Never trust a “best of steampunk” list (unless it’s one of mine.) The genre is so eclectic and quirky that there are bound to be entries that aren’t steampunk at all. I found Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl in “10 Best Steampunk Novels 2019” on bookconsumers.com. The title sounds right and the cover hints at […]
One of my goals as a reviewer is to bring attention to original works by up-and-coming authors. I encountered The Atlantropa Articles through Cody Franklin’s a YouTube channel, “Alternative History Hub.” His videos are interesting speculations on how history could have gone differently if various different scenarios came to pass. This, his first novel (2018) […]
On this blog, I have endeavored to review books by as many different authors as possible, mostly avoiding doing more than one by the same person. Now, however, I’m discovering favorite writers which I feel deserve additional attention. One of these is KW Jeter, the actual inventor of the word “steampunk.” His first novel in […]
Adventures in Alternate History When I saw this book on a list of best steampunk novels, I remembered that I’d seen its author, Naomi Novik, on a panel at Phoenix Comicon a few years back. She’d talked about her book series which featured “the Napoleonic Wars with dragons.” What a great idea! It may be […]
Studio Gonzo’s 2003 anime series Last Exile (written and directed by Koichi Chigira) is one of the few examples of Dieselpunk in popular culture. Dieselpunk is Steampunk’s lesser-known cousin, a genre that embraces the technologies and styles of the 1920’s through 1940’s. It’s also one of those rare instances of an anime which serves as […]
I have a confession to make: Steampunk has been my gateway drug to a wider world of literature. It has gotten me interested in the classics, starting with sci-fi pioneers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Recently as I was browsing in Bookmans (an Arizona retail chain specializing in used books) I came across […]
When I bought my Kindle nearly 10 years ago (I much prefer the old school version) the very first e-book I downloaded was Herman Melville’s celebrated novel, Moby-Dick. Why? I remembered a character in a Kurt Vonnegut story remarking that his life’s regret was never having read that book. Discovering the legendary tome to be […]
