Ever since I was four years old, in 1972— before the merger of punk to steam, I wanted to be Captain Nemo. After devouring Verne and Wells, I discovered the Oswald Bastable trilogy by Michael Moorcock. Philip José Farmer further fueled my feverish pubescent imagination with such works as The Wind Whales of Ishmael and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. I discovered there's more to science fiction than spaceships and robots in the future.

K. W. Jeter is usually credited with coining the phrase "steampunk" back in the early 80s. He, along with Tim Powers and James Blaylock, created dark versions of the Victorian Era, stocked with accelerated technology re-dressed in period appropriate materials with occasional supernatural elements. Morlock Nights, The Anubis Gates, and The Digging Leviathan all echoed the literature and feel of 19th Century and commented on society struggling to keep up with rapidly changing technology. With less doom and gloom than than its gleaming, black, low-slung sibling — cyberpunk — these speculations still offered cynical social commentary. The Good Old Days weren't all that great, and throwing a lot of shiny gizmos around will never fix the societal ills that confound us in any era.

I wasn't really aware of this trend in fiction until '91 when William Gibson and Bruce Sterling introduced the wider reading public to steampunk in The Difference Engine. Then, as Snow Crash did to Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson one-upped Messers Gibson and Sterling with The Diamond Age. It's just my humble opinion; this is a smarter and by far more entertaining novel. Stephenson turned the expected convention around, injecting Victorian styles and sensibilities into a future that enjoys nearly miraculous technologies. His novel examines the infamous repressive morality of that era as much as it explores the possibilities of nanotech. Michael Swanwick took a similar route with a far more playful tone in the ripping adventures of Darger and Surplus. I strongly recommend these ribald short stories — there is an excellent recent Swanwick collection from Subterranean Press and another, The Dog Said Bow-Wow, from Tachyon.

Also of note is Paul Di Filippo's weird and wonderful Steampunk Trilogy (1995). The first tale concerns a gentleman inventor and his remarkable amphibian prodigy involved in a royal scandal. "Victoria" fits most preconceptions of what a steampunk story is about: advanced retro-science and aristocratic adventures. The other two are more atypical but I adore Di Filippo's customary pop culture references and mashups at play in the 19th Century. Famed naturalist and racist asshole Louis Aggasiz visits the sleepy little fishing hamlet of Innsmouth? Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman explore the astral plane with Madame Blatavasky — and Allen Ginsberg has a cameo? Zany, clever stuff.

Even though steampunk lit has been around for a few decades now, it's increased rapidly in popularity the past few years. It has inspired other media as well as design and fashion to an eye-rolling degree. There are more steampunk novels than ever, although too many or not enough for some people. Here I'd like to share my thoughts on four of these with you, Gentle Reader.

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann (Tor, on shelves now)
In 1901, Sir Maurice Newbury and his new assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes are employed at the Anthropology department of the British Museum. They also serve as special agents of the Crown, investigating extraordinary threats against the Empire.

Sir Maurice scoffs at spiritualism and superstition, even though some of his c ases have involved the supernatural. He bows before the altar of Rationality and is enthralled by the mighty airships, graceful clockwork androids, and the other mechanical wonders of his age. Miss Hobbes finds her employer's enthusiasm for noisy odoriferous machines childish. She prefers horse-drawn carriages and Georgian architecture to the chaos and ornate fripperies of the current mode. Still she is a thoroughly modern woman championing forward-thinking social causes. Both of them keep shameful secrets and hidden agendas from each other, will their new partnership survive?

Newbury and Hobbes are assisting with Scotland Yard to investigate a series of strangulations in Whitechapel that may have a supernatural cause. Before they can pursue any new leads, Sir Maurice is called away for a special audience with the Queen. She is not amused.

Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria is kept alive by huge wheezing machines (in our world she died in the first month of the 20th Century). The frightening cyborg monarch orders Newbury off all other cases to investigate the fiery crash of an airship that killed all those aboard. The automaton that piloted the craft is missing but, most seriously in her Royal eyes, one of her family, a Dutch prince was aboard. The investigation leads to Chapman & Villiers, Britain's largest airship company and the inventors of the wondrous automatons, which may not be as foolproof or harmless as advertised. .

