# Please recommend me some steampunk that isn't set in london and doesn't feature vampires **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 25, 2012, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912 "2012-04-25T15:25:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![manx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/65b543/32.png) [@manx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/manx)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/1 "2012-04-25T15:25:29Z")
I am tired of steampunk, and I wish I wasn’t. I am tired of gentlemen explorers and ladies of independent means. I’m tired of fog-bound steam-driven London, and I’m bored of This is somehow the last straw for me: [Lady of Independant Means Fights Sexy Vampires & Werewolves in Steampunk London](http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Shop/Detail.aspx?itemId=5018343) I’ve been reading this genre for a long time now, and I know I’m being precious about it - vampires are popular, steampunk/retro-future/Victoriana is popular so of course the twain shall meet. But it’s all started to feel a bit unexamined for me. I love the idea of steampunk - I like difference engines and pneumatic tubes and Ada Lovelace and Dr Moreau. I love the pace of change that epitomises the Victorian era - the monstrous expansion of cities, the rise of the press, mechanisation & industrialisation. But the fiction is starting to bore me. I’d love something set elsewhere - somewhere never part of the Empire, or an alternative history where the balance of power is held by Mexico or India or Australia. Any suggestions? They don’t have to be flawless novels, just a bit different. Either an unusual setting, or focus or character will do. Or, even if you don’t have any suggestions, does anyone else feel like this, or am I overthinking the genre? ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/2 "2012-04-25T15:29:12Z")
On the very wild off-chance you haven’t read it… [Girl Genius.](http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/3 "2012-04-25T15:39:00Z")
**The Six Messiahs** by Mark Frost. While it does feature Arthur Conan Doyle, it’s set in the US. His previous novel in the series, **The Game of Seven** , is set in England, though. **The Digging Leviathan** by James Blaylock might qualify; it’s steampunk set in 60s Los Angeles. Tim Powers has several novels with a steampunk feel, including **The Stress of Her Regard** (some parts in England, but all over Europe; vampires, but they are nothing like any other vampire you’ve read about) and **On Stranger Tides** (earlier time period, and in the Caribbean). Even if you’re sick on England, you should read his **The Anubis Gates**. Note that Blaylock, Powers, and K. W. Jeter _invented_ steampunk (Jeter coined the term to describe the three of them). You should read their books if you haven’t already. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/4 "2012-04-25T15:43:10Z")
Depending on your definition of steampunk, the Oswald Bastable books by Michael Moorcock might qualify. Part of “Warlord of the Air” takes place in London, but most of “The Land Leviathan” takes place in the U.S. and “The Steel Tsar” takes place in Russia. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/5 "2012-04-25T15:43:21Z")
S. M. Stirling’s **The Peshawar Lancers** might fit the bill. ---
**Author:** ![Sigmagirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c89c15/32.png) [@Sigmagirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sigmagirl)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/6 "2012-04-25T15:44:12Z")
I read _[The Technologists](http://www.amazon.com/The-Technologists-Novel-Matthew-Pearl/dp/1400066573/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335368467&sr=8-1)_ by Matthew Pearl earlier this year and posted about it in the book section. About the first class at MIT and a plot to destroy Boston by a bunch of Luddite types. Lots of explosions and a mechanical man. And steam. ---
**Author:** ![manx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/65b543/32.png) [@manx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/manx)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/7 "2012-04-25T16:23:31Z")
I like the sound of The Peshwar Lances and The Digging Leviathan, and I’ve been meaning to read Tim Powers for ages. He’s recently become more available over here - _Stranger Tides_ was rereleased because of the link to the Pirates film, and it looks like the rest of his back catalogue is reprinted as well. However almost everything I read is from US/UK-based authors, and I’m trying to broaden my perspectives a little. I know I didn’t mention that in the OP - sorry for that. ---
**Author:** ![Yodalicious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yodalicious/32/8195_2.png) [@Yodalicious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yodalicious)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/8 "2012-04-25T16:30:53Z")
Cherie Priest has [three or four](http://theclockworkcentury.com/) on my reading list. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/9 "2012-04-25T16:49:37Z")
Besides the Girl Genius webcomic (which is steampunk on the far-fantasy side) mentioned earlier, I recommend [Steamboy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboy). I think it’s available for streaming by Netflix. ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/10 "2012-04-25T17:05:23Z")
Have you read the " Age of Unreason" series by Greg Keyes? It isn’t steampunk directly - it’s actually more of an alternate history where alchemy turns out to be the theory that correctly describes the universe – but it contains many a steampunkish scenario. Blimps! Odd devices! Ladies with elaborate hats! It’s set in the US during the pre-revolutionary period. Ben Franklin stars as our sexy young action hero. [Newton’s Cannon](http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Cannon-The-Unreason-Book/dp/0345433785), first in the series. ---
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/11 "2012-04-25T17:13:44Z")
> [@Daddypants](#): > > Cherie Priest has [three or four](http://theclockworkcentury.com/) on my reading list. I’ve only read her _Boneshaker_ but it’s excellent… does contain something like zombies, though. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/12 "2012-04-25T17:46:09Z")
