#steampunk fiction

[kingmakerpod]

[nokingsonlyfooles]

Early Instalments! Keep Calm and Read On!

I'll start putting them up on the site at noon on Friday (December 6th). These could've gone up two weeks ago if I wasn't bundling them like this for monthly supporters! Heh. Sorry.

There will be a Travelling Band 2 - they're not home yet! - and I'll have to divide these up a little differently at the site to keep them clear.

Still doing minor site cleanup and formatting. The naughty extras are available for DL again, at last, and the most recent update let me have the ability to stop the background from scrolling (again!!), so I may go back to the original gears or pick something new. I think I fixed the tags well enough that I can make Tin Soldier's page look more inviting, but I haven't done that yet.

If you're not reading, and you trip over this... It's free! You can read it! I'm giving supporters early access to some of it, but there's way more at the site!

Remember, consuming all the upcoming plot in one big chunk is a devil's bargain, you'll have to wait even longer for more! Make your own choices! I trust you! This preview is optional!

[silvandar]

Do you like Steampunk, Time Travel, snd Dickensian characters? Then I have a book series for you!

The series follows the adventures of Oliver Twist, an orphan with a talent for trouble and a time travelling pocket watch.

You can find info and purchase links at www.brentaharris.com

The latest book, "Twisted Expectations", is due out soon, and I'm lucky enough to be a beta reader!

[youtubealgo]

4K -> Steampunk Revolution: How Women Changed the Game!

[nevinslibrary]

Weird & Wonderful Wednesday

The Old West, 1870s/1880s, Seattle. Except. Not quite. It’s been turned into a walled city. Walling in, well, quite a bit. There’s zombies, there’s pirates, and there’s the amazing characters. Briar Wilkes’ son Zeke wants to clear his dead father’s name (his father supposedly did something that caused a toxic gas to be released. That gas is what turned people into ‘rotters’ aka zombies (also, whew and eww to those things. Wow.) Except, as Briar goes to try and save her son, she finds that, maybe her dead husband Leviticus Blue isn’t so dead?

This was a bunch of steampunk goodness, with characters that leapt off the page at me, and the world building that was just amazing (if, as I said, on occasion a little icky). It also was a compact and fast moving plot. There wasn’t must extra anywhere, and, that made it a definite page turner. Such a fun, fun read. And, awesomely enough, there are other books in the Clockwork Century series/universe too! Very exciting.

You may like this book If you Liked: The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher, The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher, or An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

[scipunk]

Love, Death & Robots - S1E8 - Good Hunting (2019)

[soranatus]

A sneak peak at the visual development for Leviathan (2025) at Anime Expo 2024

[blogfanreborn777]

Zaun by Patrick Faulwetter

[spyboy2000]

𝙏𝙖𝙣𝙠 𝙂𝙞𝙧𝙡 1995

[bedrockfactory]

The industrial age au is my latest obsession btw.

[stuff-diary]

I can't believe Arcane is ending forever in like two days 😭😭😭

[20kmemesunderthesea]

[educationaldm]

Fonts by Genre.

This might be useful to some of you.

From Other Atlas.

[youtubealgo]

A Sci-Fi Tale So Twisted, You’ll Question Reality!

[alpaca-clouds]

The History of Cyberpunk

Or why every other SciFi Genre is called [something]punk

You know what? Let's do this. Because I have seen the discussion on whether or not Solarpunk is "punk" over the last few days and... people really gotta learn their history.

The first time a genre took the "punk" name was Cyberpunk. And for context we gotta talk a bit about the history of the Cyberpunk genre.

While some books that we in hindsight call "Cyberpunk" were released as early as the 1960s, the start of Cyberpunk as a genre got its start in the late 70s and early 80s.

The term was invented by Bruce Bethke, who published a short story in 1983 with the name "Cyberpunk". His idea was to juxtapose the term "punk" for both the mentality and the punk protagonists in his short story with the term cyber, short for the cybernetics they were wearing. And while the cybernetics have become a main stay in the genre, the punk attitudes are not always carried through...

Well, the title Bethke invented stuck, though. When 1984 Neuromancer was published, one of the most influencial works in the early days of the genre, he called it "a Cyberpunk novel" in the marketing. And from there... Well, the genre was suddenly named like that.

The 80s were definitely the decade that had the most influence on the genre, given that a lot of the big novels and graphic novels of the genre were released here.

A big influence was, no doubt, that 1982 the Blade Runner movie had released and had inspired quite a few writers and artists. (And yes, this makes Blade Runner a movie that released not only before the term Cyberpunk was coined, but also before the genre had a chance to define itself.)

Given that the genre was defined in the 80s, there are a lot of 80s anxiety kept within it about the rise of the Japanese economy, that are these days rarely questioned within the western Cyberpunk movement.

When the genre was coined and developed, Japan was the fastest growing economy in the world, being so influencial that they got to buy out several things in America. Something that kinda jerked white people in the US a lot. This is, why Cyberpunk originally depicted not only a capitalist hellscape - but specifically a capitalist hellscape were everything was bought out by Japanese companies, with many of those early antagonists being Japanese companies. And yeah... there was a lot of both anti-japanese racism, but also cultural appropriation of Japanese things in early Cyberpunk, at time surviving to this day. (But that is a story for another day.)

The general sense that Western Cyberpunk had, was always the idea of: We have a capitalist hellscape where the world is slowly dying and people are exploited with no end, while we have those kinda punky protagonists, who stand outside of the society and try to work against it. This being where the punk comes from.

Now, I could talk for length about how a lot of that punky attitude has been lost in more modern Cyberpunk media, but that, too, is a story for another day.

So, let me just talk about what happened then.

The term Cyberpunk really is darn catchy, right? So just when that name took hold, writer K.W. Jeter retroactively called his 1979 novel Morlock Night "steampunk". And guess what: This stuck, too. Though while the 80s Cyberpunk still stuck to the punk attitude, a lot of Steampunk did not. While for certain there is quite a bit of Steampunk that has kinda punky characters go against the quasi Victorian society of steampunk books (something most common in the air pirate novels I have read), a lot of other stories are more focused on a general sense of adventure.

But never the less... The genre names stuck and gave a nice baseline for naming other genre. We got Dieselpunk, Atompunk, Nanopunk, Arcanepunk, Dustpunk, Silkpunk and of course also Solarpunk and Lunarpunk.

And for the most part... The "punk" names mostly communicate: "It is SciFi with this kinda aesthetic/twist going on". Which is just how it turned out.

Funnily enough Solarpunk is for once a genre that brings back the punk, as it tends to include a lot of the ideals aspired to by the Punk counter culture of the 1970s: Anarchism, anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, anti-classism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and so on. Though other than with Cyberpunk and the real world punk movement, Solarpunk for the most part imagines a place, where those things are culture instead of counter culture.

I personally find it kinda sad, how for the most part Cyberpunk kinda lost a lot of the counter-cultural, revolutionary mindset. And how fucking defeatist the genre often is.

But again, it is a story for another day. Just as the story of Japanese Cyberpunk is.

[chimeride]

Are you familiar with the book series Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld? It's an alternate history series set in WW1 that features plenty of fascinating bio-engineered creatures.

Hydrogen Sniffer, the 237th Known One.