Imagine if you will that clock towers were built not to tell time but to control it? That a stopped clock could render a city frozen in time and forever inaccessible? That the clock mechanic was the world’s most important occupation? These are the intriguing premises behind Tara Sim’s 2016 young adult fantasy steampunk novel […]
Here’s an interesting variation on an epic fantasy series: a world that transitions from primitive to steampunk as it progresses. Brandon Sanderson’s “Mistborn” novels take place on Scadrial, a world settled by humans with strange powers. Centuries after some cataclysm, people are rediscovering steam power and electricity. This is the setting of The Alloy of […]
Much recently-published steampunk fiction could be described period romance with airships. I was seeking something different, which is why the blurb for this novel caught my eye: “A steampunk adventure with snark and sass.” It had a great title as well. I expected something unique, and it most certainly was. First of all, the story […]
As an aficionado of steampunk, I tend to focus on fiction set in the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century. Yet I enjoy historical fiction from all eras. Halestorm (published 2012) is set in the 1700s and features Revolutionary-era American hero Nathan Hale. Despite the rather lame pun of the title, I was interested […]
The Desperado is back on YouTube! Today we talk about the amazing #steampunk game Bioshock Infinite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-POpiyx4Pw
When as a student in elementary school, I first heard about the underground railroad, I was disappointed to discover it was only a metaphor. In Colson Whitehead’s alternate history, The Underground Railroad, it has real steam locomotives. Though the book won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, I hadn’t heard of it until I saw a […]
The Powers of the Earth is not the first sci-fi novel about a war between the Earth and its colonies on the Moon. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, is probably the most famous. Ursula Le Guin wrote her own version, The Dispossessed. Even if an idea is not truly original, a great author […]
