Books

Top 10 Holiday Gifts for the Steampunk in Your Life

December 16, 2011

Have you been wondering what to get for the special Steampunk in your life this holiday season? Here’s a top ten list of gift ideas that will make you the best Santa ever. 10. Sucker Punch Blue ray Zack Snyder’s action-fantasy film takes on a uniquely Steampunk aesthetic and will be a welcome addition to any movie collection. The story follows a young girl nicknamed “Babydoll” who is held captive in an asylum by her evil stepfather. In order to survive, Babydoll uses fantasy to plan an escape from the institution. The visually stunning fantasy sequences all have a...

Flaming Zeppelins Pays Homage to the Classics

December 7, 2011

By Ricky L. Brown

Flaming Zeppelins Pays Homage to the Classics

A lot of writers prefer to stay within their comfort zone and stick to a particular genre. Joe R. Lansdale is not one of them. Lansdale could probably create his own genre if he wanted, one embracing the extraordinary and bizarre. His book Flaming Zeppelins – The Adventures of Ned the Seal is cast firmly under the Steampunk category. After all, it has airships! But this expands to others forms of fiction as well, including noir, western, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and historic. Originally published as separate hardbacks, Zeppelins West in 2001 and Flaming London in 2005, Lansdale has...

Steampunk’d, edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg

November 29, 2011

By Sarah Hans

Steampunk’d, edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg

Steampunk’d is a collection of short stories edited by anthology veterans Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg. With such prestigious editors, a beautiful cover design, and publisher DAW Books on the spine, I had high hopes for this anthology that promises “14 original stories of what might have been if steam tech took different paths in the Victorian era.” The book opens with a story by best-selling novelist Michael A Stackpole, “Chance Corrigan and the Tick-Tock King of the Nile.” The tale is fairly typical Steampunk fare about an American engineer persuaded by a Greek tycoon to speed the...

Captain Nemo Resurfaces in New Edition

November 21, 2011

By Matthew Delman

Kevin J. Anderson, internationally bestselling author of more than 100 novels, announced via press release today that Titan Books is re-releasing his 2005 novel Captain Nemo: The Fantastic Adventures of a Dark Genius. The highly Steampunk novel mixes reality and fantasy by pulling from Jules Verne’s real life and crafting an entirely new character to explain the origins of Captain Nemo. The story opens with Andre Nemo and Jules Verne as boyhood friends in dreary small-town France, plotting their escape to embark on a life of adventure. A rumor surrounding the real life of Verne the author states that...

Academia, Literary Fiction and Steampunk – A Conceivable Concoction?

November 10, 2011

By Sophie Playle

In last month’s column, I left distracted and struggling to write as my MA deadlines loomed. At the end of September, I handed in my Creative Writing MA dissertation and writing project. That is, a twelve thousand word academic essay plus fifteen thousand words of fiction. It was a relief to have it all complete, but it was also quite sad. The year has passed quickly, and overall it was a very enjoyable one. When I first started the MA, I only had a vague notion of what I wanted to write about. This was a hindrance in a...

“Burning the gas lamp low but steady”: A review of Darker Still by Leanna Renee Hieber

November 8, 2011

By Maria Brown

“Burning the gas lamp low but steady”: A review of Darker Still by Leanna Renee Hieber

Leanna Renee Hieber Sourcebooks Fire Historical Paranormal Fantasy ISBN 9781402260520 Ages 12 and up 336 Pages Leanna Renee Hieber makes her debut as a young adult novelist with Darker Still, a story that invokes the epistolary nature of Stoker’s Dracula, the murder mystery of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Wilde’s magical curse in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the Victorian Gothic elements present in all of these stories. I worried that the blend of all these components in one text might have produced a story that felt derivative and untidy, but Hieber manages to avoid this. ...

Cover Announced for Innocent Darkness

October 17, 2011

By Matthew Delman

The offerings of Steampunk Young Adult are growing by leaps and bounds lately, and the latest book to wait for comes from author Suzanne Lazear. Innocent Darkness, Book One of The Aether Chronicles, is due to be released by Flux on August 8, 2012. I’m personally very excited to see this, because Suzanne has been an ardent supporter of the magazine since its inception. Below is the cover, and if you want to read more head over to Suzanne’s STEAMED! blog:

With Fate Conspire by Marie Brennan

September 30, 2011

By Sophie Playle

With Fate Conspire is a five hundred page historical fantasy novel with a steampunk twist. Not having read the rest in the series, the plot was a little difficult to disentangle at first, especially because of the multiple and often unexplained viewpoints, but overall the novel stood very strongly on its own. Its basis in the faerie world may cause an initial incorrect diagnosis that this is written for a young adult readership, before the novel’s darker tones override this notion. However, the steampunk elements are second to the fantasy elements, with the power of fantastical machinery playing a...

The Psyche of the Times

September 20, 2011

By Sophie Playle

As I write this, London is burning. I’m watching live footage of the violent riots that have been destroying the capital for days. This is my first column for Doctor Fantastique, in which I am to report on my steampunk writing journey, yet when your city is destroying itself from the inside out, it seems to cause a serious case of writer’s block. I have roughly three weeks until the final deadlines for my Master’s degree in Creative Writing. I am to submit a twelve-thousand word dissertation along with fifteen-thousand words of a novel. Suffice to say, I have...

The Night Watchman Express by Alison DeLuca

July 30, 2011

By Sophie Playle

The Night Watchman Express by Alison DeLuca

The Night Watchmen Express tells the story of Miriam, a spoilt child recently orphaned, reminiscent of Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden. By day, she is mistreated by her suspicious new guardians: business partners of her late father. By night, she is haunted by nightmares of The Night Watchmen Express, a train that passes by the manor at midnight. But she soon discovers that nightmares don’t always disperse upon awakening…At nearly 500 pages long, this is the type of story that will appeal to readers who enjoy immersing themselves in a fictional world. The pacing is slow, but the...