Oh and by the way, there is also a plague of Revenants (to his credit, Mann does not use the Z-word). A virus, brought by soldiers returning from India, is infecting the neighborhoods of the less fortunate creating shambling cannibals of the classic Romero type. Everyone feels just awful about these and some calculate most of the country's population will be infected. Then again it only appears to occur to the poor, so not much is being done to stop it.

The plot whirrs along with a brisk clockwork (hah!) predictability switching over at times to reveal some of the protagonists' eccentricities and mysterious pasts. The second half shifts into high gear with some truly exciting action scenes. For all their supposed intellectual prowess, Newbury and Hobbes seem to solve most things by hitting them. Most of the puzzle clicks together as expected but some bits are just ejected with the flimsiest explanation. I'm sorry to report this story was steampunk lite, thrills and spills with steam engines in the background. Victorian language and customs have been watered down. There is an obvious message about the loss of our humanity to an increasingly mechanized society and a vague conflict between Science and Superstition. Most of the intimations of magic and the supernatural hint at the direction further Newbury and Hobbes investigations will go. I dearly hope that The Affinity Bridge is not their most interesting case.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt (Tor, on shelves now)
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt (Tor, on shelves now)
This follow up to last year's excellent The Court of the Air is a riot of twisted imagination and full steam ahead thrills. Hunt's richly textured worldbuilding compares favorably with China Miéville's New Crobuzon novels or Philip Pullman. These authors blend sorcery and science with steampunk trappings and have their own encyclopedia's worth of invented creatures, histories, and societies. Miéville has the more sober tone and keeps a firmer hand on the tiller of plot and pacing, wheras Hunt is just crazy in all the right ways. Sometimes he gets a little at sea: characters will be a bit inconsistent, and his climaxes are just way over the top. He also has similar convoluted wordplay to Miéville but with less purple prose and more groan-worthy puns. There is also dark political satire stretching to bizarre proportions (Marxist thought is not spared this treatment).

Most of Hunt's protagonists hail from the Kingdom of Jackals which resembles Great Britain. Centuries ago, the Jackals' version of the Cromwell's Civil War assured that Parliament would have the upper hand in the nation's affairs. The royal family are kept in breeding houses and the arms of each King or Queen get amputated upon coronation, so no more waving from the balcony. Parliament members make and pass laws the in traditional manner: bashing each other with stout "debating sticks" in ritual duels. This green and pleasant land of shopkeepers and shepherds enjoys stability through its monopoly of the celgas that keeps its aerostat navy aloft as well as the Court of the Air, the secret police that uses a combination of total aerial surveillance and leyline magic.

Jackal's enemies abroad include Quatérshift, in the throes of an Eternal Revolution bloodier than Robbespierre, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined. Even more frightening is the desert Caliphate of Cassarabia where the biomages breed all manner of monstrous creatures from the wombs of human slaves. They all share the planet (Earth in a far-flung future?) with people that resemble crustaceans or winged lizards. There are also the steammen, a race of mostly gentle clockwork robots with a religion that has elements of Santería and Zen.

There are also Plucky orphans, fey-blooded super-soldiers, science-pirates akin to Nemo, vigilantes with mystic weapons, lost cities, shouty dinosaurs, and an entire jungle ecology with a hive mind. Petroleum — like the controllable "electricity" — is long gone, Much industry is powered by steam or clockwork. "Expansion engines" (and firearms) run on the volatile sap of the Blow-Barrel tree. I've just given you a sliver of Hunt's creation, and hope this has piqued your interest. Look beyond all the fascinating and fantastical elements, and Hunt's work is about the pursuit of dreams in a world of clashing ideals and conquest. You can probably read Kingdom without reading The Court of the Air first, but I think you'll be hooked either way. Join the expedition of Professor Amelia Harsh (who literally has the arms of a gorilla) and her quest for The Kingdom Beyond the Waves.

Soulless by Gail Carriger (Orbit, Late Sept. 2009)
This comedy of manners and monsters is the first of the Parasol Protectorate series. I was a tad embarassed that I enjoyed this silly and original story so much. I mean, let us now judge the book by its cover – hmm, photo of a slinky young lady in period costume...oookaaay, her bumbershoot has arbitrary gears and a length of rubber hose attached to it for no discernible purpose, and the cover blurb speaks of vampires and werewolves, uh huh – Oh Sweet Buffy Sainte-Marie, this is a steampunk paranormal romance! Well yes, there are dirigibles over another Victorian London and our sassy heroine does have some decidedly racy scenes, when not facing the forces of darkness. Ms. Carriger has imbued this book with a delightful sense of humour and some very fresh changes. Her heroine, Alexia Tarabotti, is a very original creation quite separate from all those crossbow-wielding tattooed tarts one sees writhing on so many paperback covers these days. She also understands the Importance of Tea, and the problem of Silly Little Hats.

