image of a brassy looking automaton drawing a sword-cane to square off against a massive, patchwork-looking figure (a seemingly steampunk Kingpin), surrounded by spectral figures (steam wraiths!) in flight was too much to resist. Accordingly I set to work devouring Spring Heeled Jack, a phenomenal first novel deserving of the recently won Philip K. Dick award. As I said in my review of Spring Heeled Jack, if this is what the “punk” Hodder wants to see steampunk look like, then I say with Oliver Twist, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

And more there is. The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man is a worthy successor to Spring Heeled Jack, combining a number of seemingly clichéd steampunk elements in ways that shatter and rebuild them: the combination of industrial and biological sciences ala Westerfeld’s Leviathan; the filthy London of Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, filled with anachronistic innovations; recursive fantasy blending both historical and literary figures as in Newman’s Anno Dracula; the Agent of the Crown, seen in Green’s Pax Britannia series; the labyrinthine schemes of secret societies in Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and Tidhar’s Camera Obscura; multi-threaded plots akin to Powers’ Anubis Gates; and the quirky humor of Blaylock’s Adventures of Langdon St. Ives. Where these predecessors and contemporaries are inferior, Hodder elevates his material, and where they are masters of narrative, he matches them.
The story defies summary, but the narrative centers upon Sir Richard Francis Burton and poet Algernon Swinburne’s investigation into a theft of black diamonds, ultimately embroiling them in the affairs of a dubious claimant, supposedly the heir of a cursed estate. As with Anubis Gates, this only scratches the surface of Hodder’s tale, as his secondary world-building is delightfully dense. Readers familiar with nineteenth century will enjoy the numerous changes Hodder has wrought, which take this simple plotline and render it complex. The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man clearly demontrates Hodder’s ability for making the vast elements of his secondary world cohere, live, and breathe, and to do it in a way that is deliciously entertaining.

Read the whole review at Tor.com!

Steampunk Prime edited by Mark Ashley (2010)

2011-05-03T14:08:00.004-06:00

To kick off the May to June theme of Seminal Steampunk here at Steampunk Scholar, I begin with a book I do not consider steampunk, to clearly delineate what I mean by seminal steampunk from steampunk antecedents.

One of my recurring bones of contention is the tacit assumption that nineteenth century speculative fiction is steampunk. Lists of steampunk fiction regularly include Verne and Wells without any caveat to their works being inspirations or antecedents to steampunk. And while I understand the marketing strategy involved, Steampunk Prime is guilty of picking at this bone of contention.

In his introduction, "When Steampunk was Real," editor Mark Ashley makes several statements to the effect that Victorian and Edwardian science fiction is steampunk. While he concedes Edward Ellis's Steam Man of the Prairies as a "progenitor" of steampunk, he is not using this term in a grandfathering sense that many use Verne or Wells when constructing a lineage of science fiction writing. Rather, Ashley asserts this is where steampunk began. Avoiding all ambiguity, he boldly claims that "steampunk was well under way by the 1880s, but came into its own in the 1890s."

Those who frequent my blog will know I argue for steampunk's genesis in the 1970s with Moorcock in the UK, and Powers, Blaylock, and Jeter in the 1980s in the U.S. I'm open to a "blast radius" (in both directions - Wild, Wild West in the '60s and the increase in steampunk publications in the '90s) inclusion of other works within that period, such as Richard Lupoff's Into the Aether, but I firmly contend that steampunk is a postmodern phenomenon. Nevertheless, in the interest of keeping the debate open, I was willing to agree to disagree with Ashley, until I read his introduction to the very first short story in Steampunk Prime, where he makes a distinction of terminology:

We should not call these steam men or automata by the name robots. That word did not pass into the English language until the translation of Karel Capek's 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots in 1923 ... For the steampunk period they were automata and, as the essence of steampunk, they feature in our first two stories. (12)

Ashley establishes and transgresses his rules of nomenclature, all in one paragraph. We ought to avoid anachronistic terms for these nineteenth century artificial beings: don't call them robots--call them automata. I hate to be the nitpicker, but by the same standard, shouldn't we call it Scientific Romance Prime, as the term steampunk "did not pass into the English language" until K.W. Jeter coined the term, tongue-in-cheek, in 1987?

I can hear the protests already: I'm being anal retentive. Can't we retroactively subsume works which fall under the steampunk header, regardless of when they were written? To me, it's like saying The Eddas and Beowulf are high fantasy, which they are not. Tolkien used these as inspiration to write The Lord of the Rings, but that does not make them high fantasy. That is a twentieth century innovation. You might say I'm being restrictive, and you'd be right. I'm a guardian of precision in language, because too often I see the discussion getting inclusive to the point of insignificance.

What Steampunk Prime laudably collects under one cover are fourteen short works of speculative fiction. There is nothing retrofuturistic or neo-Victorian about it. Mark Hodder has a wonderful moment in The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, when the enigmatic Jack names Sir Richard Burton one of the great Victorians, to which Burton replies, "What the hell is a Victorian?" (126). In Hodder's London, Victoria was assassinated: accordingly, there are no Victorians. But I had to laugh at this passage as a commentary on steampunk at large: we consider nineteenth century Brits to be Victorians, but they would not have. This is the perspective of the backward gaze, which is intrinsic to steampunk: literary or popular, political or frivolous, steampunk is commentary on some facet of the nineteenth century, even when it doesn't take place there.

What Ashley has collected in Steampunk Prime isn't retrofuturistic: it's futuristic. George Parsons Lathrop's "In the Deep of Time" an excellent example of what I mean, since the Time Traveler, sent forward by the Society of Futurity finds a world decidedly un-Victorian, and furthermore, un-steampunk. Where steampunk nostalgically revisits the fashion of the nineteenth century, Lathrop's Time Traveler summarily rejects it. In a comparison between Eva Pryor, his love interest from the nineteenth century, and Electra, a modern woman, the Time Traveler is decidedly attracted towards the Electra's costume, which seems pulled from the set of Logan's Run:

Charming though Eva was in her way, she had perhaps placed herself at a disadvantage by having insisted on keeping her nineteenth century costume. The angular slope and spread of her skirt, her unnatural wasp waist, the swollen sleeves, and the stiff, ungainly bulge of her corsage had a grotesque and even offensive effect. The extraordinary tangle, also, of artificial flowers, wings, and other rubbish that she had carried on her head-for she still wore her hat-was as barbaric or savage as the head-dress, of some early Norse warrior or Red Indian chief.
To all this Electra presented a refreshing contrast of harmony, with grace and dignity and style of dress modern, yet classic, womanly, yet suggesting the robes of a goddess. (99)

This is only one of several such rejections of the very style and aesthetic steampunk embraces. Admittedly, this cannot be restricted to corsets (and yes, all puns are intended), since other fashion choices abound in steampunk writing. Maria Boyd, the heroine of Cherie Priest's Clementine, finds herself needing to shed her undergarments in order to properly handle a bubble-turreted gatling gun; Matt Cruse finds Nadira's lack of corset alluring in Kenneth Oppel's Skybreaker; Gail Carriger's Madame Lefoux wears men's clothing. But these divergences from fashion norms still evoke the neo-Victorian retrofuture of steampunk. Lathrop's proclivities, do not - even the technology of the future dismisses the dreams of the nineteenth century: "They are on an entirely different plan from the flying machines which were announced but had not yet come into use when I was last alive" (104).

Even when the stories seem reminiscent of steampunk, we must remember they are antecedents to steampunk, and remain futuristic, not retrofuturistic. They are the science fiction of their day, not the nostalgic recreation of a romanticized past. There is a difference, and I think it is wrong-headed to claim them as steampunk: effective marketing, yes, but not accurate taxonomy. Steampunk is, at the earliest, a mid-20th century innovation.

All this said, people who like steampunk will enjoy a number of the stories collected in Ashley's anthology, as well as Paul di Filippo's excellent foreword. There is a wonderful mix, including adventure ("The Gibraltar Tunnel," my favorite of the lot), horror ("What the Rats Brought"), apocalyptic ("The Great Catastrophe"), and more. I applaud Ashley for unearthing these stories from the vaults they were in. Where I had expected an anthology of short stories by Verne, Poe, Wells, and other oft-cited steampunk antecedents, I found a collection of artifacts of what we should likely consider science fiction antecedents as well. This is speculative literature from the days before it had a proper name firmly affixed to it, providing us with a window into the birth of SF ideas that have become cliched: the very first story, "Mr Broadbent's Information," contains ideas possibly borrowed from Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau, prefiguring the four year life span of androids in Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and "automata like prize-fighters" such as the one in James Lovegrove's steampunk short story, "Steampunch."

So even as I refuse to call Steampunk Prime steampunk--in much the same manner I refuse Verne, Wells, and other Victorian and Edwardian era writers as such--I cannot help but recommend it for those who enjoy genuine windows into the past. As artifact of bygone speculative fiction, Steampunk Prime is worth a read. My hat's off to the marketing strategists who decided to capitalize on steampunk's popularity to get this collection out there -- while it might offend my more pedantic sensibilities, the mercenary in me is glad this collection has not only seen the light of day, but might end up in more hands than it would have if it had been labeled Dusty Old Speculative Fiction primarily from the Edwardian Period.

Steampunk Scholar at Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition

2011-04-29T05:00:00.004-06:00

As this gets posted, I'm headed to the Edmonton airport to board a WestJet flight, traveling the farthest east I've ever been in Canada: Markham, Ontario, for the Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition. I've been at the Toronto airport once before, returning from Jamaica, but I don't think that counts. As with most conventions, I'll see more of the hotel than Toronto or Markham, but it's more than just tarmac and terminals.

For those who will be in attendance at some point over the weekend, or for those still looking for a reason to come out, here's my schedule for the weekend. If you come by a panel, please come over and introduce yourself! For those who visit the blog, I'll be doing my best to update via Twitter (and hoping to do a far better job than I did at Steamcon, where I didn't tweet at all.)

Friday, April 29:

4pm: What is Steampunk? – With the Steampunk Scholar -- Beaufort West Room

More than just a primer, this panel digs deep to define a working definition of steampunk from an academic perspective.

Panelists: Mike Perschon, J.M. Frey

5pm: Steam Wars, Beaufort West Room

Star Wars gets steampunked! If you’re curious about what it takes to adapt an existing property into the steampunk aesthetic, this panel is for you. Also, Star Wars makes everything cooler.