> [@Pleonast](#): > > Besides the Girl Genius webcomic (which is steampunk on the far-fantasy side) mentioned earlier, I recommend [Steamboy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboy). I think it’s available for streaming by Netflix. Also, other anime may qualify. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky (both Miyazaki works) have steampunkish elements but they take place in post cataclysmic worlds and don’t take place in clearly identified modern countries or even the recognizable future of any of those countries. Neither has vampires. They both have steampunkish flying machines, one has robots, and one has artificial life. Both of them have more that 200% of the Recommended Daily Allowance of Cute Anime Heroine ^\_^. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Righteous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Dr.Righteous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Righteous)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/13 "2012-04-25T18:07:05Z")
> [@Hello\_Again](#): > > Have you read the " Age of Unreason" series by Greg Keyes? Just came in to say - this. Great books. ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/14 "2012-04-25T19:14:20Z")
There’s a postapocalyptic steampunk/dieselpunk game coming in August for Windows & Mac. [Guns of Icarus Online](http://www.gamespot.com/search.html?qs=guns+of+icarus+online) ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/15 "2012-04-25T19:34:28Z")
War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, edited by Kevin J. Anderson > [@](#): > > quoted from [amazon.com](http://amazon.com)’s ad > > In the spirit of H.G. Wells’s classic tale of Martian invasion comes this anthology of some of today’s leading authors’ own renditions of the Martian invasion as it might have been seen through the eyes of such notables as Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, and Pablo Picasso. Reprint." The chapter in which Teddy Roosevelt encounters a Martian during his African safari is hilarious. Age of Aztec, by James Lovegrove I have not read this one, but it takes place in a world where the Aztecs conquered Europe. Might be amusing. > [@](#): > > The date is 4 Jaguar 1 Monkey 1 House – November 25th 2012 by the old reckoning – and the Aztec Empire rules the world. > > The Aztecs’ reign is one of cruel and ruthless oppression, encompassing regular human sacrifice. In the jungle-infested city of London, one man defies them: the masked vigilante known as the Conquistador. > > Then the Conquistador is recruited to spearhead an uprising, and discovers a terrible truth about the Aztec and thier gods. The clock is ticking. Apocalypse looms, unless the Conquistador can help assassinate the mysterious, immortal Aztec emperor, the Great Speaker. But his mission is complicated by Mal Vaughn, a police detective who is on his trail, determined to bring him to justice. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/16 "2012-04-25T20:07:49Z")
“Seventy-Two Letters” by Ted Chiang is an interesting steampunk story. Chiang focuses on how science would work in a steampunk setting. It’s available online [here](http://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.com/72ltrs.html). ---
**Author:** ![N9IWP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/n9iwp/32/3154_2.png) [@N9IWP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/N9IWP)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/17 "2012-04-25T20:50:10Z")
It is not super steampnk, but Perdido Street Station by China Miéville definitely isn’t in London (and I don’t think New Crobuzon is supposed to be London). There may be a mention of vampires, but if so, a very minor mention. Not counting the Slake-Moths, which suck people’s intellect Brian ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/18 "2012-04-25T21:06:43Z")
I’m having trouble remembering the name, but Harry Harrison wrote an alternate history/steampunk novel set in 1970s British America that I thought was rather good. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/19 "2012-04-25T22:28:51Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > S. M. Stirling’s **The Peshawar Lancers** might fit the bill. I love this book! It’s more alternate history than steampunk, but there are aspects of the latter. If you haven’t read it, give it a try. I think Stirling extrapolated very well the threads of history and technology. The story takes place in the 21st century about one hundred fifty years after a spray of comets or meteorites devestated the Earth. The British Empire is now centered on the Indian sub-continent. The list of monarch of the British Empire/Angrezi Raj, was quite interesting. The following excerpt describes how one of the characters in the book is looking at a series of Imperial portraits on a wall. \*Now she followed his eyes and looked. There was Victoria I, dour and dumpy and indomitable, in archaic black widow’s weeds. Her son Edward, with his plumply good natured face and the haunted survivor’s eyes of a man who had lived through the worst of the Fall and Second Mutiny, witness to the death of a world. Edward’s son George, in a plain turban of naval blue, the bluff, tongue-tied Sailor Emperor. George’s daughter Victoria II, draped across the Lion Throne in a daringly tight and gauzy sari, covered with a tiger-skin sash, portrayed as she’d always insisted she be portrayed in life: a pen in one hand and a wine cup of carved white nephrite in the other. Gorgeous and mad and brilliant–Charles would have been totally out of place at her court, which the more respectable history books still skipped over rather lightly. Although even the censorious admitted her love poetry had been first class in three languages, despite the embarrassingly wide spectrum of objects of adoration. She’d had no children: Albert I was her cousin, a professor of Indo-European linguistics most of his life, and Cassandra’s imagination put a you want **me** to be **what**? behind his wide blue eye’s. His daughter Elizabeth, only twenty years dead in this year of grace 2025, The Whig Empress they’d called her, the one who’d pressured Oxford and Cambridge and the Imperial University into opening their doors to women. And John II, Elizabeth’s second son, whom she’d now met and chatted with…\* Later in the book John II is killed and his son Charles III succeeds him. Whew, I pushed my button!😃 But the book is well worth a read. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2012, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912/20 "2012-04-25T22:36:54Z")
There’s also The Two Georges [The Two Georges - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Georges) This was written by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss(yep, the actor guy) It’s alternate history as well, with technology at what to us would be very early 20th century level. Travel by airship is common. It takes place in the North American Union. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-recommend-me-some-steampunk-that-isnt-set-in-london-and-doesnt-feature-vampires/619912.md?page=2)