Posts in the "Steampunk" Category

• The Great Unmasking

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  I said last week that I would reveal my true name today, the writer behind T. Aaron Payton and The Constantine Affliction, and if you’ll dim the lights and start the drumroll and prime the fireworks…

  Oh, I won’t be coy: T. Aaron Payton is a pseudonym for me, Tim Pratt. Ta da! All is revealed.

  I’ve done other books with Night Shade — my collection Hart & Boot & Other Stories, and an anthology, Sympathy for the Devil. A couple of years back I was chatting with Night Shade editor Jeremy Lassen, and he asked if I had any novel ideas I could pitch him. I said, “Well, there is one thing…”

  Back in 2009 my agent sent around a proposal for a book that was called, at the time, Death (and other afflictions), and which I thought of as “Steampunk Zombie Jamboree.” One of my friends had commented that lots of zombie books were selling well, and lots of steampunk books were selling well, so obviously the perfect commercial novel would combine steampunk with zombies. (That’s actually something that Cherie Priest has done, and very well, in her Clockwork Century novels.)

  I started thinking about that throwaway comment, and saw a way I could write such a thing and amuse myself immensely in the process, though it wouldn’t be exactly like most steampunk, and the zombies wouldn’t be exactly like most zombies, and there’d be this sex-changing plague, and some embedded literary references, and, actually, it likely wouldn’t be very commercial at all…. So I wrote up the first few chapters, and a synopsis, and sent it off to my agent to shop around.

  The big publishers passed on it. I got various responses, but more than once we heard variations on, “We like all the steampunk stuff, but this sex-changing plague stuff is too weird.” To which I could only shout at the moon, “But the sex-changing plague stuff is the only thing that differentiates it from all the other steampunk! If I take that out, I’m not writing anything a dozen other writers couldn’t do better!” So I gave up on the book, with sadness because I loved the characters, and shelved the proposal.

  Until Jeremy asked if I had anything. And I thought about how welcoming the Shade could be to things that were weird. I pitched him the idea, and he was enthusiastic, and now… here we are, among the afflicted.

  Why the pseudonym? Partly because this book isn’t like any of my other books — it’s my first time doing a historical, my first time doing steampunk, my first time mangling London geography, and the first time I’ve written anything quite this over-the-top at novel length — so they wanted to differentiate it from my other work. I did something similar with my Marla Mason urban fantasy series, which I wrote as T.A. Pratt. I’m told it all has to do with branding. And I’m fine with branding, as long as it doesn’t involve hot irons.

  Read More...

• Musings Upon the Steampunk Æsthetic

  Steampunk

  Steampunk is, I believe, a reaction to the last 80 years of industrial design.
  Machines used to be self explanatory, to an extent. You could look at something chugging away, and see how the various pieces functioned. Ordinary people could repair their own auto mobiles. When they first came out, Mr. Ford’s machines were sold not just as a mode of transportation, but as an efficient source of power for the home, farm or small business. When you got a car, you got the parts and instructions that allowed you to put the thing up on blocks and use it to power a lathe, a well pump, or any number of useful devices.
  When we think ‘Steampunk’, we have a mental image of a factory floor from a hundred years ago, with giant gears grinding away, driving belts that loop around exposed pulleys and drive shafts that power clacking cogs or saws or incomprehensible Jacquard loom–like devices that weave, pound, stamp, and sort various other items through a cavernous gallery lined with vents spouting live steam, exposed glowing busbars and crackling Jacob’s ladders, all covered with a fine layer of coal dust.
  Thousands of these factories really existed, using first generation, improvised technology. They steamed and roared and clanked out their products at a furious rate, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of people in the process.
  Over time, people who weren’t factory owners said “Surely it is possible to accurately pour boiling Mercury into a vat and not have to rely upon a six year old child using a paper funnel”. And machinists and inventors would re-design these systems (usually because the government forced them to do so) and the quaint and picturesque six year old child would be replaced by something a bit less prone to dying.
  Thus, over time, these changes would accumulate. Machinery became more aerodynamic. Less prone to failure. Sealed away from human incompetence and the elements. Sub–systems became more electronic and less mechanical.
  Today we are approaching the end result of this design process, which is embodied by the iPhone. It is a complex device with, to the casual eye, no moving parts at all. All very well, but to the majority of the people who own one, it might as well be magic. Not one person in a thousand knows how their phone works, and the rest probably don’t even think about it.
  However, people like to know how things work. A part of our monkey brain enjoys figuring out and being able to comprehend cause and effect.
  A device that has been reversed engineered so that you can see all the parts and understand what they do is very satisfying to people. I believe that the Steampunk esthetic plays to this. Steampunk presents us with amazing science–fiction devices, but does so in a such a way that we kid ourselves that we understand how they are done. Look over there! It is a mechanical man! From the cast iron door on his stomach and the black smoke pouring from his metal hat, it is obvious that he is powered by coal! Anyone can understand that. An exposed set of rods and pistons hiss and thump along his limbs, obviously providing for his movement. So simple! Through the ornamental glass plate we can see the gears turning and the pistons rippling as his engines of cogitation grind through his assigned tasks. Ah, the green light went on! He’s obviously just solved a tricky ethical quandry. Nonsense? Yes. But nonsense presented in such a way that the viewer thinks he or she understands what is going on.
  Compare this to the smooth, plastic manikins that are supposed to impress us by being able to climb stairs without falling over. Every moving part sealed behind proprietary layers of plastic. Mysterious. Boring.
  That is, in my opinion, is the essence of steampunk. It harkens back to a time when a mechanic was proud of the way he had solved a particular problem, and wasn’t afraid to let people see how he had done it, because most people were educated enough to be able to appreciate it. Steampunk lets us think we’re smart, because it shows us the simple things we recognize (pistons!) leaving us free to ignore the larger questions (so how does an coke furnace with feet and an iron mustache know enough to save the professor’s daughter?) because we’re too busy being entertained.
  It takes into a place where we can suspend disbelief while still having a good time.