Alexia Tarabotti seems doomed to spend her life as a spinster. She is far too willful and too old (well into her third decade) and has a father who is both Italian and dead. He left her with an unfashionable complexion, an abundance of all manner of curious books, and very little social prospects. Unbeknown to her mother and other boring people, Alexia lacks something else— a soul. Oh she laughs and cries as the rest of us do, appreciates the arts, and I suspect could bust out in a funky gavotte. She just has no immortal soul. Supernaturals; ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the like have a surplus of soul, thus accounting for the extra life and unkillability they enjoy. The extemely rare preternaturals are born without a soul. Upon the slightest physical contact with Miss Tarabotti, a supernatural becomes a mere mortal, the fangs retract, fur sheds, and death or injury become very real prospects. This can be a very handy talent should the local vampire forget his manners and attempt to dine without an invitation.

In this capacity, Alexia occasionally assists the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, that Branch of Her Majesty's Civil Service that polices vampires and werewolves. Supernaturals revealed them selves to the world at large during the Civil War. They had grown weary of skulking in the shadows, fleeing the inevitable torches and pitchforks. Now they are integrated into high-society and have helped build the British Empire and no longer threaten innocent mortals. Still, there are little misunderstandings, and that's where the BUR comes in. It is led by the very dashing Scottish peer and Alpha of London's werewolf pack, Lord Conall Maccon. Miss Tarabotti is often offended by his brusque, crude manner, no doubt stemming from his exotic and savage nature. Oh, and he turns into a wolf once a month. How bothersome, and yet the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Lord Conall and Miss Tarabotti must investigate the sudden appearance of unregistered vampires and the appearance of known supernatural citizens. They employ cutting-edge science and the most scathing banter they can muster. Gail Carriger has employed some very original thinking to the alternate-history-with-monsters game. She also lampoons the vicious world of Victorian society where an arch remark or fumbled introduction could reduce one to a state akin to walking death. Soulless is a character-driven romp with great worldbuilding and delicious rapier wit that recalls Austen and P.G. Wodehouse. Mystery and bloodshed abound, tea will be served,and there will be treacle tart!

Not Less Than Gods by Kage Baker
(Deluxe Hardcover, Subterranean Press, Dec. 2009 Trade Hardcover, Tor, March 2010)
I am a big Kage Baker fan and have raved about her books before. This one won't be coming out until after Kwaanza, and I'll do a more in-depth review then. I'll just say it involves the early life and career of that Victorian superspy, Edward Alton Bell-Faifax, whom some of you may know from The Company novels. Bell-Fairfax is a Hero in the most Classic sense, fated for greatness and all the tragedy that entails. There's globe-trotting espionage and scads of amazing secret gadgetry: novelty-hat cameras, radio transmitters, a kung-fu robot, radar-equipped speedboats, a rifle that shoots ice bullets, bullet-proof carriges with "internal-combustion engines", and so much more! "But wait, will there be goggles? We want the goggles, Grey!" Do you? Well how about telescopic infrared goggles? For Everybody! GOGGLES YAY!!

Do please pardon me. The important thing to remember is that Kage Baker really brings 1849 alive with a wealth of details and pitch perfect dialogue. This woman truly understands language in a way only someone deeply involved in the Theater can. She often works as a professional historical reenactor and has taught Elizabethean English as a Second Language. She takes a rather dim view of people who show up at RenFaire dressed as their WoW character and ask where the frozen yogurt stand is.

