China Mieville (that’s his name)–
[ul]*
[li]Perdido Street Station[/li][li]The Scar[/li][li]The Iron Council*[/li][/ul]
All edge into Steampunk (magic does more of the cool things, but there are steam engines galore).
Not particularly light-hearted, though. Fair amount of exploration of the grittier parts of a Victorian society.
Check out Howl’s Moving Castle, it had a beautifully visioned Steam/Victorian flavor to the fantasy world.
There is a great sci-fi comics series taking place in an alternative-timeline 19th century England, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, but I don’t know if copies or trades are still in print.
Well, I’m sure that some would argue, but I think that the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake, Mairelon the Magician and Magician’s Ward by Patricia C. Wrede count as steampunk-ish.
As would Sorcery and Cecelia and The Grand Tour by Patricia C. Wrede/Caroline Stevermer.
Anno Dracula by Kim Newman. Witty, but not exactly lighthearted.
For the truly hardcore, look into the Wold Newton Universe; but don’t read the Anno Dracula page before you read the book. The Wold Newton Universe
That Darn Squid God by Andrew Pollotta & James Clay is a lighthearted look at the Chthulu (sp?) Mythos. Very silly. If you like it, there appear to be more by the same guys.
Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! is an anthology of The Great Detective investigating eldrich matters.
A Night in the Lonesome October by Richard Zelazny–with illustrations by Gahan Wilson. The Usual Suspects rounded up once again. (A personal favorite.)
And let me recommend, as I have before, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Time travelers from the near future search the past for a Mysterious Object. Mostly, they search in a very silly Victorian England. Quite hilarious–to make up for the grim horrors depicted in some of my other recommendations.
And I’ll second The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. His *On Stranger Tides * & The Stress of Her Regard might meet your needs. If not–he’s a fine author, anyway.
I’ll also second the ripping yarns of Mark Frost.
Finally, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel is a bit weighty, but I found it worth the effort.
No. If you prefer light-hearted, these books are absolutely not for you. They are fantastic stories, but they are grim, grim, grim–particularly Perdido Street Staion and Iron Council.
Want something “lighthearted,” but at the same time really deep and intellectually heavy?
Try [by [url=Avram Davidson - Wikipedia]Avram Davidson,](]The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy,[/url) acollection of short stories set in the 19th Century, in the mythical southeastern European state, the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania (modeled, clearly, on the Austro-Hungarian Empire). The hero is Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy, a brilliant and largely autodidact polymath of the minor nobility – urbane, broad-minded, gentle, temperamentally cheerful, philosophical yet practical, endlessly resourceful. He works (when he is working at all, and not alone studying) as a kind of detective, but unlike Sherlock Holmes he has no fear that his mind is like an attic, of limited storage capacity; he studies everything. Even magic. (Many of the stories include supernatural elements; and phrenology is crucial to his solving a mystery in “The Tell-Tale Head.”) His personal motto is, “Often pause, and turn aside.”
I’d say that the Diskworld books by Terry Pratchett, especially the later ones, especially those set in Ankh-Morpork, can be classified as “Gaslamp Fantasy.” Try The Truth or Going Postal. While there isn’t much technology, the culture involved alternates between Victorian and modern-day.
Dark Sleeper The House in the High Woods Strange Cargo
Separate books all set in the same Dickensian/Lovecraftian world where much of civilisation has been destroyed and mastodons and other megafauna still roam.
Great stuff!
Might be difficult to get in the States, but Robert Rankin’s *The Witches of Chiswick *involves someone going back in time to a rather steampunk alternate Victorian history, and is not merely lighthearted; I’d go so far as to say that it’s actually quite silly. It is, however, part of the increasingly inappropriately named Brentford Trilogy, so you may find yourself hunting down more of his work… not that that’s necessarily abad thing.
Neal Barrett, Jr.'s fantasy novels The Prophecy Machine and The Treachery of Kings are set in the kingdom of Fyxedia, site of ongoing conflict between two religious cults, the Hatters and the Hooters. The Hatters wear hats all day and try to poke people with sticks, while the Hooters spend the night hooting and setting stuff on fire. Into this unstable situation walks Finn the lizard-maker (he manufactures lizards to sell as gift items). Finn is shortly stranded in a house ruled by a family that gets more crazy with each passing generation. They have a prophecy machine in the basement–it’s powered by mice on treadmills and spits out thousands of pages of incomprehensible prophecies every minute–of course, who better to fix such a thing than a master lizard-maker?
James Stoddard’s The High House and The False House have a Victorian setting with more of an old-fashioned story. The great house of Evenmere contains every conceivable universe within its walls. There’s a dinosaur in the attic and tigers in the basement. If the lamps on the roof aren’t lit each night, then the stars will go out. If the clocks aren’t wound, then the planets will stop moving. There’s a band of anarchists who want to break in so that they can destroy the stars and planets, and it’s up to Carter Anderson to find the magic set of keys that can stop them.
