Over at the right rollicking Adventures in Reading blog, they’ve just done a review for the second book in a series called ‘Flaming London’.  This novel, set in the times of Verne and Twain, features the War of the Worlds tripods, octopodes, King Kong and a giant steam powered robot.  Sign me up!

The previous book (also reviewed by Adventures in Reading) called ‘Zeppelins West’ mixes the titular lighter than air vessels, the Island of Doctor Moreau, Dracula, Captain Nemo and the characters associated with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

Described as a mix of sharp humour, crude language and occasional violence, this is the wild west with airships, pickled talking heads and time travelers.  According to Wikipedia, there is a third novel in the series called ‘The Sky Done Ripped’ somewhere in the future too.  Wonderful reviews by Mr Sherry that really make me want to try these out.

Over at the Da Vinci Automata clockpunk blog, they’ve posted about an upcoming comic called Clockwork Girl.  Star crossed lovers are not a new theme, but when one of the loves is a clockwork automaton and the other a Frankenstein’s Monster styled creation, and their great scientist creators (ex-best friends) espouse their particular aspects of science as the greatest and most misunderstood – then it’s starcrossed lovers of a most Steampunk style.

The Clockwork Girl sees life with an excitement and enthusiasm that doesn’t want to be quenched, Huxley (the monsterboy) is a young man keen to see the world to hell with the cost!  It sounds like it’s going to be a desperately lovely tale and you can read an interview with lots more about it at the Comic Book Resources site (with example pages) and a little on the offical Arcana Studio site.  I do hope they prevail!

Three cheers for the Steampunk Magazine!  The new issue appears to be available from their site, and it’s subtitled “The Journal of Misapplied Technology” – which really is a marvelous name.  I’ve had a read (of the articles, I’ve left the works of fiction for later) and there’s some wonderful stuff – from an interview with Crabfu, to how to make your own Pennyfakething, to a history of the Steampunk genre, to advice on finding your Steampunk wardrobe style (and significantly more – I apologise for not mentioning it all!)

Lovely stuff indeed, and I must congratulate Mr Magpie and his co-conspiritors on an excellent piece.

Some time ago, Matt wrote to tell me about a comic called Mr Hero. The character, a steam powered automaton sent to Earth as a sleeper agent for a typically evil bad guy intent on world domination, was designed by Neil Gaiman, but the comic itself was written by James Vance. It sounds pleasantly Steampunk though (at least initially) with the Mr Hero, and spare head, found by a farmer in the 1880s.

I can’t say I’ve read it, and it seems that it lived for only 18 issues before being abandoned, but if anyone knows more about it, I’d love to know. Some of the later covers look decidedly futuristic which turns me off a little, but I may well be doing it a disservice.

Sir Henry Bessemer, engineer and inventor, was a real character, and as such can’t really be called Steampunk, but reading his autobiography is surprisingly facinating! From chapters on The Great Exhibition of 1851, to a riveting tale of industrial espionage and secrecy spanning fourty years of Bronze powder making, to a perfectly curious (and ultimately doomed) design for a hydrolically righting saloon compartment on English Channel crossing steam-ships to counteract his terrible sea-sickness, Sir Bessemer writes with that strange but exciting mix of Victorian wonder at technology and a marvellous tone that can be both bashful and boastful in the same sentence. I found the paragraphs detailing the crowds wonderment at the Exhibition particularly moving – such crowds would probably only be seen at concerts or sporting events these days. The Bessemer Saloon story is a particularly sad one, where an inventor and his invention is critically let down by the company they colabborate with, and the public believes the invention to be without merit. A sorry tale, that probably clouds several inventors histories. Still, a good read and nice that the chapters can be read with some independance of each other – thank you so much, Ms Heather McDougal, for pointing it out to me!

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Mr Angus McQuarrie (what a good name, Mr McQuarrie), writes to tell me about a new novel for the younger of heart Steampunk fans – a tale of two orphan children, worlds apart, who are caught up in a terrible series of events involving an evil that was thought vanquished so long ago. Entitled The Court of the Air (Amazon.co.uk) by Stephen Hunt, it does not hide it’s Steampunk theming but revels in it!  There are airships and poorhouses, mechanical men and merchant uncles – it sounds fantastic!  (It’s on my list of books to read, most certainly.)

