I’m currently looking around for a change in my usual course of summer reading and I find I’m in a steampunk sort of move. Can anyone recommend a favorite work?
The only modern (e.g. not Verne or Wells) example of steampunk I’ve read is the Difference Engine by Gibson and what’s-his-name. Very cool. I’ve also heard good things about Powers’ The Anubic Gates (and as soon as I take a shower, it’s off to the bookstore for Slortar).
Any others you can think of? Anyone?
A few suggestions:
James Blaylock’s Lord Kelvin’s Machine.
K.W. Jeter’s Morlock Night.
Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates you already have 
, but also try On Stranger Tides and The Stress of Her Regard, which are kinda, sorta steampunk.
Okay, I gotta ask…
“steampunk” ??
There’s also a “Steampunk” comic out there.
Steampunk: One part William Gibson, one part Charles Dickens. Usually, either alternate histories where computers are invented in the 19th century (ala Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine) or, less often, describing a future which returns to Victorian social moores (as in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age). The genre emphasizes the connections between cyberpunk and Victorian popular literature: classism, social decay, rampant capitalism, and Horatio Alger-esque “little guy makes good” plots. There’s a relativly new sub-genre of steampunk which takes a Middle Earth-type fantasy world in the middle of an industrial revolution: a Victorian setting with elves and wizards. I’ve mostly seen this sub-genre in gaming: a few Dungeons and Dragons supplements and a forth-coming CRPG called Arcanum, but I’m pretty sure there are a few novels with this setting out there.
The Steampunk genre is pretty much dead, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. Gibson actually got in fairly late, when it was winding down.
Broadly defined, Steampunk was usually science fiction/fantasy novels set in Victorian times. Technically, Tim Powers wasn’t Steampunk because his books were set in earlier times, but he’s usually grouped in it.
Generally, the Steampunk novels are:
James Blaylock ("Homunculus, “Lord Kelvin’s Machine,” “The Digging Leviathan” (perhaps))
K. W. Jeter (“Infernal Devices” “Morlock Night”)
Tim Powers (“The Anubis Gates,” “The Stress of Her Regard,” “On Stranger Tides”)
Mark Frost (“The List of Seven,” “The Six Messiahs”) – Frost is best known for his partnership with David Lynch on “Twin Peaks.”
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (“The Difference Engine” – the best known book of the genre, but hardly the best).
Esther Friesner (“Druid’s Blood”)
Paul Di Fillippo (“The Steampunk Trilogy”)
Michael Swanwick (“Jack Faust”)
Stephen Baxter (“Anti-Ice”)
Perhaps it’s dead in the sci-fi world, but in the role-playing world, it’s gaining steam (as it were). Dragon Magazine recently dedicated an issue to it, and there’s soon to be a computer game called Arcanum based on it. Steve Jackson Games has had a steampunk supplement out for at least a year now.
There’s also some comic books that have some pretty good steampunk stories. The Steampunk comic book I haven’t read, but two other series are pretty good. There’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is really good and is currently collected in a hardcover collection. It basically collects several famous characters from 19th century fiction and places them in an alternate reality London. I’m also reading a great alternative comic series called Girl Genius right now, which has a wonderful sense of humor. Its only on its second or third issue right now, so not quite enough for a collection yet.
Wow, thanks everyone. Looks like something to add to my summer reading list. I’ll definitely look into it.
I had a custom 3E D&D campaign I was working on which had steampunk elements, wherein a fairly typical dark fantasy setting with elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. comes into contact with 19th Century Earth - basically planehopping Abyssal Halflings kidnapped a few hundred humans from an isolated Old West town and brought them there to use as slave labor - the campaign started 500 years later and humans are one of the most populous races, legends of the world they came from are vague and inaccurate, but some of the technological ideas learned from the first couple of generations have changed the world, the dwarves have a transcontinental underground railroad, elves lead armies of orcish riflemen…it was a fun one.
If you like a little magic mixed in, and also like the detetctive genre, may I suggest the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett. All of them have been collected in a single volume called, appropriately enough, Lord Darcy. Lord Darcy is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective in an alternative universe where the laws of magic have been worked out and science is distrusted. This type of story is difficult to do well, because it’s so easy to cheat by introducing a deus ex machina to solve the mystery. Instead, each story is a legitimate detective story in its own right, where the author introduces the rules that govern magic, leaves clues and red herrings, and the reader could conceivably work out whodunit for themselves.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as “Steampunk”, but I greatly enjoyed Michael F. Flynn’s “In the Country of the Blind”, about a secret society that built a working difference engine in the mid-eighteenth century, and used it to predict the future.
Ah, I wondered what the hell steampunk meant. The correct SF term is “post-anachronism,” they’ve been using that term for ages. I guess they figured they could cash in on the now-dead cyberpunk genre by using the “punk” label.
If you haven’t done so already, please check out “The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne” on the Sci Fi Channel. The future of the show is dodgy, but the stories are good for the most part and I just LOVE the Rebecca and Passepartout characters. The stories are sorta “alternate realities” where the sci-fi writer joins up with two British secret agents who use cunning and technology to battle the baddies who do the same. Here’s the official page for the show: http://www.scifi.com/julesverne/
Patty
I knew you guys would come through. 
“The Anubis Gates” is currently sitting on my dining room table, waiting for me to finish my current novel. Looks really good.
…and you’ve gotta love the Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. What other series would have the balls to cast Patrick Duffy as a vampire? 
I’ve been involved in science fiction – both as a reader and writer – for over 40 years and this is the first time I’ve ever seen the term “post-anachronism” used. Google doesn’t even have a match for the term.
“Steampunk” was coined by one of its authors (Blaylock, perhaps) in a letter to Locus or SFC. It was at the height of cyberpunk, and the term was a joke on “cyberpunk,” much like the more obscure subgenre of “cyberprep” (Gibson is officially a cyberprep, BTW. I am, too, being actually present when the “Cyberprep Pronucianto” was first read.)
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*Originally posted by RealityChuck *
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I first encountered the term back in the 1970s, IIRC it was in “The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.” There are plenty of literary concepts not represented on the web.
Though it’s not really steampunk per se, this might be the place to plug GURPS Goblins, set in the London of the Industrial Revolution, 'cept there aren’t any people, just goblins. “Life in London is nasty, brutish and short. So are you.”
I had the opportunity to page through it this weekend, and it’s a gorgeous satire. I can’t imagine it doing well as a campaign setting, but it would be a riotous one-shot, or a great side-trip in a multiverse game.
Is Cyberpunk dead? I mean, I realize I’ve been out of the loop for years. I don’t follow current science-fiction, and most of the stuff I read is relatively old – I’m talking about Asimov, Retief, Spider Robinson. But I liked Gibson and Sterling. I read a lot of hard-boiled school stuff, and I thought it was fantastic that people were producing hard-boiled science fiction. But I didn’t exactly keep up with the reading. What killed the genre? And what the hell does “Cyberprep” mean?
Tho not an adent follower of the genre, I would have thought that the end of the cold war had a lot to do with cyberpunk’s loss of steam. From my limited experience, cyberpunk futures tended to assume that the three big players in the future would be the Soviet Blcok ,the US, and Japan. With the USSR gone and the Japanese economy in an extended slump, one has to find different players for a near-future senario. One the other hand, we are even more aware of another theme in Cyberpunk, enviromental destruction. Perhaps the time is ripe for EcoPunk?