  Read More...

• Steam it Up, Steamy Steamerson

  Steampunk

  I’m late to the Steampunk party. Not even fashionably late, but couldn’t find anything to wear for ages, changed my outfit twelve times like a teenage girl, got in a fight with my wife over who forget to get what on the last grocery run, got lost on the way with no GPS or sense of direction to speak of, forgot the bottle of absinthe and had to run back to the house for it, and fully expected to find the party either deserted, busted up by the cops, or full of passed out lunatics in corsets and goggles who vomited in the potted plants or drunk flew their dirigible into the neighbor’s tree house.

  What I’m getting at is, while I’d heard of steampunk, Boneshaker and The Half-Made World were my first real exposure to the universe in any meaningful way, and both in the last year or so. Unless you count playing Arcanum (which I enjoyed, for all its quirks), or watching Will Smith’s Wild, Wild West (which forced me to wash my eyes with lye and bleach). So, I’m hardly an authority on the subject. In fact, I’m woefully ill-equipped to do much besides talk out my ass and make wildly inaccurate observations and proclamations. But that’s true of most topics and most of my contributions, so hey, why go changing now. (more…)

  Read More...

• Just Because it’s Cool…

  Steampunk

  

  Steampunk is cool because . . .

  5. The birth-pangs of Industrialization sacrificed the lives of millions of workers in the service of the machinery of capitalism; mill workers, coal miners, piece workers, painters of ceramics, sewers of seams, and countless more, slaved from childhood to premature death at 14-hour works days, six days a week. Their labor should by rights have led us into a better future than the one currently ruled by the internal combustion engined. With Steampunk, the visionaries of fiction offer us, instead of diesel fumes and engine noise, the stately dirigibles, the brass and rosewood machines, the clever and comprehensible gears and wheels, to show us what we might be, and what all this civilization is for.

  4. Steampunk offers us a chance to rabbit down legs of the trousers of time that we didn’t take; legs that seem a lot more fun than the current messes we are entangled in. Steampunk, in all its endless iterations, hearkens back to an age when we were able to be naive enough to believe that civilization meant more than exercising control, when there were still vast unspoiled wilderness to explore, amazing discoveries to be made, and when progress trotted along at a comprehensible pace, rather than flipping pages on the world every five years as it does today.

  3. Steampunk hearkens back to an era when human interaction was governed by a certain ceremony, and one’s station in life was defined as much by one’s mastery of a code of conduct, than one’s birth or one’s job. Formality as a lifestyle, can be stultifying, but what we sacrifice for our present-day uninhibited insouciance is the grand gesture, the bow, the salute, the action that gives an exalted meaning to the things we do.

  (more…)

  Read More...

• Steampunk=Engineers + Goth + Brown

  Steampunk

  First, I’d like to apologize for this blog being late.  I’m a Tuesday person, and this should have been up before now.  I have two excuses: first, I had the first reading/signing for my novel FAUSTUS RESURRECTUS on Tuesday, and I had a million things to do to prepare.  The event was sponsored by TY KU Sake, and so there was much drinking involved during and after the event.  There was no way in Hell I was going to be able to do this when I got home Tuesday night. 

  My second excuse is a little more to the topic–I have very little experience with steampunk.  I’d heard of it, and once I started to research it I discovered some things I’d read were considered ‘steampunk’ (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but I had no real sense of what steampunk is.  From what I can tell, steampunk equals engineers plus goth plus the color brown. (more…)

  Read More...