I have a similar problem with these Josiah-come-latelys who glue-gun clock parts to their bolo ties and spout things like, "I say, old bean, zeppelins are absolutely smashing!" in a bad Cockney accent. I spoke to one gentleman deeply committed to the Steampunk Lifestyle and he admitted that he never read any of the novels I discussed in the top half of this post. For him it all began and ended with that TV series starring Robert Conrad, which admittedly predates those novels. When asked why he found steampunk so fulfilling he rhapsodized about the DIY aesthetique his community enjoys,"I stitched this waistcoat and suit myself!" and the sense of boundless optimisim the psuedo-era held (holds?). To paraphrase; "People could become whatever they wanted despite their gender, race, or class!". This is stunningly ironic from someone emulating a period known for a rigid social hierarchy and the beginning of mass-produced consumer goods. Of course it's all fantasy, there never were clockwork automatons or airship fleets ushering in a Utopia of muttonchops and bustles. I just wish some of these fashion victims put a little more depth and research in to their statement. Read a damn book already.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the Gentlemen's Speculative Society as Christopher Hsiang, Esq. He is very much looking forward to the 20th Century again.

Steamy Photograph by Kyle Cassidy, Models: Liza James and Jared Axelrod

High Bloods, John Farris (Tor)

It's the near future, and LA is overrun with werewolves. An International Lycan Control force is set up to keep tabs on the "high bloods," those that can keep their werewolfish nature under control. But then something goes terribly wrong, and the book becomes a hard boiled crime novel. With werewolves.

Wireless, Charles Stross (Ace)

Notorious future-forward sci-fi author Charles Stross has collected the strands of some of his short fiction into this compilation. Stories feature everything from relocating the cold war in deep space to a Lovecraftian take on the Iran-Contra scandal. The collection showcases Stross's short works that have never found their way into any of his longer pieces.

Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Subterranean)

Dozois and Martin have gathered a crop of modern sci fi writers to write their own stories exploring Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" universe. The "Dying Earth" series is a cornerstone of its very own sub-genre of dystopian sci fi, and these stories give some other writers a chance to lend their voice to this seminal canon.

Metatropolis,edited by John Scalzi (Subterranean)

Five sci fi writers collaborated on their own urban future, and then each took a turn writing stories set in their collectively imagined universe. The result is a portrait of a possible future of cities. From the io9 review:

These feel like cities where anything can happen, from getting your skull cracked to discovering your life purpose. And most important of all, when I was done reading about this future dys/utopia, I wanted to spend a lot more time there.

The Osiris Ritual, George Mann (Snowbooks)

George Mann's well-received "The Affinity Bridge" created a steam-punk Victorian London landscape for his intrepid mystery solvers. Now his steam-punk Sherlock Holmes is back to solve another mystery, interacting with some distinct characters along the way. This one is for fans of clockwork robots, airships, and good old fashion mysteries.

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Neil Gaiman (DC)

This hardcover volume collects a few of Gaiman's Batman pieces, focusing on his canon-spanning final story, "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" This story stretches from one end of the Bat's career to the other, offering a new angle on the Batman mythos.

Purple and Black, K.J. Parker (Subterranean)

"Purple and Black" is an epistolary novel, or one told only in letters. In this case, the letters are between a reluctant intellectual emperor and his best friend on the front lines of combat. The result is an exploration of the duty of leadership, of war, and of friendship. It's also printed in two colors, purple for the official empire business between the two friends, and black for the less formal, more personal letters.

The Stars Blue Yonder, Sandra McDonald (Tor)

A military commander dies, but then comes back to life on a mission to save all of humanity. This mission takes him all over space and time, where he meets his yet-non-existent grandchildren and his descendants from thousands of years in the future. He also manages to thoroughly confuse his grieving wife with resurrection and stories of far-flung time travel. The two work together to save everything they've ever known.

Bar None, Tim Lebbon (Night Shade)

After the world ends, a group of tenacious survivors hole up in a giant home in Wales, but supplies start to get thin, and they learn from a supernatural stranger of a haven a few days away. It's the Bar None, and it's maybe the last bar on Earth. The survivors then decide to do probably what anyone would do in their situation: against all odds, braving corpse-strewn countryside, they try to track down a cold beer. From the io9 review:

In the end this is a deeply sentimental and intimate look at memory, loss, and those perfect days barbecuing and tossing a few back with good friends. And flesh-eating monsters.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, Stephen Hunt (Tor)

Amelia Harsh, a sort of steam-punk female Indiana Jones, and a cast of adventurers sets out in an ancient U-boat to discover the sunken "perfect society" of Camlantis. Also on board are a band of female mercenaries, escapees from an underwater prison, and an insane guide. Sounds good to me.