Panelists: Mike Perschon

6pm: Canuck Steampunk, Beaufort West Room

Is there a Canadian Steampunk aesthetic? What’s being produced here? What makes Steampunk Canadiana distinct? Are we afraid of incorporating our own culture? How would we steampunk Tim Hortons, anyway?

Panelists: Mike Perschon, Rob St-Martin, Lee Ann Farruga.

Saturday, April 30:

10am: Envisioning a Better Steam Society: Social Issues and Steampunk, Ellesmere, 2hrs

A discussion panel concerning taking aesthetic inspiration in a historical era rife with sexism, racism, and classist thinking. Can the steampunk subculture come to terms with its problematic past, or are we just repeating history, except with ray guns? Together with the audience, we hope to engage in an open dialogue about whether steampunk confronts or condones the historical ideas behind its inspiration, how nineteenth century thinking is re-interpreted in the present day, and what makes steampunk actually "punk."

Note: continental breakfast items will be available for purchase at this presentation.

Panelists: Jaymee Goh, Mike Perschon, J.M. Frey

6pm: Steampunk Literature, Beaufort West

What's good, what's not; what's required reading and what are some hidden gems you may have missed. Our panel of experts shares its reading lists from the varied perspectives of an academic, a reviewer, and a writer in the genre!

Panelists: Mike Perschon, J.M. Frey, Adrienne Kress

9pm: The Steampunk Scholar’s Top Ten Reading Countdown, Consuite

The Steampunk Scholar will present samples from his list of recommended reads, in the quieter, more relaxed setting of the Consuite.

Presenter: Mike Perschon

Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar (2011)

2011-04-27T11:05:00.001-06:00

Lavie Tidhar’s Camera Obscura, out this week from Angry Robot, is dreadful: penny dreadful.
This steampunk novel both evokes the cheap, serialized sensational fiction of nineteenth century Britain, and engages the aesthetic of the comic book, grandchild of the penny dreadful. While it contains more literary references than any literature/creature mashups flooding the market these days, don’t go looking for high-brow literary illumination through this Camera’s lens: Tidhar writes in the manner Michael Chabon champions in “Trickster in a Suit of Lights,” applauding the speculative writers who keep one foot in the land of “literary” fiction, while invoking “the idea of playfulness, of mockery and inversion.” Tidhar is such a writer, delivering a rollicking adventure with passages of brilliant prose, all the while wryly winking at the reader. At its core, Camera Obscura is a little bit like a Dirty Harry movie, with a young Angela Bassett replacing Clint Eastwood, and 19th century Paris standing in for San Francisco. But that hardly encompasses the dizzying array of elements Tidhar weaves together in a maelstrom of pop culture and recursive fantasy.

Read the whole review at Tor.com!

Pure Speculation 2010

2011-03-31T11:53:00.004-06:00

Having just missed the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition, and barely a month away from attending the Canadian National Steampunk Exhibition, my mind has turned to conventions. While I have yet to report on Steamcon 2011, I wanted to give some time and attention to an excellent local con, Pure Speculation.

Following my attendance at the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition in the Spring of 2010, I realized I wasn't attending the cons to collect research as much as present it. My focus is on literature that uses the steampunk aesthetic, though I'm of the opinion that the aesthetic concept itself can be applied to other steampunk scholars working in other areas such as subculture, fashion, or visual art.

Don't misunderstand me. I love attending conventions. I hate how they hit my pocket book, considering I pay for flights and accommodation whenever I attend one. That is, whenever I attend one out-of-town. I have occasionally been able to procure the funds for these trips through travel/research grants, but the rest is made up of reward points and my own meager funds.

Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor comics, the best comic store in the world, hocks his wares at Pure Spec.

Thankfully, Edmonton has a burgeoning Geek Convention called Pure Speculation, which I attended for the first time last year. I liked the downscale coziness of the event, which had under 250 attendees. I presented the same research I presented at steampunk conventions, and in some cases, to the same number of people I gave it to at the bigger cons. What was particularly noteworthy to me about last year's con was how many people said "hey, great steampunk outfit!" This by way of contrast to my attendance at the first Steamcon and the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition, where people rarely comment on my attire - I'm simply not that outstanding in a sea of brass gears and bustles. At the local con though, I guess it stands out. There was something fun about that; in addition, shooting the bull with local uber-geeks left me with the favorable impression of the entire event, and I had it in mind to attend again.

Tanya Huff, Judith Graves, and moi, after the Paranormal Romance panel. I am laughing at some joke made at Twilight's expense here, I'm sure.

So when I was invited back, it was easy to say, "yes." This year's Pure Speculation event was bigger and better in so many ways: from the costume contest to the vendor's room to the multiple panels and talks, everything about it was an improvement. Highlights included sitting on two panels with fellow Albertan Judith Graves, who writes paranormal romance, and Canadian fantasy writer Tanya Huff, who were wonderful to share the stage with - both are smart and funny, and the panel on paranormal romance was a blast. My other highlight was having Liana K as co-presenter in my "Steampunk 101" session.

Liana K and me, presenting Steampunk 101: it was standing-room only. You can insert joke about sharing the stage with a gorgeous geek girl here, but you'd be underestimating how much SMRT she brought to the presentation. - photo by Rick LeBlanc

Aside from geeking out about getting to share the stage with the Queen of the Geeks, I was excited to have Liana present on the fashion and music of steampunk. We played to a packed room, with Liana dressed as a steampunk Harley Quinn. It was one of the best experiences I've had presented at a convention, and Liana challenged me on a few points of the thesis, which was great. Liana's a triple threat geek-girl: smart, outspoken, and attractive. Too often, people accept my thesis hook, line, and sinker, which does nothing to move my research forward. It's the friction that produces better thinking, and Liana brought some strong challenges to the debate.


Liana K, as a steampunked Harley Quinn. She warned me this was the outfit she was going to wear, but knowing didn't spoil the awesomeness of it. Some people steampunk a costume by slapping goggles on it. Liana didn't bother to include goggles, and it still kicks ass.

Photo by Robert Blezard

I came away from 2010's Pure Speculation telling my friends that they have to attend in 2011. The con had grown to around 300+ attendees, retaining the cozy atmosphere, but giving the event a sense of critical mass. I am already considering possible panels and presentations for this year's Pure Speculation. If you're from Edmonton, it's a great weekend of finding your inner (or outer) geek. If you're further afield than the capital of Alberta, still consider making the journey, especially if the sturm and drang of larger events has turned you sour on the con weekend. Think of it this way - if the San Diego Comic Con was a bar, it would be one of those big, noisy, uber-clubs. If Pure Spec were a bar, it's the one from Cheers. And doesn't everyone want to go where everybody knows your name?

Pure Speculation 2011 is happening November 18-20, in my academic backyard at Grant Macewan.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder (2010)

2011-03-18T17:11:00.003-06:00

Mark Hodder's first novel is exactly what I thought I'd be reading when I started this research project in 2008: a story set in the nineteenth century about an agent of the crown in a world filled with adventure. It is what I wanted from Jonathan Green's Pax Britannia: Unnatural History and George Mann's The Affinity Bridge, both delivering the goods, but in that unsatisfying manner akin to finding out toy Spiderman web-shooters won't really let you swing off your garage. If The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack was the only book I had to do my research from, I'd never have changed my idea about steampunk from a a sub-genre mixing alternate histories and anachronistic technologies to an aesthetic blending neo-Victorianism, retrofuturism, and technofantasy. In short, Hodder is writing the steampunk I expected to be reading two years ago, but never really have.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not about to change my research based on one book. I'm simply saying Hodder's changing the game again, returning readers to the sort of steampunk we were expecting to build up to from the world The Difference Engine introduced us to. While reading Spring Heeled Jack, I couldn't help but think back to The Difference Engine. Hodder writes like someone inspired by The Difference Engine, but determined to have a hell of a lot more fun than Gibson and Sterling. This is a similar London, filled with the poor and destitute, where "coal dust coalescing with particles of ice in the upper layers of fog [drift] to the ground like black snowflakes" (67). And yet, for all its grit, Spring Heeled Jack doesn't sacrifice the romantic call of adventure. Hodder's hero, Sir Richard Francis Burton, is everything Green and Mann were trying for with Ulysses Quicksilver and Sir Maurice Newbury, but never quite achieved. Burton's narrative voice is more convincing. He isn't indestructible, irresistible, or indefatigable. He's regularly on the edge of an attack of malaria; has doubts about the work he's engaging in,wondering if he should just get married and settle down, and gets hurt bad enough to rival Bruce Willis in the first Die Hard movie. His sidekick, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, is the perfect foil to Burton's taciturn hero. I defy readers to dislike him the duration of the book. He regularly screeches "Auguste Dupin!" Poe's fictional detective, in glee over Burton's appointment as an agent of the crown, and when he discovers a way to get involved in the intrigues, goes into histrionics, much to Burton's amused chagrin:

"Calm down, you silly ass!" The king's agent chuckled.
Swinburne, though he became uncharacteristically silent, did not calm down. As they walked along, his gait became increasingly eccentric, until he was practically skipping, and he wrung his hands together excitedly, twitching and jerking as if on the edge of a fit.
By the time they'd waved down a hansom and were chugging homeward, the poet could contain himself no longer, and exploded: "It's obvious, Richard! It's obvious!"
"What is?"
"That I have to masquerade as a chimney sweep!" (183)

This scene epitomizes the two men's odd couple, cop-buddy-action-movie relationship. Burton is large and brooding, while Swinburne is slight and expressive: humour ensues. Hodder has created colourful characters I care about, in a world dangerous enough that the cliff-hanger ending of a chapter ending in abduction gave me flashbacks to reading adventure novels as a boy, before I was clever or jaded or academic enough to stay one step ahead of the author. This is a book I couldn't put down, a book that kept me up late into the wee hours, written so well I refused to skip ahead for fear of missing a great line or a well-crafted description.

In addition to sheer enjoyment, Spring Heeled Jack offers serious studies of steampunk literature an intersection with Karen Hellekson's The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, along with a plethora of scholarly works on possible worlds theory, since Hodder's steampunk world exists by accident. This is genuine anachronism, and as in Lansdale's Ned the Seal series, the characters are aware of it. Burton discovers that time has been tampered with; there is something wrong with the stream of history he is living in: "The way ahead offers choices that should never be offered and challenges that should never be faced. It is false, this path, yet you walk it and it is best that you do so" (149). There are few, if any, steampunk texts that are this self-reflexive without being cumbersome. Hodder combines entertainment with good time-travel conundrums, and like the Star Trek reboot, gives his steampunk world a reason for existing.