• Ok, I admit it, I really want a Steampunk outfit

  Steampunk
  

  Bradley P. Beaulieu

  So why haven’t I gotten one yet? Equal parts laziness and pickiness. I was the same way with my Ren Faire outfit. I didn’t want to get one just to get one and look like a doof. I wanted to look, well, like I was taking the stuff seriously, enough that I could enjoy myself.

  Maybe I’ll get an outfit and maybe I won’t. But I really do enjoy steampunk. I didn’t know it when I read The Anubis Gates for the first time that it was steampunk (I’m not even sure the term had been coined by that point) but I loved the ride. Part of that was Tim Powers’ writing, of course (who doesn’t love Tim’s writing?) but another part was this cool new vibe that I hadn’t really been exposed to. At the time, I hadn’t read some of the original material like The Time Machine and Frankenstein and so on, so this was a very refreshing change for me, a change-up from the typical high fantasy that I’d been used to reading.

  I even tackled a steampunk novel once. I was experimenting a bit, breaking away from the typical high fantasy stuff I’d been writing at the time. My take on steampunk was technology built around crystals and minerals with strange and wondrous properties. I liked what I did. It was good for me at that time in that it pushed my boundaries and forced me to do some things I wasn’t exactly comfortable with, which is a great place for the young writer to be. In the end, it wasn’t a story that was publishable. I was still to raw in my craft. But I really enjoyed the experience.

  I did revive those urges recently when I wrote “Foretold,” a steampunk story about a mining crew in the Ural mountains and an augurist who’s having difficulty understanding not only his own flagging abilities, but the rising star of his apprentice. That story appeared in the DAW anthology, Steampunk’d.

  I don’t think I’ll tackle another novel in the foreseeable future, though. For now, I’m more than happy to read the great stuff that’s been coming out. A recent favorite is Mark Hodder’s Burton & Swinburne series that starts with The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack. I also really enjoyed Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. I think it’s great how much the sub-genre is bifurcating. It’s cool to see steampunk not just in merry old England, but also in the American Northwest, and in Africa, and plenty of other places that authors are exploring.

  Read More...

• With great power…

  Steampunk

  The last few days I’ve been pondering what I could write on this week’s theme of Steampunk, about which I know very little but would like to learn more. Fortunately, a brief dalliance with Google revealed I have read one book which at least part-qualifies, and even better, it’s one of my favourite books: NORTHERN LIGHTS by Philip Pullman (published as The Golden Compass in the US). So I’m going to write a bit about what I love about NORTHERN LIGHTS and what (I think) makes it Steampunk-esque. Less fortunate is the fact that I have lent my only copy of it to a friend who is now in Egypt. That’s my excuse for any mis-remembering, anyway…

  I read NORTHERN LIGHTS first as a teenager and have revisited it several times since. There are so many awesome things about Pullman’s trilogy, but what grabbed me about the first book was its world aesthetic. For a start, it has zeppelins, which are clearly the most excellent mode of transport ever invented, and I’m now feeling quite sad that one got cut from OSIRIS in the editing process (next book, next book…). There are strong elements of fantasy in Pullman’s work – witches who don’t feel the cold, armoured bears, animal daemons who express part of a human’s soul, and of course the alethiometer, a truth-reader which heroine Lyra must learn to decipher. But the alethiometer, whilst it is magical in concept, is in fact a scientific measuring device. And then we have theories of parallel worlds, which resonate with contemporary quantum physics theories. (more…)

  Read More...

• Steamdrunk

  Steampunk
  

  Paul Tobin (pre-steampunk version, before installation of the ocular steam-laser)

  So… what IS the deal with steampunk, anyway? Why has it become so popular? So many fantasy books incorporate elements of steampunk these days that it’s become the new de rigueur sub/side-plot, the way it’s always been with romance. When writing fiction, there has always been a moment when you’re encapsulating your simple and straightforward story to an agent or editor, and you’re saying, “See, there’s this elite squad of international mercenaries who funnel back in time in order to save and secure the Library of Alexandria, but they fall foul of an alien attack squad who have the same goal, because their alien overlord wants a library of all Earth’s knowledge, and man-OH-man do they FIGHT!”

  And the agent nods, scratches her chin, takes a few calls (of course) and then says, “Nice. But have one of the aliens be scorching hot, I mean Audrey Hepburn or Milla Jovovich, and she and one of the mercenaries start to think maybe they should be working together to save the library, and also get naked a lot.”

  That’s the way it’s always been. Stories need a touch of romance. I’m cool with that. I like romance, and I like women easily as much as I’d like to save the Library of Alexandria, so we’re good. (more…)

  Read More...