I encountered this book entirely by accident. I was doing a web search for images to serve as inspiration for the cover design for one of our “Ione D.” steampunk novels. This cover appeared, an illustration of a young woman in a long dress and high boots running through a Chinese street scene. It looks […]
Clockwork Imperium is a set of three stories by J. P. Medved set in an alternate history of the British Empire. All feature the same three characters, British soldiers Henry Emerson and James Billingsworth and their Sikh comrade Raheem Aranjapour. The author establishes their friendship in the prequel story, “The Great Curry Contest,” available for free […]
Having focused on steampunk for the last few years, I was astonished that I hadn’t run into this book before. Homunculus was published in 1986 before steampunk became all the rage in the 2000’s. It won the Phillip K. Dick award for best original paperback in 1988. Many steampunk books are modern-style novels that happen […]
Recently I wrote a review of Volume 2 of Jerry Pournelle’s “There Will Be War.” The series began in the 1980’s and came to an end in 1990 when the Soviet Union fell. After 9/11/2001, however, it was apparent that Fukuyama was quite wrong about “The End of History.” Notwithstanding the continuance (and increase) in […]
While attending a movie recently, I was astonished to see a trailer for an upcoming steampunk movie, Mortal Engines. I had heard of the 2001 book by Philip Reeve but hadn’t read it. The premise was very imaginative albeit somewhat silly: in a post-apocalyptic world, cities went mobile to survive. They became huge steam-powered edifices […]
In the early 1980’s, renowned sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle compiled the first in a series of story collections with a military theme. For several years they came out regularly until the end of the Cold War seemed to make the series obsolete. Though I hadn’t been interested at the time, my interests have broadened since […]
Being a steampunk fanatic, anything with “clockwork” in the title automatically piques my interest. The book’s cover illustration of a colorful harlequin-like character added to my fascination. Clockwork Ninja turned out not to be steampunk, but rather an imaginative urban fantasy set mostly in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Full disclosure: I know the author, […]
