Some Thoughts on Steampunk

Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

The other day I was cruising about The Mad Reviewer, Carrie Slager’s very prolific book review blog.  If you haven’t seen this blog before, check it out.  If a YA book exists, chances are that Carrie has read it and has something to say about it.  I asked her what she thought about the recent trend of steampunk books, and she replied with this guest post:

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So Margaret asked me: “Hey what is your opinion on the sudden hotness of the steampunk genre?  Do you thin kit’s going to last?  I remember having a conversation with some friends last year, and they said that the problem with steampunk is that nobody’s written anything serious in the genre, only frivolous books.  Could you write a blog post about that?”

Why yes I can, Margaret.  Yes I can.

Do you guys remember when pundits were predicting the death of the Western?  How about science fiction?  Fantasy?  Historical fiction?  Romance?  The book itself?  My point is that although so-called experts have predicted the disappearance of practically every genre, they’re still here.  Steampunk is definitely a fascinating sub-genre and I suspect that it’s here to stay, no matter what literary experts say.

However, that’s not to say the trend won’t cool off.  Genres go through trends, just like music, movies, clothes, you name it.  Steampunk is on a current high, but it will drop as people tire of it and move on.  Remember the huge paranormal romance craze after Twilight’s success?  That’s mostly died down now and general fantasy and steampunk have replaced it temporarily.

Contrary to what some of Margaret’s friends and many pundits seem to think, steampunk is  a serious genre.  As for the claim that no one has written anything serious, define ‘serious.’  If you definite serious as ‘a sweeping epic that questions our fragile mortality and the futileness of it all in a Margaret Atwood-esque style’, then you won’t find anything mainstream, let alone steampunk.  However, if you use a less narrow definition like ‘it’s meant to entertain and may or may not impart some important life lessons’, then yes, there is a high volume of serious steampunk.

Take Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy, for example.  It’s set in an alternate version of 1914 Europe and I really don’t think there’s anything not serious about how the First World War started.  Alek and Deryn, the novel’s two main protagonists, are serious characters because they get into very real danger and suffer very real consequences.  There may not be many grand themes you can over-analyze in typical novel study-like fashion, but that doesn’t mean they’re not serious books.

So yes, steampunk will cool off but it’s here to stay and yes, it is a serious genre.  Literary snobs and my fellow self-appointed critics, you may begin writing your hate mail now.

Help with a plant ID?

Beautiful flowers are popping up all over here in the Twin Cities.  I’ve been enjoying all of it, but there’s one species that’s got me puzzled.  It looks like a member of the nightshade family, and it seems to like growing in weedy places on parking strips and drainage gardens.  It’s all over the place.

What is this?

Foliage

Flowers

Fruits. Sorry it’s blurry.

Also, for your viewing enjoyment, here’s some milkweed and bee balm:

Kickstarter: Ravensdaughter’s Tale

Hey, guys, I’m getting on the Kickstarter bandwagon.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, Kickstarter is this really cool website where people can post ideas for artistic projects.  Other people on the Internet can help fund these projects so they can become a reality.  Sometimes, so many people get together to back a project that a certain webcomic can raise over a million dollars.

I’m giving Kickstarter a go for one of my short stories.  In a nutshell, I’ve found a great local artist to draw cover art for the story, and I’m raising funds to pay her commission.  Her concept for the cover of Ravensdaughter’s Tale looks like this:

Check out my campaign, and then check out all the other cool projects on the site.

The Russia House by John le Carré

John le Carré is the celebrated author of over a dozen spy novels (including the likes of The Constant Gardener), but there’s certain spy elements that you won’t find in his books.  You won’t find any guy in a tux whipping out a one-liner before he blasts his way out of a supervillain’s death machine.  These are not that kind of spy books.  John le Carré (not his real name) has worked for both MI5 and MI6, and his books reflect what spying is actually like.

The Russia House is not le Carré’s most famous work, but it was my introduction to him because a friend of mine recommended the book.  Barley Scott Blair is the manager of a bankrupt publishing company and borderline alcoholic.  On a publicity trip to Moscow, he says and does a chain of wrong things and winds up embroiled in an espionage scheme.  British intelligence has to figure out how to harness him to learn more about the Soviet missile program – and how to keep Barley on a leash.

What I found most interesting about this book was that it captured the zeitgeist of the late Cold War.  I’m a millennial, so the U.S.S.R. collapsed when I was a baby.  There has only ever been one Germany to me.  What was living through the Cold War like?  Le Carré does a vivid job of capturing the moribund U.S.S.R., the mutual resentment between the U.S. and Britain, and the constant, low-level paranoia that we are going to make ourselves go kablooie.

There are only gray characters in this book.  Everybody has a reason they want something out of Barley, and nobody is a knight in shining armor.

Another neat thing, which is really just an aside – you know how in English class you always learn about how The Great Gatsby is an example of a displaced protagonist?  Gatsby is the main character of that story, but the story is told by Nick Carraway.  Then the English teacher comes up dry trying to think of another example.  The Russia House is another one of these rare stories.  Barley Scott Blair is the main character, but the narrator is Palfrey, a legal advisor to the the British intelligence agency that’s trying to keep Barley in check.  Try bringing up that factoid in English class.

Neat word: Anastomosis

The other day I came across this word when I was searching for something completely unrelated on the Web of Science.

Anastomosis

  1. a natural connection between two tubular structures, such as blood vessels
  2. the surgical union of two hollow organs or parts that are normally separate
  3. the separation and rejoining in a reticulate pattern of the veins of a leaf or of branches

– From the World English Dictionary

So this is a leaf with lots of anastomoses:

Courtesy Wikipedia

My latest pet

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Euphorbia obesa:

She’s a fat little beauty, ain’t she?

One of my labmates just gave this to me as a gift (somebody else has the same obsessions!).  Euphorbia obesa is native to the great Karoo region of South Africa, where it is endangered.  They do so well in cultivation, though, that there are now more of them in pots than there are out in the wild.