Tag Archives: steampunk

Next Town Over by Erin Mehlos

A bit of the artwork from the comic

Like a twisted version of Coyote and Roadrunner,* Ms. Vane Black is chasing John Henry Hunter across a magical version of the American Southwest, and she will stop at nothing until she kills him.

The visuals for this comic are gorgeous.  Just look at this.  Mehlos does something with the coloring so the grasses and live oaks of the Old West seem to glow from the page.  There’s a lot of fire magic involved in this story, and it sure benefits from the treatment.  Even if this comic didn’t have any plot to it, I’d recommend people go look at it just for the pretty colors.  There is a plot, though.

The other thing I like about this comic is that Vane is a badass, but she isn’t a babe.  In fact, she looks kind of sick and the other characters notice.  But Vane doesn’t need to be gorgeous to show people who’s boss.

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* I’m not kidding about the Coyote and Roadrunner.  There’s a bit where Vane tries to lure Hunter into a cart full of dynamite.

The Circus of Brass and Bone

An online serial novel by Abra Staffin-Wiebe.  This is a world where everything runs on a magical stuff called aether.  It powers the steamships, the city lamps, the walking elephant skeleton down at the circus.  Everything’s going fine – more or less – until a technician decides to light up down at the power plant…

The Circus of Brass and Bone is the story of survivors who are trying to pick up the pieces after a very big boom.  If you’re into post-apocalyptic steampunk (and who wouldn’t be?), check it out.

http://www.circusofbrassandbone.com/

Songbird: A Steampunk Fairy Tale

Professor Zebulon Volt receives the assignment of a lifetime: to create a mechanical nightingale that will pull Queen Victoria out of her depression.  The real world calls out to him as he pursues his obsession with creating artificial life.

A steampunk riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale.”  I’ll give you three guesses whether Texas is its own country in this world, but that doesn’t matter.  Songbird is gorgeous.  I was surprised how much dance was incorporated into a performance that was billed as a play.  The machines, the toadies at court, even the prostitutes on the Victorian streets all swirled around each other like the players in a ballet.  And the costuming, of course, is beautiful.  One of the tenets of steampunk aesthetic is attention to detail, from the Professor’s artificial hand down to Queen Victoria’s brooch.

The show’s still running until the 25th, so if you happen to be in the Twin Cities area, check it out!  Upright Egg Theater Company for more information.

The Difference Engine

“A classic – something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” – Mark Twain

And that’s about all I have to say about The Difference Engine. William Gibson was supposed to have almost single-handedly launched the steampunk genre with this book (though some people would make arguments about Morlock Night).  The Difference Engine is for steampunk what The Lord of the Rings is for high fantasy.

But while Tolkien is more awesome than any of his imitators, Gibson feels like he’s dealing in clichés, even if he did invent them.  There’s the plucky young woman who defies Victorian gender mores, for one.  And the hotshot computer engineer.  I quit around page 30 when I found out that in this alternate history – gasp! – Texas is its own country.

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Not going to be coming out with another review for a while.  I’m onto Anathem now, and if you know anything about Neal Stephenson … this is going to take me a long time.

Iron Angel

Before turning novelist, Alan Campbell worked on developing Grand Theft: Auto for a living, and it shows.  Not that this is a bad thing; I quite liked Iron Angel.

Campbell’s debut Deepgate Codex trilogy (Iron Angel being the middle book) is punk something or other.  Steampunk?  Gothic punk?  Dieselpunk?  None of these categories quite fits.  It’s the story of a deep, richly imagined world where life sucks.  For some deific political reason that is not fully explained (yet), the goddess of Heaven has closed her gates on the world.  If you’re dead, you’re screwed, because everybody is going to Hell now.  If you’re alive, you’re screwed anyway, because Hell is planning to stage an invasion.  Iron Angel describes the movements of the ordinary and some not-so-ordinary people who have gotten caught in the crossfire.

Campbell’s descriptive power reminds one of the work of Mervyn Peake and Clive Barker.  And if you know who those two writers are, then you should be very, very afraid of this book.  Like the bit with Cinderbark Wood.  Good Lord.  There’s a lot of brutality and you might say that humanity is in a bit of a tight spot, but it’s not all doom and gloom.  Amidst all the villains, there are some characters who are quite definitely good people, and they know how to fight.  Recommended.

Girl Genius: Now That’s How Steampunk Ought to be Done


Why is it that all the webcomics I’ve been reading lately have been better than the books? I haven’t written any book reviews lately because the last couple of books I read were lackluster. And the disappointing thing is that they sounded like they would be really good. Good Omens, a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is about an angel and a demon who manage to bungle up the apocalypse. If you’ve ever wanted to know how an angel behaves when drunk, this is the book for you, but otherwise it didn’t light me on fire. And Seventh Son, well, Orson Scott Card is the kind of sf/f author where everybody takes their hats off when you mention his name, and the book had a way cool premise: what would happen to the American colonies … if magic worked? Unfortunately the book read like a big long prequel. Alvin, who goes on to do actually exciting things later in the series, is only ten years old by the time the book closes.

Girl Genius, on the other hand, is another one of those gems you happen to stumble across by word of mouth. It’s a webcomic by Phil & Kaja Foglio that’s been running for many years now. It’s an alternate history where most of Europe is at the mercy of dueling mad scientists. (They call it Europa, but you’re not fooling me, Foglios.) Imagine a Jules Verne book that has been left in the back of the refrigerator for too long and gotten completely out of hand. It’s gotten to the point where, when a crab monster with laser eyes crashes out of the forest, the peasantry rolls its eyes and groans.