At the official site, www.TheCourtOfTheAir.com, there’s two chapters free to download, and a flash version of the ‘trailer’ (can you have a trailer for a book?) also.  The flash version is of course much sharper than the compressed YouTube version above.  Nice little hook though – I mean, mechanical men and airships!  I’m not sure it can get much better than that.

UdW7rbcfGzs I post this trailer, because it’s on YouTube and thus fits nicely in the post, but really – you want to see the one at the official Stardust movie site – it’s much lovelier! And if that’s not quite enough for you, then there’s an alternative trailer at Yahoo. So perfectly amazing looking – airships! But what can you say about Stardust? It’s from the book by Mr Neil Gaiman (and what a delightful teller of tales he is) where a young man leaves the small Victorian village he resides in, to find a recently fallen shooting star as a token of his love for the village beauty. Of course, it doesn’t go as simple as he may have imagined it would.

I’ve got the book less than 4ft from where I’m sitting and I’m going to have to read it now – I mean, the trailer has airship pirates in it! Perfectly wonderful – between this and The Golden Compass, it seems that 2007 is the year for Steampunk airship films. I’m not about to complain. August cannot come soon enough for this! Thanks to the Steampunk Forum members, the people of The Clockworkers Journal, and Sci-Freaks for pointing it out – you’d have thought I’d have noticed by now!

In a Victorian world, in the Umberland Asylum, a terrible mystery unfolds around two children – one ‘lost’ and the other missing.  Withershins, the comic, follows the unfolding of this tale that follows the viewpoint of the boy as he, with the gentle prodding of the psychiatrist assigned to his care, try to seperate childish mythology from fact, and find out what happened to his sister.

Nice little touches, like overgrown grandfather clocks, but with an overall feeling of dread and spooky atmosphere, this comic isn’t a comedy, that’s for certain, but it is beautifully themed with a struggle between the thorns of the forest and the ever present onward march of clocks.  Not classically Steampunk, for certain, but it’s a nice change – perhaps more like a 19th Century “Little Fears” or cautionary Victorian fantasy for children.

(For those curious, Withershins seems to be a play on the word widdershins, which means anti-clockwise (or counter-clockwise).  It’s a lovely word and really ought to see more use!)  Thank you, Wandering Nomad!

Tesla’s been getting a lot more publicity recently, and that makes me smile.  A wonderful, unappreciated inventor of so many things, and inadvertantly probably the greatest force in ending the steam-centric age and ushering in electricity!  A world treasure, and just an all round facinating character – Fortean Times did an article on him only recently, though as I’m not a subscriber I cannot see much more than the first of 5 pages.  However, if you’d like something a bit more moving-picture based, there’s a half hour, 80’s documentary on Tesla over at the Internet Archive.  (There seems to be some conspiracy theory tags on it – it’s not related to that, as far as I can see.  You may ignore as you wish.) Were it not for Tesla, we’d not have so many of the linchpins of the modern world – but also of the richness of our fictional world.  Mad scientists with giant tesla coils have become such a mainstay, that we can barely imagine an over-the-top scientific genius without one.  Thanks to reader Charles to give me another excuse to post about the master of electricity.

When I was at Futurismic blog today, imagine my surprise when I saw a little picture of an airship blinking at me from the sidebar. I couldn’t help but click. It was the cover of a novel by Mr Tobias Buckell, called Crystal Rain (Amazon.co.uk hardback, paperback apparently out soon too).  Set in a devolved non-earth world cut off after a wormhole collapse, the two cultures have an uneasy truce.  More interest to me, however, is the fact that the technology level has reverted to rifles, airships and steamships!  There’s even a snowtank.  Sounds like skewed Steampunk flavour to me!

“Cautious, they followed the destruction inward. To walk over the hot ground, they bound their feet with aloe and arm-sized leaves. They choked from the smoke. When they could walk into the destruction no longer, they turned around and found a weary-looking man sitting on a steaming metal boulder. He wore a top hat, a long trench coat, and black boots. His eyes were gray, his dreadlocks black, and his face ashen. It was as if this man had not seen sun in all his life, but was born brown once. He spoke gibberish to them, then touched his throat several times until the hunters understood his words. “Where am I?””

The authors site is here, and you can download the first 1/3 of the book to read right there.  There’s a review over at the Scifi channel, and an interview at the Speculist, but I’m sure there are more out there.