Hodder recently decried the lack of punk in steampunk. I'm no fan of that particularly argument, unless this is what punk in steampunk looks like, in which case I say with Oliver, "Please, sir, I want some more."

Flaming Zeppelins by Joe Lansdale

2011-03-11T15:02:00.006-07:00

One of the latent benefits of steampunk's current popularity has been the publishing push to re-release out-of-print classic steampunk. Later this year, Angry Robot Press will be providing us with two of the seminal steampunk works by K.W. Jeter, Morlock Night and Infernal Devices, in a gorgeous omnibus featuring splendid cover art by the inimitable John Coulthart. Coulthart's the man for the job when it comes to putting covers on these, to use Jeter's words, "gonzo" Victorian fantasies, as they combine so many disparate elements it would be hard to choose one to encompass them all. Likewise, Coulthart's style proved the right choice for Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal, Tachyon's re-release of Joe Lansdale's Zeppelins West and Flaming London, originally published as limited editions from Subterranean Press. Who else but Coulthart could combine Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill Cody, an Edisonade steam-man, dirigibles, and London in flames with martian tripods in the distance, without it becoming cumbersome and ungainly? Likewise, who else but Joe Lansdale could combine all those things along with a grocery list mash-up of pop-culture, classic literature, and to quote Kevin Smith, "dick and fart jokes"?

I've already reviewed Zeppelins West, the first half of Flaming Zeppelins, so I'll focus my attention here on Flaming London. While Zeppelins West ended with what seemed the demise of Ned the Seal, Flaming London is quick to correct our misconception with an epigraph from Ned's writings, which one can hear read by Lansdale himself, among other excerpts, here. The first chapter following the epigraph demonstrates the wild tone swings Lansdale regularly engages in, moving from the voice of Ned the Seal to a tribute to the opening chapter of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. The Martian attack is rendered with the same sense of impending doom as in Wells, but before we can take the material too seriously, Lansdale spends the next four chapters chronicling Ned the Seal's rescue by a down-on-his-luck Mark Twain visiting his friend Jules Verne. The following scene exemplifies Lansdale's approach to these moments:

The seal snapped both thumbs against his flippers and made a kind of whistling sound with his mouth, then slapped both fingers against the pad and took hold of the pencil with one thumb and flipper and made a writing motion.
"Now I've seen it all," Verne said.
"Not if he actually writes something, you haven't" (21).

The arrival of the Martian cylinder is uproariously funny, even if you aren't familiar with Wells's original text, as Lansdale centers his humour on an episode involving one man "giving a play by play" to the crowd gathered around the impact crater left by the Martian cylinder:

"It's opening," said a short stocky man in the back of the crowd.
This was, of course, obvious...As there was little to see other than the cylinder, he took it upon himself to describe the steam coming out of the interior of the device, and was quick to describe it in excruciating detail, as if everyone present was blind.
"See the steam coming out. More steam than before. A lot of steam's coming out," he said.
This was true.
"Now the lid has fallen off. See that?"
Everyone saw that.
"Now there's some light. Do you see the light."
The light was pretty obvious. Red and yellow.
"There's something moving in there. Do you see the shadow?"
Suddenly, without warning, a little man in the crowd screamed something impossible to understand, leaped on the explainer and began beating him. "We see it. We see it, you dumb bastard." (27)

The attacker is incarcerated in a police wagon, but after the police experience a few moments of the explainer's penchant for the glaringly obvious, resort to violence, and free the original attacker: "Should he awake," said the officer, "one word from him, and you have our permission to finish what you started" (29). Moments like these are when Lansdale reminds me somewhat of Terry Pratchett, if Pratchett was an irascible cuss with an affection for scatological humour. The Martians pass gas, Ned the Seal passes gas, one chapter's title tells us Ned will pass gas. Lansdale loves a good fart joke.

Flaming London is filled with literary references, without any pretensions to being literature. It's a barrage of irreverent reverence for the classic SF and horror of yesteryear: as with Zeppelins West, the cast is a who's who of boyhood favorites: Wild West stories, Jules Verne, Passepartout, Mark Twain, a certain giant gorilla, flying monstrosities, Martians, as well as a few characters who cross over from Lansdale's short story, "The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel," which many may be familiar with from Tachyon's Steampunk anthology, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. These last characters introduce the idea of rips in the fabric of time and space that have been created by H.G. Wells's Time Traveler. Unlike many instances of steampunk, Lansdale draws attention to why things aren't as they "should be," the core conceit behind Mark Hodder's brilliant steampunk series. Flaming London ends with the remaining heroes setting off from the ruins of a Martian-ravaged London to fix these fractures, and seek to set things right.

I was disappointed by the Flaming Zeppelins omnibus in only one respect: it lacks the interior art from the Subterranean editions. The lack of Mark Nelson's art from Zeppelins West is minor: it's Timothy Truman's artwork in Flaming London that strikes me as the greater loss, given how Truman and Lansdale partnered to deliver three Jonah Hex miniseries. There's something about Truman's art that suits Lansdale's text in my mind. However, that shouldn't stop interested readers from picking up the Tachyon copy - Lansdale's text, as was the case in the Jonah Hex miniseries, is the real star of the show. The images support the text, but aren't essential. On a more practical note, picking up the Tachyon version is far less expensive than tracking down original Subterranean editions from a used book vendor.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: I do not recommend Lansdale without numerous caveats to those who like their steampunk with a sense of decorum, or bereft of below-the-belt humour, or written by a human (Ned the Seal writes a number of chapters in Flaming London; Ned's voice is funny all on its own, since he often stops talking about the matter at hand to ruminate on the joys of eating fish, or how eating fish results in awful gas). If you want your steampunk serious, sombre, or squeaky-clean, stay far away from Lansdale. For myself, he's a breath of flatulent air in the midst of steampunk taking itself far too seriously. Jeter might have conflated steampunk with the word "gonzo," but Lansdale embodies the term.

Please note: All citations utilized the pagination of the Subterranean Press version of Flaming London, as that's where I've made my annotations.

The Buntline Special by Mike Resnick

2011-03-04T08:34:00.001-07:00

Literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss came up with an idea he called the “horizon of expectations,” the cumulative preconceptions a reader approaches a text with, based upon its author, style, genre, and other formal elements. Although he was speaking of a reader’s response to a text, I kept thinking of the horizon of expectations while reading Mike Resnick’s steampunk Weird Western, The Buntline Special. Utilizing the oft-told tale of the events surrounding the shootout at the OK Corrall in Tombstone, AZ, The Buntline Special is an exercise in playfully subverting the reader’s horizon of expectations. After all, to anyone who’s seen Gunfight at the OK Corral or Tombstone, these aren’t simply familiar characters, situations, and settings: they are archetypes of the Western genre.

A promising premise, and Seamas Gallagher’s cover art is gorgeous enough to entice any fan of American steampunk (I’ve been a huge fan of Gallagher’s since he did superior renderings of the characters from The Wheel of Time at his blog. I should add my agreement here to the Rob Will Review, which praised PYR's covers, saying, "If every publishing house's cover art were as consistently attractive as PYR's, a lot more people would feel encouraged to read books"). Perhaps my own horizon of expectations was too large, given Gallagher's wonderful cover art, but not unfounded, given that Resnick is a five-time Hugo winner. Granted, this is not the Tombstone of Costner’s Wyatt Earp: there are electric lights and literally horseless carriages courtesy of boy-genius Thomas Alva Edison, who is in Tombstone investigating how science can counteract magic. The players are the same, but with a twist: Bat Masterston’s name is taken literally when he becomes a creature of the night; Johnny Ringo is still one of the fastest guns in Texas, only now he’s also slowly decomposing; and the Clanton gang has more than numbers on their side in their opposition of law-dog Earp and his companions—they are allied with Geronimo, rendered as a shaman with high magic powers. Despite all the magic and mechanical digressions, Doc Holliday and the Earps remain mortal and unmechanized, unlike Emma Bull’s Territory, which imagines Earp and Holliday with the ability to use magic. Admittedly, Doc will finally wield the steampunked Buntline Special, but without it, he’s simply the superior pistoleer of our history with a penchant for intelligent conversation, droll humor, and the affections of Big Nose Kate.

In steampunk Tombstone, Doc’s lady-love runs a whorehouse with an automated twist: several of the girls are clockwork dolls. And while they provide the impetus for a few below-the-belt jokes and a means of narrow escape, they’re largely left as many of the steampunked digressions are in The Buntline Special: unexplored beyond the “ain’t it cool” factor. Accordingly, I had to adjust my “horizon of expectations.” The Windup Girl, this wasn’t. So it's not social commentary: what is The Buntline Special?

It’s intended to be light, escapist fiction for fans of the Weird Western, as well as a steampunked defamiliarization of this familiar story. As noted, the steampunking is entirely surface. Unless you’re encountering the story of Tombstone for the first time, Edison’s electric streetlamps aren’t shedding light on anything new. Readers familiar with the history may be disappointed that, despite the introduction of advanced technology, undead gunslingers, and First Nations magic, the events leading up to, during, and away from the Gunfight at the OK Corral unfold with a strangely by-the-numbers adherence to the historical chronology.

Resnick is somewhere in the middle of previous steampunk Weird Westerns, neither as off-the-wall crazy as Joe Lansdale’s Zeppelins West, nor serious and brooding as Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World. While he plays things straight, the voice of Doc Holliday provides tone ironic enough to solicit laughter, and it is Resnick’s rendering of Holliday’s persona that rescues The Buntline Special from being just another steampunk book in a current morass of steampunk books. Holliday’s character interactions are what kept me reading; the banter between Holliday and zombie-Ringo was more engaging than their final gunfight. Like Emma Bull, Resnick wisely makes Holliday the focus. As I've noted, the steampunking of Tombstone is purely aesthetic. So if you’re going to put your gunslingers in brass armor with pistols that look like they were lifted from Dr. Grordbort’s shelf, you’d better make sure the character under the armor is someone worth reading about. Resnick does that, and while I wasn’t blown away by this first installment in what promises to be a series, I’d sure give it another go, especially if Holliday shows up again. At least now I know what my horizon of expectation should be.