Young Agatha Clay, a hapless student at Transylvania Polygnostic University, discovers she’s the sole surviving heir of the Heterodyne dynasty, a family of mad scientists with a particularly strong and checkered reputation. Now, everyone in Europe wants a piece of her. Her madcap quest to assume her rightful place as a heterodyne and keep from getting killed involves blob monsters, airships, robots, talking cats, wasps that will turn you into zombies, and lots and lots of explosions. And did I mention that her house is insane?

If you’re going to try Girl Genius out, please wait until you’re partway through Volume 2 before you decide whether you like it or not. The Foglios took a while to figure out what they wanted their comic to be. Early on, characters’ reactions to things are kind of cartoony and flat, and the Jägermonsters resemble nothing so much as rotting pumpkins. It really hits its stride once Agatha gets on the airship and we get some character interactions going. By the time you meet the robot princess you’ll need to start keeping a scorecard.

The graphic novel format means they can do some really neat things you can’t do in a novel, like subtle visual humor. Oh, look, Agatha’s guardians just happen to have bolts in their necks. That guy driving the wagon in the background has a cybernetic hand. That mouse in the cellar is actually a tiny, tiny wooly mammoth – an escaped experiment.

One of the things I particularly like about the story is that Agatha’s a strong female character (with glasses!) who relies mainly on her intelligence to get things done. A few well-made death rays never hurt, either. There are certain limits on what Agatha and Gilgamesh (he’s the romantic lead) can do because they’re the main characters, and they’ve got a heroic job to do. The side characters really make the story shine, and there are a lot of them – it is a sweeping, epic plot. And each one of them gets motivations, even if they’re only there for a few episodes, so you get the feeling that if you looked closer there’d be even more to them.

I love, love the Jägermonsters, though I can’t figure out what the dickens they are. They’re humanoids who come in various shades of purple or green and have fangs and claws, and they’re really hard to kill. And they don’t seem to mind eating glue for supper at all. My running hypothesis is that they’re some sort of highly intelligent breed of Orc. And by highly intelligent I mean about as intelligent as a human, because for an Orc that would be an accomplishment. The cool thing is that at first they look like they’re just stormtroopers, but then they get lines, and some of them even get names, and it turns out that they’re a lot more important to Agatha’s destiny than originally anticipated.

I’m far from the only person who thinks this webcomic is awesome, considering its nomination for 2 Hugo awards, its five Web Cartoonist’s Choice Awards and 8 more nominations, and nomination for 2 Eisner awards. These guys mean serious business. And it looks like Agatha’s going to be gearing up for a final showdown soon, so you’ll want to save your seats.

What can I learn from this, from a literary point of view?

  • More explosions always help.
  • Make your minor characters shine, not just your protags.
  • Always keep the following in mind: how can I make my heroine’s life even more complicated?

Mainspring

Most peculiar story.

Remember how you learned about deism in your AP European History class? A bunch of French philosophers thought they would be clever and decided that God had created the universe, wound it up like an enormous watch, and left it to run its course. What would happen if the universe really was a huge watch? What would happen if a talented short story writer tried to build a novel around this central conceit?

The result is … interesting. This is a world a lot like your usual steampunk Earth, you know, Great Britain never lost the American Colonies and airships are floating around everywhere. And everybody can see the brass gears in the sky that define Earth’s orbit. The universe, or the solar system at least, runs on clockwork.

The clockwork that powers the Earth is running down, and only our hero, Hethor, can rewind it. Why the angel Gabriel chooses Hethor for this mission is never made clear, but it might have to do with the fact that he has a magical ability to tell time. Unfortunately, for the first half of the book, Hethor’s kind of a twit. For the second half of the book he reminds me of Dune Messiah. It’s an improvement, but … still.

And now for some quibbles. Earth is anchored to its orbital gearing by a miles-high toothed wall around the equator. The airship’s crew says that the air should be bad if it weren’t for the blanket of air that magically coats the top of the wall, so let’s say the wall extends to the top of the troposphere. That’s about 6 miles. (And that’s a conservative estimate; it could be much taller.) During northern hemisphere winter, this thing is going to cast a shadow of 6 * tan 23.5º or 2.6 miles long*. Wouldn’t this have some pretty weird effects on global climate? You’ve got a narrow strip of tropical land that gets six months of night just like at the poles. And that’s not to mention the fact that the Equatorial Wall prevents the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere oceans from mixing.

But Lake spares no time for such plotholes. He’d rather explore what happens to people in a world where evidence of God’s creation is, well, pretty obvious. There are freaking gears in the sky! And yet, astonishingly, there is a group who calls themselves the Rational Humanists. I don’t quite understand their philosophy, but they seem to believe that mysterious beings called clockmakers built the universe, not God. That doesn’t seem to make sense. Isn’t it the Rational Humanist thing to do to seek a natural explanation for the gears in the sky? What does it accomplish to transfer the responsibility from God to a bunch of magical Keebler elves?

I’m probably trying to approach this story like too much of a Rational Humanist myself; I should just sit back and enjoy the ride. Despite the protagonist, there’s a lot to like. There’s lots of airships and plenty of action scenes. One of the ships seems to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which is cool. There’s a strong implication that one of the characters is a cyborg. Then again, this happened at the end of the book, at which point I would not have been too surprised if Elvis had walked on stage. Oh, whatever. I’m over-analyzing. Go check it out.

* I’m assuming Earth’s a flat surface. At a scale of 2.6 miles, it’s not going to matter much.