Blood Red Sphere, Lawrence Barker (Swimming Kangaroo)

A recovering "cactus juice" addict passes his days scavenging ancient artifacts from the surface of mars and selling them. Then one such object, the "blood red sphere," attracts attention from pretty much everyone on Mars and the rest of the solar system. It's like the "Maltese Falcon" on Mars, which is something I can definitely get behind.

The House of Lost Souls, F.G. Cottam (Thomas Dunne)

After a psychic trauma visits itself on four students (causing one to commit suicide), a journalist investigates a home haunted by madness and strange occult happenings. The novel touches on many different eras of the house's history, eventually leading to a confrontation between our protagonist and an ancient evil.

Jeff VanderMeer, author of City of Saints and Madmen (and, with Ann VanderMeer, a columnist for io9):

The main difference is that science exists and magic doesn't. Even though everything in a novel is made up in a sense, this still matters—it creates different responsibilities. If, for example, the physical laws of a fantastical or SF world are different than our world, there has to be some explanation, no matter how off-the-cuff. And if that world contains magic, I think the writer has to be even more rigorous in thinking out how magical systems work, no matter how much of that appears in the text. This is because we are used to constraint. We are worlds of blood-and-water existing within a larger but finite network of people and settings, and all of that is constrained by the egg-yolk that is the Earth. If even something as arbitrary and recent as a sonnet suffers from constraint, then magic can be no different.

Of course, if you're a surrealist or absurdist, you often don't care about the difference between science and magic because the boundary between the two is going to be trampled and gleefully pissed on anyway. As well it should. Nothing is more annoying than allowing a little reality ruin your fun. If you have the imagination to get away with it.

Or, if you're Jack Vance, you just set your stories far enough in the future that the science seems like magic and you sit back in your golden throne, fold your arms, and cackle like either a mad scientist or a crazy sorcerer—take your pick.

One reason I have no magic in most of my fiction is that I cannot believe in it and thus cannot write about it in any convincing way. This is the same reason you do not find unicorns in my fiction. Or Smurfs. Or Republicans. I can and do, however, believe in huge intelligent squid ponderously pulling themselves through the alleys of a weird city, protecting themselves with helmets full of water. I can also believe in nefarious mushroom-based intelligent life forms living in bizarre underground caverns. However, since this is merely an audacious application of current theory on biology and biological systems it amounts to perfectly good science.

Elizabeth Bear, author of New Amsterdam and Dust:

That's a really interesting question, especially since for both SF and fantasy, I tend to lift my "rules"—whether that means the laws of physics or the laws of magic—from outside sources. Basically, in terms of writing—science fiction or fantasy—science and magic both serve (for me) to form a framework upon which I can hang the rest of the story. They're a structural element. So I try to find the coolest bits of either than I can.

Stephen Hunt, author of Court of the Air:

A fantasy author creates a monster by having a character in robes of any colour mumbling a spell, whereas the rules clearly state a science fiction writer has to put the character in white robes only, and have them mumbling something about genetic engineering and how at termination of protein synthesis, type I release factors promote hydrolysis of the peptidyl-transfer RNA connection in reaction to recognition of a stop codon. For the average reader, though, these both seem equally magic.

Ted Chiang, author of Stories of Your Life and Others:

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it's science, and if you can't, it's magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she's made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it's something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she's a magician. And I don't mean that she's a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren't dependent on a specific person.

Electricity might have seemed magical at one time in history, but it works for everyone; you don't need to have an innate talent or be descended from someone special for a light bulb to turn on which you flip a switch. It took the work of very smart people to get us to the point that we can all use electricity, but none of them were magicians, precisely because they were able to make their discovery work for everyone.

To go on at slightly greater length, the reason magic can't be mass-produced is that it usually relies on some subjective quality of the practitioner: her intense concentration, her spiritual purity, something that can't be substituted with another person or with a machine. Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you're a person. When people say that the scientific worldview implies a cold, impersonal universe, this is what they're talking about. Magic is when the universe responds to you in a personal way.

China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun:

What is the difference between science and magic? In real life, loads. In SF, I think the question's misleading, because I think that whatever SF may think and claim, and however much individual books may justly pride themselves on scientific accuracy, fundamentally the genre is not predicated on 'real' science at all. It's about apparently authoritative use of supposed scientific language, or, to put it another way, bullshitting. And that is not (necessarily) a dis.

There you have it, dear readers. What do you think?