For those who can't get enough of alternate Tombstones, check out Bookslut's great review of Territory, which will tell you many of the reasons I enjoyed it as well:

Getting "Steamed" about the steamy in steampunk

2011-02-28T08:29:00.001-07:00

My first big experience of steampunk was at Steam Powered, the Northern Californian Steampunk convention. Among all the entertainments and attractions we've come to expect at steampunk conventions, exhibitions, and the like, was a session on BDSM: how to tie your lover to a bed and not hurt them in the process. In addition to an interest in kink, subsequent research journeys to the Bay Area for steampunk events demonstrated a connection between steampunk culture and burlesque, which has gained ground in other areas in North America. The erotic flavor of Dark Garden's fashion shows can't be denied, nor can we cite "corsets on the outside" as a return to Victorian ethics. In short, many expressions of steampunk are sexy or sexualized. There's nothing intrinsically erotic about steampunk, but the neo-Victorian aspect presents an opportunity for writers of erotica that's simply too good to pass up: the perceived sexual repression of the nineteenth century, and the more expressed underbelly we've come to discover, is a gold mine for writers of erotica.

Color me surprised then, to find my readers somewhat divided in their appreciation of this past month's content. Granted, I went more for erotica than romance, but this was primarily because I got in more reading on the iPhone than I did off hard copies. All the erotica I had to read was sent to me as eBooks, so I got through that quicker, and was able to write about it sooner than the romance.

But it was interesting to see yet another facet of steampunk where people want their steampunk a certain way, and don't like it when it deviates from that model idea. This is the heart of my response to Katie MacAlister's Steamed, which generated some controversy in steampunk circles with its unlicensed use of steampunk images for a book trailer, and was derided as being written by someone from outside steampunk who looked in on steampunk from the outside. Again, as I commented in my post on Steampunk Erotica, this sounds a lot like religious rhetoric: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and the Islamic community, writ small. My dislike of Steamed has nothing to do with whether or not Katie MacAlister "gets" steampunk. The number of writers who are doing steampunk right now, but aren't part of the steampunk community, are numerous. Steampunk darling Tim Powers responds with bemusement at his inclusion in steampunk events: he is not part of the community, yet produced one of the "classics" of steampunk, The Anubis Gates. I don't like Steamed much because I think it's poorly written: it's a clunky cross-hatch tale where a steampunk fanboy crosses over into a steampunk world. References to Abney Park in the opening chapter are so thinly veiled as to be laughable, definitely demonstrating that Katie MacAlister's understanding of steampunk was mediated through web search, not research. Yet apparently a number of people really liked it, and it proved to be their doorway into the wider world of steampunk. I've met quite a few folks who sheepishly admit Steamed was their first steampunk read. Stop being sheepish people: some people's first foray into fantasy wasn't Tolkien, but Terry Brooks. I celebrate Shannara for making Middle-Earth accessible to weaker readers.

All this to once again say, let us declare a moratorium on transcendent language in regards to steampunk. Enough with essentialist ideas about steampunk needing to be something. People often misunderstand my goal of definition as essentialism, but there is a difference between defining by observation, and defining by desire. I don't need steampunk to be anything. In truth, if you look back through this blog, or read my article, "Finding Nemo," you'll discover I've already had to revise some of my ideas. I started out thinking the punk/oppositional politics was intrinsic to steampunk literature: it's not. Some books have it, others don't. Appeals to etymology are pointless: the punk in steampunk doesn't mean anything. All the punks who keep saying "you're using our name, expect some bad-ass shenanigans to ensue," are as misguided as Christians who keep bemoaning the loss of "Christ in Christmas," as though secular celebrations of that season don't have a cultural reality and validity all their own.

Likewise, I could have come up with some clever way of responding to those who want their steampunk G-rated with an etymological pun on "if you don't want your literature steamy, maybe you shouldn't be reading steampunk." That would be ridiculous. Steampunk isn't inherently polite and prudish, nor is inherently sensual and steamy. Steampunk is an aesthetic: this month, I've investigated its application to romance and more often, erotica. Peter Tupper's The Innocent's Tale is good writing, erotica, steampunk, or not. It utilizes familiar science fiction tropes, but enlarges on them through strong characters and clever world-building. The BDSM aspects won't be for everyone, but as I learned at Steam Powered, they clearly appeal to someone in the steampunk community. If it isn't your brand, don't smoke it.

Walt and Emily by Paul DiFilippo

2011-02-24T10:50:00.002-07:00

Here we are, the month almost completely gone, and I've only dealt with one bonafide romance, and two works of erotica. Given how much I've been publishing on the blog in the past two months, this is more than I'd really expected to achieve this month. Sadly, those still seeking a standard romance review this month are going to remain disappointed, as "Walt and Emily," the third novella in Paul DiFilippo's classic Steampunk Trilogy is anything but conventional. As I read it, I kept thinking, "In the unlikely event this story got made into a movie, Terry Gilliam would be one of the few directors who could pull it off." This is the story of two American poets who never met, and likely would have hated each other had they met, and their love affair amidst a fantastic steampunk journey.

For those who see the subversion of texts and canon as a form of punk-style writing, DiFilippo's steam has punk in spades: to pair up Whitman and Dickinson is some form of poetry heresy, I'm pretty sure, if one considered nothing other than their poetry on the quintessential steam technology, the locomotive. According to Ferris Cronkite, Whitman's "To A Locomotive in Winter" is a the response of a "worshipper" of the train (171), whereas Patrick F. O'Connell sees Dickinson's "I like to see it lap the miles" as a critique "about the theme of progress, as exemplified by the train" which is "devastating in its irony" (470). Whitman is characterized by Cronkite as the technophile, and Dickinson by O'Connell as the technophobe. This distinction encapsulates the polarity these poets represent, though one could find a number of other topics to establish the distance between them.

A reader without background on these giants of American verse will still grasp the strangeness of Whitman and Dickinson as couple, but they'll miss the immediate humor of moments like the opening scene: Dickinson wakes to find Whitman, "a huge hairy bearded barbarian, utterly and shamelessly naked save for a black floppy wide-brimmed hat" bathing in the fountain in front of her home (240). She is scandalized until she learns Whitman's identity, her shock turning to hope of a peer, perhaps a soul-mate, to share her poetry with. DiFillipo's use of both poet's writings is brilliant - they are interposed throughout "Walt and Emily" as actual poetry, inner ruminations, and sometimes spoken musings or responses. Again, the story is intelligible without a thorough knowledge of Whitman and Dickinson's poetry, but aficionados of these poets will have moments akin to the Marvel fanboy watching X-Men movies and catching a glimpse of Colossus or Kitty Pryde.

However, don't let these diversions into the esoterica of poetry and literary history dissuade you from reading "Walt and Emily," or anything else in The Steampunk Trilogy: as I say, the reading is intertextually enriched by knowing the sources DiFilippo is drawing from, such as H.P. Lovecraft, but the experience is rich enough without that knowledge. I would argue instead, that such richness lends itself to a deeper reading experience. During a second reading, try googling any line you suspect is poetry, and then follow up on any poem you find, looking into explications of those poems. In this way, "Walt and Emily" serves as a door to the wonderful world of poetry.

On first reading though, just enjoy the story: DiFilippo has rendered the reclusive Dickinson and the robust Whitman accurately enough (right down to Whitman's speculated bi-sexuality) for the neophyte of Nineteenth-Century American poetry, despite the story's steampunk bombast . The characters and their poetry are the only toe-hold to reality in "Walt and Emily," as in a possible concession to the morbid themes of Dickinson's poetry, the romance is given the backdrop of an extraordinary voyage into "Death's Cold Kingdom" (252). Here, as throughout The Steampunk Trilogy, DiFilippo cleverly steampunks history, conceding the prominence of Spiritualism with the necessary presence of several clairvoyants including Andrew Jackson Davis, and the fictional Madame Selavny: it is through the "science" of Spiritualism, an array of test-tubes and copper wire, and a twin-masted schooner that the voyage to the Summerland is achieved. Yet the actual journey and the means by which it is achieved are window dressing: they are ultimately less important than what Emily Dickinson learns of life and love along the way. "Walt and Emily" is an intelligent ode to the idea of whether 'tis better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all, told with wit, whimsy, and a reverent irreverence for both Whitman and Dickinson, and the poetry they left behind.

Works cited:

Cronkhite, G. Ferris. "Walt Whitman and the Locomotive." American Quarterly 6.2 (1954): 164-172.

O'Connell, Patrick F. "Emily Dickinson's Train: Iron Horse or "Rough Beast"?." American Literature 52.3 (1980): 469-473.

Steampunk Erotica by Ora Le Broq

2011-02-17T05:00:00.008-07:00

At Steamcon II this past fall, I had a woman ask me about the increase of questionable content in steampunk writing. I asked her to clarify what she meant, and understood her response to denote explicit sexual situations in books like Gordon Dahlquist's The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Consider yourselves warned: if you found Dahlquist too titillating, then stay far, far away from Ora Le Broq's Steampunk Erotica. My iPod nearly melted while I was reading it. I'll further warn my readers that I'm going to review this with some tongue in cheek off-colour constructions, so either forgive me, or quit reading.

I should further qualify how much steam this eponymously titled work of steampunk erotica gives off. It's not the same steam I spoke of in Peter Tupper's The Innocent's Progress. That is a series of steampunk short tales with explicit sex in them. Steampunk Erotica is a series of steampunk sexual adventures with a tale around them. And what sexual adventures these are! Unlike the liasons of The Innocent's Progress, the heroines, heroes, villains and villainesses of Steampunk Erotica engage in sex in the same way adventure heroes engage in battle. The opening scene in a private girls' school is typical of how over-the-top the sex in Steampunk Erotica is. While heroine Mina Trelawney pleasures herself before an audience, one-by-one her admiring peers succumb to orgasm, overwhelmed with desire for their classmate: orgasm without touch isn't unheard of, but it is rare. Mina's ability to cause such irresistible passion in those around her provides the precedent for a series of hyperbolized sex encounters somewhere between Emmanuelle Arsan's The Joys of a Woman and hard-core porn aimed at hetero males. And there's a type of sex for nearly everyone: girl on boy, boy on girl, girl on girl, a little bit of kink, an orgy, masturbation, but no boy on boy: hence my comparison to hetero hardcore, where anything goes except gay sex. Steampunk Erotica is an adventure story with gonzo sex-scenes where the adventure set pieces usually are. Halfway through reading it, I felt that it should have had a title closer to The Perils of Gwendolyn in the Land of Yik Yak. However, unlike the heroine portrayed by sex-kitten Tawny Kitaen, Mina is no damsel in distress: like other steampunk heroines, Mina takes matters (among other things) into her own hands.

