If the steampunk community is to have any festivals, this would be one* of them. James Watt, inventor of the first efficient steam engine, was born in Scotland on this day in 1736. If not for Watt’s genius, there would have been no “age of steam” for us to celebrate. Many people mistakenly think Watt […]
* Cheers for Count Zeppelin This year marks the 110-year anniversary of aviation pioneer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin founding his airship company Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. This came on the heels of the destruction of one of his early airship prototypes (LZ-4) in a storm when it was moored at Echterdingen. Despite this incident, the German public […]
In 1895, the Lumière brothers Louis and August debuted their invention a camera-projector for motion pictures called the Cinématographe. On December 28th of that year, they showed their films, a series of short clips of scenes from everyday life, at the Grand Cafe in Paris. Though they had shown their films to the public before, […]
When I launched Steampunk Desperado two months ago, I decided to avoid political posts, my goal being to promote our books without courting controversy. But when freedom of expression is at stake, I’ll make an exception. I’ve reversed my opinion from my March 2015 post on my earlier blog “Sci-Fi and Sedition.” Hail, hail, the […]
Cover art by Kyle Dunbar. The e-book edition of Centrifugal Force is one of those we’ll be putting on sale for the Black Friday-Cyber Monday shopping holiday. This was my first book, published in 2012, and was not steampunk, but near-future speculative fiction. In it, I ask the following question: assuming that America continues its […]
As part of our ongoing effort to expose the public to works of steampunk fiction, Steampunk Desperado will feature a series of reviews of the classics as well as new works. First on my list is The Difference Engine since it was the first one I read. Published in 1990, this is not considered to […]
The airship is one of the signature technologies of steampunk fiction. They did exist in the latter days of the Victorian Era or Gilded Age, (late 1890’s) but they were a novelty, and therefore “futuristic.” In those days, the only humans who had experienced flight were a handful of daring balloonists. Travel by air must […]