For example, instead of outwitting the evil mastermind Baron Thaddeus von Vasey, Mina outsexes him. In their confrontation, the Baron uses a whip to slowly disrobe Mina, who has been running about the countryside in her private schoolgirl's outfit. As more of Mina is revealed, she has a sort of epiphany regarding herself shedding the trappings of the society she has been raised to, mediated to the reader through a strip-tease:

Mina looked down and saw that her stockings were torn in several places and her pink-white flesh showed through the gaps. She breathed deeply and felt strangely liberated. The school uniform ... had been surprisingly constrictive. ... She unconsciously undulated from side to side, glorying in the release that the insignificant man had given her ... She looked down at the remains of her torn, grubby uniform at her feet and then back at the huge range of uniforms that the baron had created for his army and she made her first decision—dress for the part.
Mina tore the boater off and flung it away. She bent over and rolled her underwear and stockings down her long, shapely legs ... This also necessitated removing her shoes, which were sensible school shoes with no shape and no grip...
Her corset was also tattered from the baron's whip. Mina tore it from her body in one sudden motion so that she was left with the two halves in her hands before she cast them aside. She stood naked, the red flames of the furnaces flickering over her bleeding body...
Throughout her unselfconscious strip, the baron had gaped lasciviously and stupidly, reluctant to stop Mina's undressing whilst being insensible to what she was achieving. As Mina gazed at him in cool, controlled contempt, he finally raised the whip again, but he had left the end trailing by Mina's foot and she trod on it sharply, preventing the baron from using the weapon. He hissed in puzzlement and anger, but behind this, Mina detected something else.
“You‟re afraid, baron,” she challenged him. “You've always been afraid.”
“I am not afraid of a girl!” squeaked the baron, but his face was agitated and sweat poured from him...
The baron stuttered in anger but was unable to speak. He tried again to raise the whip but Mina, with barely a thought, stepped forward, grabbed his hand and yanked it upright, twisting the baron's body as she did so...
The baron looked in fear at the metamorphosis in Mina's face. The frightened schoolgirl was gone, transformed into a capable and strong young woman. In the heat of the baron's workshops, in which his ambition, vanity and fear had tried to forge the beginnings of a new world order, a frightened young woman found the strength to forge herself into what the baron could never be—her own person, unencumbered by fear or egotism.

Mina then dispatches the baron with fisticuffs, before returning to her transformation via steampunk fashion:

Having stripped down to the essentials, Mina could now begin to rebuild.
The red flickering glow of the furnaces illuminated her as she strode naked along the workbenches, observing, choosing and discarding various items. A pair of hardwearing leather trousers came first, followed by long, thigh-length boots, with a split-toe design and slightly raised heels. Mina was surprised but pleased at their comfortable fit. She could only guess it was difficult for an army to march into enemy territory in uncomfortable jackboots.
A small leather jerkin with numerous straps and pockets fitted snugly over a severe shirt. It was practical for the pockets and rings that she filled with small tools and knives, as well as cartridges, a revolver and electro-thermal grenades that could destroy solid objects for up to one hundred yards ... A leather great coat went over the top. It was rather too regimented for Mina's liking, with a severe cut and standardized style, but it would be warm and it had built into it a power pack and holster for a Laserton gun ... a pair of skin-tight leather gloves on her hands almost finished her preparations, but before she moved on, Mina selected a pair of Opti-Zoom goggles and slipped them around her neck, where they dangled in place of the discarded boater. Suitably dressed, Mina walked past the unconscious form of the baron, barely glancing at him as she passed and she set out to destroy the baron's dream of world domination. (126-131)

I'm not going to suggest Ora Le Broq win any literary awards, but I have to give kudos where they are due. When teaching critical analysis, I tell students its important to evaluate a work based on the criteria and standards we normally judge that sort of work by, before moving on to more subjective readings. We do not bemoan a lack of realism in a super-hero movie, but are impressed with the level of verisimilitude Christopher Nolan's take on Batman reaches. Yet we cannot say Tim Burton's vision is worse because it does not attempt reality - it is a comic book film - we expect some level of hyperbolization. Likewise, I cannot decry erotica of this kind because the characters are sexual athletes whose bodies and reactions are exaggerations of real-world sex. In real life, female orgasm is apparently in short shrift, if the articles devoted to achieving it in Cosmopolitan are any indication: the women in Steampunk Erotica don't just orgasm: they have multiple orgasms, often including female ejaculation. And yet, despite all this ridiculous hyperbole, Le Broq includes passages that comment on the steampunk aesthetic, and the steampunk community's perception of it. The transformation of Mina from schoolgirl to steampunk heroine through attire reads like moments in Christian fiction where people get saved: steampunk fashion isn't just cool, it will change your life. Whether one actually buys into this idea is immaterial: in the universe Le Broq has fashioned, Mina's transformation of self is visualized symbolically through steampunk fashion. This is impressive in a book involving an orgy in a factory workers' communal shower.

Whether steampunk can change the world is debatable. That Steampunk Erotica will, isn't. This isn't high-literature. It's a high-flying, orgasmic adventure. There are lots of examples of technofantasy, and many gonzo mash-ups of Victorian and modern sensibilities, which wouldn't work at all in a book with a serious tone.While I take the underlying meaning of Mina's transformation seriously, I can't take the delivery too seriously without missing the point. Steampunk Erotica, is more akin to the 1960s Adam-West Batman, than to Burton or Nolan. It's got a salacious Sock! Pow! (or perhaps a Suck! Pow!) sensibility, a wanton, carefree attitude that endears the reader, even if the sex scenes don't. While the type of over-the-top sex isn't my brand of erotica, it certainly matches the ultra-romantic steampunk world Mina Trelawney inhabits. Le Broq's Steampunk Erotica is an X-rated B-movie, whose D-cup heroine should be A-OK for those who've tired of G-rated YA content. YMMV.

You can purchase Steampunk Erotica HERE.

"The Steam Dancer (1896)" by Caitlín Kiernan

2011-02-14T08:54:00.001-07:00

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

I was up this morning around 4 a.m. with a fevered little girl, and after I got her back to rest, I was wide awake. So I lay pondering what I'd suggest to my readers as the most romantic steampunk tale I've ever read, and was surprised at the rapidity with which the answer came to me. It's a wonderful short tale by Caitlín Kiernan in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, titled "The Steam Dancer (1896)." I'm a huge fan of Kiernan's 1998 novel, Silk, and was pleased to discover she hasn't lost her penchant for beautiful prose when I read this short story last fall.

It's difficult to talk about short prose without giving away all the spoilers, but in the case of "The Steam Dancer," the reading experience is less about plot than about character, relationship, and Kiernan's lovely weaving of words. It's the tale of Missouri, a steampunk cyborg, a mosaic of "muscle and skin, steel and artifice" (70), and her relationship with both her deceased father, a snake-oil salesman in life, and the mechanic, the man who rescued her from death, and literally rebuilt her. This is the heart of romance in this tale: to be rescued from the trash-heaps of a shanty town, and remade into something beautiful and graceful, the object not only of desire, but a strong and binding love, resonates with me. The themes of "The Steam Dancer" are love and identity seen as things we choose, and build - things we must be invested in the upkeep of, all tenets of amour I personally subscribe to. While Kiernan uses "What's past is prologue" from Shakespeare's The Tempest as one of her key ideas, the sentence that sums the story's themes up for me is "Other women are only whole ... Other women are only born, not made. I have been crafted" (68). Especially today, on Valentine's Day, as I reflect on 15 years of marriage, on five years of being a father, on turning forty in a month - at this point in my life, I can say with confidence that love is something we choose: while fate and blood play their part, we are the makers of our lives and loves.

I haven't finished wending my way through the tales in Steampunk Reloaded, but I can tell you the price is right if only for Kiernan's tale. The intro blurb gives my the impression Kiernan has plans to write more in this alternate steampunk world, and to that I say, "encore!"

The Innocent's Progress by Peter Tupper

2011-02-08T11:25:00.003-07:00

When I started reading Peter Tupper's The Innocent's Progress, my intention was to read one or two stories and move on. My goals for the month are ambitious, and I have a lot on my teaching plate besides. After reading the eponymous first tale, "The Innocent's Progress," I thought I'd just post story-by-story. By the time I'd finished the second story, "The Pretty Horsebreaker," I was immersed in Tupper's alternate world, a place both historically familiar and yet culturally strange. I've only read the first three stories, having gone further than I intended, so I'll focus on those in the following review.

I love the structure of this book, with its slow reveal of both its world and characters. "The Innocent's Progress" introduces the reader to the Razor Lotus theatre, a space of pleasure and performance. The Razor Lotus strikes me as the type of theatre we imagine took place in the Victorian era, when thespians had low reputations and were considered only marginally above sex-trade workers. Here, Tupper combines this ill-repute with creative environment: the Razor Lotus is a blending of the Théâtre des Vampires from Rice's Interview with the Vampire and the bordello little Nell works at in the final act of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. The first presents reality as a fantasy, while the second presents fantasies as realities - the space of the Razor Lotus offers both. Be warned - you might dismiss the anthology as simply neo-Victorian based only on this first story. Read on, as Tupper will bring the technofantasy and retrofuturism to in the second and third tales.

The second story, "The Pretty Horsebreaker," expands the reader's view of the City and its environs. Tupper only thinly veils his historical references with slightly removed renamings: Sir Richard Burton becomes Captain Rhisiart Braen, and Oscar Wilde becomes Odgar Wycke. Yet rather than being clunky, as such historical references often are, reducing the major figures of history to caricatures or complete digressions (such as the robust, Captain America-esque Mark Twain in Image comics' Alter Nation), the remove is effective. I was aware of the way Braen resembled Burton, but wasn't distracted by the real history because the Welsh-style names made enough of a remove to keep me thinking of the characters as versions of the historical figures. Further, Tupper's world is easier to accept because it is completely other: I don't balk at a steam car, since in a world where naming conventions have replaced Earnest with Earwin, a steam car isn't an anachronism I need to suspend disbelief about. Instead, it's part of this alternate steampunk world. I was also suitably impressed that instead of the morality police being the ever-shat-upon Church (capital C, to let you know the author thinks of the complexity of multifaceted faith practice as a single, monolithic institution), Tupper renders the authority that takes Wycke/Wilde away to jail the department of Decency: "We're from Decency, sir." It's a nice touch, and one I can't help applauding. Nineteenth century Christianity didn't have the monopoly on Victorian hypocrisy concerning sex.

Tupper's world-building continues to engage the reader in the third story, "Delicate Work." Before I describe the setting of this tale, I want to note how Tupper inserts the main character of each story subtly into the previous tale: we already met Tangwen, the tinker heroine of "Delicate Work" briefly in "The Pretty Horsebreaker." "Delicate Work" is Tangwen's back-story, the narrative of her life before leaving the Honeycomb (this is not a spoiler - she's already on the outside in "The Pretty Horsebreaker" - besides, "Delicate Work" is about character, not plot), a massive shelter for wayward women:

"The Honeycomb was vast, more than a dozen large buildings grown together, connected by tunnels, covered alleys, walkways, and bridges; encrusted with layer after layer of buttresses, iron girders, bricks, tiles, metal barred windows, ivy, moss, and mushrooms ... Inside, it was an endless warren of rooms, corridors, galleries, garrets, and more lit by a jumble of electric lights, gas lamps, mirrors, and candelabras. Rooms were subdivided into smaller cells, while walls were torn down to make larger ones. Floors were connected by staircases, ladders, dumbwaiters, lifts, pulley shafts, crawlspaces, and attics...There were no complete maps. The Honeycomb was too old, too complex, too large, and too variable to ever chart comprehensively." (65-66)

The women who live inside the Honeycomb are factory workers engaged in assembly line production of Wire terminals or difference engines, which are shipped from the Honeycomb to the outside world of the City. Tangwen has decided to leave the Honeycomb, but her lover Betrys wants to stay: this is the real conflict of "Delicate Work." What's fascinating about Tangwen and other Honeycomb girls is how Tupper uses them to play with the steampunk persona of engineer: Tangwen's description in "The Pretty Horsebreaker" could be any number of women at a steampunk convention, dressed in a corset on the outside, above a worker's apron, along with the ubiquitous goggles, which serve the purpose most goggles do: to protect the eyes while working with electricity or other potential harmful components. The corset is a fashion affectation the Tinkers have taken to: lesser writers seeking to play off of convention cosplay or steampunk fashion fail at pulling this off. Tupper's got a world where it makes sense, and it doesn't feel overly contrived.

This is largely owing to Tupper's excellent characters: he writes his people with diverse and believable voices.

Miss Ccri, the heroine of "The Pretty Horsebreaker," is already one of my favorite steampunk heroines: sexy, smart, and yet complex and vulnerable, she got me hot around the collar several times. She's exactly the sort of woman who would both terrify me and make me follow her around on a leash. Despite this, she's completely sympathetic and endearing. Tupper's characters are a joy to read, and his writing style is wonderfully inviting.

There's lots of sex, of course. It's erotica after all. But it's a servant of the story, not the other way around. Tupper isn't writing stock Harlequin plots that eschew innuendo and euphemism. That isn't to say your ears won't turn red if you're a former Baptist boy like me. When the characters engage in sex, love-making, or fucking, it's steamy reading, all puns intended (let's just get that lame chestnut out of the way, shall we?). However, unlike lesser erotica, where boy meets girl, boy eventually fucks girl, sex in The Innocent's Progress happens along the way: it isn't, to engage in one more groan-worthy pun, the climax of the story. The climax of "The Pretty Horsebreaker" involves two women, but they're both clothed, and resolving emotional, not physical tensions. Tupper's a damn smart writer, and anyone who dismisses The Innocent's Progress as just erotica might say The Dark Knight is just a comic book movie. I haven't finished it yet, but I wanted to move on to some other works before February wastes away. However, I'm confident in saying that even if the remaining stories are pure garbage, The Innocent's Progress is worth the money you'll pay for just the three tales I've highlighted here. I'll be returning to Tupper's fictional London in July for Canuck Steampunk Month II (Peter's a fellow Canadian!), and for the time being regretfully pull myself away from The Innocent's Progress to look at some other steampunk erotica and romance this month.

Grade: A
Steampunk Factor: High

Links:
Circlet Press, publisher of The Innocent's Progress
Peter Tupper's site, with excerpts from The Innocent's Progress

February Preview: Steampunk Romance and Erotica

2011-02-01T12:39:00.004-07:00

My apologies for a nearly month-long silence. I vowed I wouldn't get behind on grading this term, and so far I'm succeeding. I'm still busy with other steampunk-related projects, but I've wanted to devote a month to Steampunk Romance and Erotica since I first read Gail Carriger's Soulless. I'll begin by shamelessly plugging Parliament and Wake, one of the most innovative steampunk photo sites on the web. James and Kate, the lovely couple behind P & W, consented to my use of their image as photographed by Lex Machina for the header this month. I hope to say more about P & W when I have more time, but let it suffice to say that in a sea of people taking photos in steampunk outfits, P & W sticks out, both with its pinup content and narrative elements. James and Kate go beyond just standing in front of old buildings with rayguns made from candlesticks. They tell tales: some sexy, some macabre, others fey, but always interesting.

My plans are always bigger than I can make happen, and while I wanted to look at the entire Steampunk Trilogy this month, I'll likely be focusing solely on "Walt and Emily." I'll take a look at Gail Carriger's Soulless again, revisiting it beyond review to ruminate on the elements of Austenian comedy she brings to the first two books in the Parasol Protectorate series. I'm going to review some erotica as well, including Ora Le Brocq's Steampunk Erotica and a few selections from Circlet press: Peter Tupper's The Innocent's Progress and Lionel Bramble's 1901: A Steam Odyssey. I'd like to get the chance to talk corsets, burlesque, and Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge! We may even bring up that steampunk chestnut, Katie MacAlister's Steamed as well. Let's see what the month holds. It is a short one, after all, and who knows how much work I'll actually get done if I'm reading these after the kids have gone to bed...

To get started, check out my original review of Gail Carriger's Soulless, and my thoughts on Nathalie Gray's Full Steam Ahead by Nathalie Gray.

All apologies to Ricky Pai for using his image of model Yaya Han in this post without consent, but I couldn't find a contact address, but really loved the model shot.

All the Bells on Earth by James P. Blaylock

2011-01-06T13:41:00.002-07:00

Many people complain of Christmas being over on March 26. Coming from a church background, and having researched a number of church calendars, I've taken great comfort in extending the holiday season to its traditional end on January 6. A number of Christian denominations celebrate Epiphany, or the visit of the Wise Men on this date, and so I'll simultaneously close my string of seasonal posts while bridging back into our study of James Blaylock's steampunk with All The Bells On Earth.

This is not a steampunk book - it's a Blaylock book, filled with a cast of quirky characters occupying a very normal narrative space, engaged in conflicts that are simultaneously banal and transcendent. At both The Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition and Steamcon II Blaylock admitted low-key Inkling Charles Williams as a strong influence and inspiration (March & November, 2010). This is apparent in both of the other books in what wikipedia dubs Blaylock's "Christian" trilogy: The Paper Grail, The Last Coin, and All the Bells on Earth. Williams wrote "supernatural thrillers," making him the ostensible horror writer of the Inklings. His novels are theological in nature, but not in adherence to any strict systematic theology. Williams was adventurous with the theological musings in his fiction, pairing Christian motifs and ideas with the Occult: ghosts, the Tarot, the Philosopher's Stone. Where many Christian writers would fear to tread, Williams went dancing.

Reading Blaylock's so-called Christian trilogy is like reading Williams, if Charles Williams were from California and had a sense of humour. All the Bells on Earth shares a key concept of Williams' writing, best identified by Thomas Howard in his excellent study, The Novels of Charles Williams:

"Eliot spoke of the 'fear in a handful of dust,' referring to the enormous and alarming significance of the most ordinary things ... The ordinary stuff of our experience seems both to cloak and to reveal more than itself. Everything nudges our elbow. Heaven and hell lurk under every bush. The sarcastic lift of an eyebrow carries the seed of murder since it bespeaks my wish to diminish someone else's existence. To open a door for a man carrying luggage recalls the Cross since it is a small case of putting the other person first. We live in the middle of all this, but it is so routine that it is hard to stay alive to it. The prophets and poets have to pluck our sleeves or knock us on the head now and again, not to tell us anything new but simply to hail us with what has been there all along.
If ever there was anyone who saw the fear in a handful of dust it was Williams. There was no detail of life, no bodily function, no chance word, no bird or bush, no kiss or shaken fist that did not signal Everything to him. Like all poets he saw a correspondence between commonplace things and ultimate things. Everything supplied him with parables and images.
An image points to something beyond itself. The wave of a hand is a an image of greeting, which is itself one aspect of courtesy, which in turn is a subdivision of Charity. The shake of a fist is an image of animosity, which is one aspect of anger which is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Everything keeps rising towards heaven or plummeting towards hell. The whole conflict of heaven and hell crops up at our elbow a thousand times a day."

The conflict of heaven and hell is clearly the business of the characters in All the Bells on Earth. Some are more aware of this than others. Three powerful businessmen who sold their souls to the devil are keenly aware, as one by one the price of their success comes due. In an attempt to thwart the Faustian bargain, one of these men procures a literal Bluebird of Happiness, which is delivered wrongly to the house of Walt Stebbins, a very ordinary mail-order businessman. Walt's a bit of a loser: he's never succeeded financially, and relies upon the income of his Realtor wife; she wants kids, and he doesn't. He's about as normal a protagonist as one could find, and with the arrival of the Dead Bluebird in a Jar, he's thrust into the midst of the conflict between darkness and light, good and evil, hell and heaven.

We've seen this story before. However, instead of setting off on a quest for Mount Doom, or protecting the Virgin who is to be Satan's consort, or finding all Seven Seals and Bowls of God's apocalyptic wrath, Walt Stebbins is faced with a very simple problem. The Bluebird will grant any wish he makes. To thwart evil, he merely needs to throw the damn thing away. As one character remarks when Walt ponders the possibility of wishing for a million dollars, "What if there's ten million dollars in it. It'll buy you the same thing--ruination. A ticket straight to Hell in an upholstered sedan chair. Bank on it. You'll ride to the Devil in comfort" (196).

But Walt doesn't throw it away, and while he makes up his mind about what to do with it, the struggle between good and evil goes on in very normal ways, cropping up at Walt's elbow "a thousand times a day." He has to deal with the inconvenience of family visiting for the holidays: his wife's Uncle Henry and Aunt Gladys, parked in their motorhome on Walt's driveway, evoking shades of Randy Quaid in Christmas Vacation. Gladys puts everyone on a nuts-and-grains diet at the time of the Turkey, and Uncle Henry doggedly tries to rope Walt into a get-rich-quick scheme involving a Pope-on-a-Rope, all the while carrying on adulterous liaisons with a woman who works the counter at a donut shop. When Uncle Henry seeks to end the relationship, the woman threatens to reveal Henry's infidelity to his wife. In the ensuing confrontation and placation of the spurned Other Woman, one of the two clergymen aware of the struggle, and actively engaged it it, reflects, "I came around this afternoon looking to enlist the two of you in this affair of mine, didn't I? I thought I was up against a pretty formidable dragon, but now I'm inclined to believe that Maggie Biggs gets the brass ring" (244). Not cosmic evil, but the petty, larcenous variety. Petty evil that is met with mundane charity. Walt stubbornly bails Henry out of the situation with Maggie Biggs, through small, mundane acts of kindness, the opening of a door recalling the Cross - the waved hand signifying greeting, courtesy, and ultimately Charity.

Other family show up uninvited and nearly unannounced when Nora, Walt's wife, brings her sister's kids home: the sister has gone off to find herself, and the father is an abusive alcoholic. While Walt states he doesn't want kids, he warms up to these, and finds himself drawn into the role of father to them before long. While the confrontation with the abusive brother-in-law is tense, the actions are once again mundane. This is an everyday act of kindness, not a stand-off with a Balrog over the abyss. When Father Bentley, the clergyman in the thick of the spiritual fray chooses a more direct and violent approach to fighting evil, he finds himself "sickened and ashamed," since his nemesis didn't defeat him: "he saw that clearly -- he had defeated himself" (329). Ultimately, it's another act of everyday goodwill that brings the struggle between heaven and hell to its conclusion - Walt will invite the outcast in from the rain, obeying once again the ethic Jacques Derrida spoke of in "Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility":

"...unconditional hospitality implies that you don't as the other, the newcomer, the guest, to give anything back, or even to identify himself or herself. Even if the other deprives you of your mastery or your home [as Walt's guests effectively do], you have to accept this. It is terrible to accept this, but that is the condition of unconditional hospitality: that you give up the mastery of your space, your home, your nation ... I try to dissociate the concept of this pure hospitality from the concept of 'invitation'. If you are the guest and I invite you, if I am expecting you and am prepared to meet you, then this implies that there is no surprise, everything is in order. For pure hospitality or a pure gift to occur, however, there must be an absolute surprise. The other, like the Messiah, must arrive whenever he or she wants." (70)

The outcast, the other, the one in need of hospitality, is conflated with the Messiah in both Derrida and Blaylock. When Walt invites his enemy to his home, it is because his enemy has effectively turned up on his doorstep, wet and bedraggled with nowhere to go:

"Come on over to our place," Walt said, although he realized that he didn't like the idea of an evening with Robert Argyle very much at all, which he knew was uncharitable. He'd have to work on that. Probably there would always be something to work on...
"Plenty of room at the inn," Walt said. "It's Christmas. It's the best time of the year to let bygones be bygones. We might as well start tonight." (375)

I know I've given away the ending here, but that shouldn't deter you from the journey. Christmas is coming to a close, but there's always next Christmas to get a used copy of All The Bells on Earth through an online book vendor like Thriftbooks. It's worth checking out, for a quirky battle between good and evil in the town of Orange California. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Steampunk Scholar's Reads of the Year

2010-12-28T09:55:00.002-07:00

New Year approacheth, and it's the time of year for "best-of" lists! Steampunk.com did one of these, but the criteria for nominating texts reminded me too much of discussions where I'm told "you can't limit steampunk," so rather than be a troll, I just decided I'd do my own list. My criteria are a lot more restrictive. To be considered steampunk at my blog, the book must have been written from the late 20th century (1970 and on) up until now. More to the point, as books of the year, the release date is crucial: the original release date (frankly, if you're going to include any book from any period, you're doing an ALL TIME GREATEST list, not a "book of the year"). Re-releases don't count, or I'd be including Joe Lansdale's Flaming Zeppelins. And of course, I'm working with my definition of the steampunk aesthetic: books that combine a neo-Victorian retrofuturist feel with technofantasy.

Here are my choices, in exactly the order you see them. I went with five for the same reasons I made my choices more restricted than steampunk.com. If you open things up too wide, you render the words "best" or "of the year" meaningless.

Dreadnought by Cherie Priest - This became my go-to gift book of the year. Better than the first in the series, in my opinion. Trains + Texas Rangers + zombies + great characters, great writing.
Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld - In most cases, saying "more of the same" is a bad thing. Given how kick-ass Leviathan was, it's a compliment here.
The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman - Guns with demons in them! Locomotive Engines with demons in them! People with personal demons! Demons, demons, everywhere! And gunplay to boot. Loved the whole thing, and am looking forward to impending sequels.
Changeless by Gail Carriger - Many people have told me Blameless is better, but I can't say - my wife became a fan this year, and we read the series together. And by read, I mean I read, she listens, and drifts into sleep. At which point I have to put the book down, and read something else, or suffer her wrath for skipping ahead. I'm loving this series, and think it deserves all the praise and hype it's getting.
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding - Yes, it's Firefly even more steampunked. How is that a bad thing? This is well-written, fast-paced, high-adventure. Abney Park sparked the idea of sky pirates, but no one has written them so well as Wooding.

There you go! Until next year...

The Ghost of Christmas future: Mission Update December 2010

2010-12-17T14:45:00.003-07:00

Yeah, I know - I skipped the Ghost of Christmas Present. Let's pretend the Steampunk Santa wallpaper was my "present," and I'll steal the lame pun reference from Animaniacs doing A Christmas Carol and call it even!

Before I get into the bulk of this post, I wanted to present my "things to do before the five-year mission is over" list:

Meet James and Kate of Parliament & Wake in person
Get photographed by Lex Machina
Have drinks with Jake von Slatt at a Con (we keep meaning to, but for some reason...)
Party with Abney Park
Talk with Jay Lake about the steampunk aesthetic over drinks
Attend Dickensfaire in the Bay area
Write my own steampunk tale
Get one of Greg Broadmore's Rayguns to commemorate the journey (Barring a raygun, I could always commemorate the journey with a Dark Garden corset-vest)
See Chris Garcia win a Hugo for Journey Planet
Do another reading with Gail Carriger (and I'd add a first reading of Dreadnought with Cherie Priest to this particular list, and Felix Gilman's Half-Made World)
Build a time machine, go back to Steam Powered in the fall of 2008, and not freeze like a chickenshit fanboy when Greg Broadmore walked by me on Sunday night and said "Hi," and I noticed Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop was with him (true story - I think Orlando Bloom would have fazed me less - I'm a huge fan of Richard Taylor's work).

As I round the corner into the third year of my PhD work, I'm rather optimistic. With the writing the blog has generated combined with the articles published elsewhere, both in print and online, I've likely got the dissertation already written. It's just a matter of dropping it all into a Word document and organizing it, and then inserting a lot of major literary theorists into the mix. That's the work of May to August of 2011. I'm confident I'll have a first draft done and handed in by August.

My next immediate task is my prospectus, which is basically a paper saying how I'll be conducting my research, which is laughable, since I've been conducting said research for two years now. Part of these "ghost" entries here at the blog have been a sort of warm up for the prospectus. The papers I wrote from my visit to Rice in 2008 were me getting my feet wet: thank God for the serendipity of the "Steam Wars" paper, which really kick-started the concept of steampunk as aesthetic and not genre.

But beyond that first draft of the dissertation, the work will mostly be about colons and semi-colons, dangling participles, and shoring up arguments. I know what I want to say, and for the most part, have said it many times already. The structure of my dissertation won't surprise any regular readers:

1. Introduction to Steampunk: the difficulty of a definition
history of the term
weakness of etymological approaches
weakness of complex taxonomic approaches
why steampunk isn't Victorian science-fiction
2. Seeking the aesthetic: an inventory of the novels and short stories utilized; theoretical approaches utilized
3. Aesthetic 1: Neo-Victorianism - how the aesthetic evokes the nineteenth century in a number of different places, worlds, and times, with examples.
4. Aesthetic 2: Retro-Futurism - how the aesthetic imagines what the nineteenth century past imagined the future would look like, with examples.
5. Aesthetic 3. Technofantasy - the inclusion of technology that is scientific in appearance only.
6. Case Study 1: Steam Wars - the aesthetic applied by others
7. Case Study 2: A steampunked Beowulf - the aesthetic applied by the author
8. Conclusion: A definition with broad application

That should do the trick, I figure. We'll see. It needs to be around 200 pages, but I'm pretty sure I have that already. Like I said, it's all about organization and revision now.

Beyond the completion of the dissertation, I see a horizon of writing - not the sort of stuff I write now, though that will continue. I'll get back to writing fiction again. I have a few people who've asked me to submit fiction to their publication/anthology/whatever, and I'm looking forward to the summer of 2012 when I can see myself doing that. If I'm right, this will officially turn out to be a four, not five-year mission. But we'll see.

In the meantime, I'll continue to attend one out-of-town con per year, write for Exhibition Hall, Journey Planet, and Tor.com, and do my best to keep the blog updated. Thanks to everyone who's helped me make the journey thus far. A few names to that end:

Tofa Borregaard; the members of Legion Fantastique, especially Daniel, Rich, Erin, Ryan, Greg, Maria, and Joel; Sean Slattery; Christopher Garcia, J Daniel Sawyer, Krzysztof Janicz, Cory Gross, Blaine Kehl, Kevin Steil, Jha Goh, Ay-leen the Peacemaker, Matt Delman, Lee-Ann Faruga, Nancy Overbury, James Schaefer, Kate Franklin, Liz Gorinsky, Jack Horner, the folks at Locus, Liana K, Gail Carriger, Jess Nevins, anyone I missed who I should have thanked by name, and everyone who follows the blog regularly. Thanks for leaving comments and keeping the conversation alive.

Steampunk Santa Wallpaper

2010-12-12T21:40:00.002-07:00

Here it is! I did some revisions to a Father Christmas image I did years ago, and have uploaded it here for those of you who are looking for a festive steampunk wallpaper. I'm sorry it's 1024 x 768 - I only had time to make these adjustments, not to build it in multiple sizes. Merry Christmas everyone!

The Ghost of Christmas Past: Rice University - December 2008

2010-12-08T06:00:00.007-07:00

Today is apparently "pretend to be a time traveler" day, and this is how I'm time traveling here at the blog, by going back to December of 2008. This should have been the first post I ever made, since it was during this Christmas visit to family in Texas that I started the Steampunk Scholar blog. I nearly posted about it a number of times in the past two years, but it never seemed that the time was quite right. With the recent release of the "Steam Wars" article in Neo-Victorian Studies, and a desire to have a holiday theme to the posts this month, it is, to use a Biblical reference, the fullness of time for this anecdote.

The original image that somehow warranted the comment, "feels steampunk."

People often ask how I came to the decision to study steampunk for my PhD work. It started out of the confluence of two separate incidents. I wrote a paper on alternate history, which lead to finding Steffen Hantke's brilliant article, "Difference Engines and Other Infernal Devices: History According to Steampunk" in Extrapolation. Around the same time, I'd drawn an image for a webcomic idea I'd had, and someone said something about it feeling steampunk. I'd heard of the term before, but had paid it little attention. When it came time to choose a topic for my dissertation, it was between Intertextuality of Dystopic literature in Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero, or something to do with steampunk, based out of the interest generated by the two unrelated incidents. My M.A. thesis advisor, who I have a great relationship with, said, "Dystopia's been done. You do steampunk, and I'll be your advisor again." I was sold.

That fall, while doing grant proposal research (you know, the research you do to tell someone what you're going to research), I came across an advertisement for Steam Powered, the North California steampunk convention. With what little I knew about steampunk, I was aware that with guests like Jake von Slatt, Abney Park, the Vandermeers, and Greg Broadmore, this was not an event to be missed. Tofa Borregaard, the programming coordinator for the event, put me on a few panels and let me present, all very last-minute. The event was incredible, and galvanized my research.

Two months later, I was still finishing up term papers while on vacation in Katy, TX. I had to put the finishing touches on a paper about Captain Nemo, and needed to write a theory paper from the ground up. My prof had been interested in me writing something about steampunk, so as to write toward my research. My brother-in-law wanted to have a Star Wars marathon over the holidays, and in the intersection between researching the paper and watching the films, the "Steam Wars" paper was born.

Writing papers on your holidays is always a chore, even when you love the subject matter. Yet despite missing out on a lot of fun moments, I have a very fond and vivid memory of a day spent in the library at Rice University in Houston. The campus was gorgeous, and as a great fan of architecture that supports learning, it energized my excitement. What I didn't know at the time was that Rice holds one of the best collections of vintage Verne editions in North America, which is probably just as well, as I'd have lost a day looking at those when I needed to be photocopying.

Since I couldn't take any books out of the library, I set to a vigorous regimen of locating my research, then taking it down to the photocopier where I spent a lot of money photocopying huge sections of books. I had my steampunk goggles along, as they travel wherever I do when I'm on steampunk scholar business, even when it isn't a con. In this case, it was a lucky thing: no joke, with the amount of photocopying I was doing with the top of the copier open, I put the goggles on to protect my vision. Plus, the photo ended up looking kind of cool.

I had a moment where I paused in the day with a stack of my research in front of me, staring out one of the windows of the library. I pondered how I should go about writing my dissertation: what would be the best approach? I didn't create the blog until a few days later, but I'm positive that was the moment this website was born. I'd been thinking about how much fun it had been to attend Steam Powered and was wondering what the future would hold. The horizon was before me, as it were, and I was deciding on the best path to embark on.

While I made the decision for steampunk in my hometown of Medicine Hat, Alberta, and the research most certainly got its start in California, the advent of this blog was at Rice University in Texas. I had no idea when I started the blog that the monthly readership would climb to 10,000 readers (well, just shy of it last month, but that's the round number!), that it would lead to being on several review lists (yes, they're coming in January!), a nomination for an Airship Award at Steamcon II, and best of all, so many good friends in the steampunk community all around the world. I just thought I'd start a blog, and some people might give me feedback. Talk about underestimation.

Post-scriptum: it occurred to me too late to have time for the revision, that I should have written this in the present tense: "I'm standing in front of Rice University..." It would have given the posting a better "time travel" feel, but I'm busy with marking and giving exams, so I have to be happy with publishing anything at this time of year!

Steampunk Star Wars - the Slideshow

2010-11-25T16:23:00.002-07:00

I'm an open source kind of guy. I think education is for everyone, and that's why I've made my work available via this blog. To that end, I'm making my slides for Steampunk Star Wars available to all. If you use them, please just make sure to let me know when and where you're doing it, and make sure you don't present them as your own. They're free for y'all to use, just don't be dicks about it, ok?

Stormtrooper Image by Albert Feliu Gomis

Steam Wars: the Steampunk Star Wars article

2010-11-22T10:21:00.002-07:00

I'll return you to our regularly scheduled programming, "Journeys with James Blaylock" in my next post, but I wanted to wave my arms enthusiastically to crow about the publication of The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies' fully steampunk issue. To my knowledge, this is the first academic publication of its kind. After a two year process of multiple drafts, convention presentations, artist permissions, and formatting minutiae, my article on the Steampunk Star Wars images from 2007-2008 is finally available for your perusal. With steampunk Star Wars cosplay showing up and getting a lot of attention, I'm pleased to finally be able to draw direct attention to the brilliant work of the digital artists who inspired that Boba Fett costume you all think is so kick ass. Ironically, I say nothing about Fett in the article, but there's a lot about Princess Leia being a "damsel without distress," so it's still worth reading.

Abstract:
While steampunk continues to defy definition, this article seeks to identify a coherent understanding of steampunk as an aesthetic. By comparing and contrasting well-known cultural icons of George Lucas’s Star Wars with their steampunk counterparts, insightful features of the steampunk aesthetic are suggested. This article engages in a close reading of individual artworks by digital artists who took part in a challenge issued on the forums of CGSociety (Computer Graphics Society) to apply a steampunk style to the Star Wars universe. The article focuses on three aspects of the steampunk aesthetic as revealed by this evidentiary approach: technofantasy, a nostalgic interpretation of imagined history, and a willingness to break nineteenth century gender roles and allow women to act as steampunk heroes.

Here's the TOC for the issue as well - from what I've seen, the whole issue is solid gold!

Contents
Introduction: Industrial Evolution Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall

Clacking Control Societies: Steampunk, History, and the Difference Engine of Escape Patrick Jagoda

Technology and Morality: The Stuff of Steampunk Stefania Forlini

Betrayed by Time: Steampunk & the Neo-Victorian in Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Jason B. Jones

Steam Wars Mike Perschon

Time Machines: Steampunk in Contemporary Art Caroline Cason Barratt

Democratising the Past to Improve the Future: An Interview with Steampunk Godfather Paul Di Filippo Lisa Yaszek

‘The Steam Arm’: Proto-Steampunk Themes in a Victorian Popular Song Kirstie Blair
Notes
“God Save the Queen, for Someone Must!”: Sebastian O and the Steampunk Aesthetic Joseph Good

Reviews
The Rocky Terrain of British Novel Adaptations: Review of Dianne F. Sadoff, Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen Thomas Witholt

Re-Imagined Memory: Review of Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages Marie-Luise Kohlke

On (Neo-Victorian) Re-Visions and Foldings: Review of Rachel Carroll (ed.), Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities Rosario Arias

Steampunk Show Time: Review of Robert Rankin’s The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions: A Novel Marie-Luise Kohlke And as an added bonus, here's a link to Greg Peltz's neo-Vic/steampunk Star Wars images:

Steampunk Scholar at Steamcon II: November 19-21

2010-11-19T10:17:00.001-07:00

The five year mission takes me south of the border yet again! That's why I've put the Twitter feed at the top, so people who drop in and aren't twits (or whatever we who tweet are called) can enjoy any updates I post.

Here's my itinerary for the weekend at Steamcon II in Seattle. If you're attending and you make it out to one of these, please come up and introduce yourself. It's always fun to meet the people who keep the blog worth doing.

Saturday

Steampunk: Technofantasy in a Neo-Victorian Retrofuture

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM - Emerald C, Hilton

Mike Perschon - the Steampunk Scholar, breaks down his theory of steampunk into three aspects: the technology that doesn’t do anything, the past that never was, and the future that never will be.

Meet James P. Blaylock
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM - Emerald D & E, Hilton

An Interview with Author GOH James P. Blaylock

Joe and Jonah’s Weird West
Noon - 1:00 PM - Mercer A & B, Hilton

An overview of some of the Weird West works by Joe Lansdale, focusing mainly on his three Jonah Hex miniseries, Two-Gun Mojo, Riders of the Worm and Such, and Shadows West.

The Triumph of Vision - The Prescience of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Mary Shelly

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Emerald B, Hilton

Early pioneers of what we would call Science Fiction, living in the era we draw upon as Steam Punk, were remarkable in their visions and postulations about the future. What did they get right? How has our concept and understanding of science and our worldview been shaped by these and other major writers of classic fiction?

Panel with Suzanne Jachim

A Soulless Reading with Gail Carriger & The Steampunk Scholar
6:00 PM - 6:30 PM - Suite by Pool, Marriott

Mike Perschon & Gail Carriger read excerpts from The Parasol Protectorate series.

Sunday

Canuck Steampunk
11:00 AM - Noon - Orcas A&B, Hilton

A survey of steampunk set in Canada and/or written by Canadians: this will include an introduction to The Northern, the Canadian equivalent to the American Western, a look at the Deadlands supplement The Weird North as well as synopses and analyses of six pieces of steampunk written by Canadians: Whitechapel Gods by S.M. Peters, The Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee, The Apparition Trail by Lisa Smedman, and Airborn, Skybreaker, and Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel.