Harold Flashman’s astonishing adventures begin in the early 1800s with his expulsion at age 17 from Rugby School (named after the town, not the sport) for drunkenness. It’s a bawdy, dark comedy that would never past muster in this politically correct era. The man is too much of a scoundrel, and his many sins include […]
Today is the BICENTENNIAL of the birth of England’s famous Queen Victoria. Victoria reigned over the British Empire from 1837 to her death in 1901, giving her name to the Victorian Era. She was the first monarch to bear the title Empress of India. Her reign was longer than any of her predecessors until the […]
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 […]
For many years, scholars regarded Kipling as one of the great writers in the English-language canon. Political correctness has damaged his reputation, due to post-modernist interpretations of his novels and poetry as an apologia for British Imperialism. Being familiar with leftist over-sensitivity, I had my doubts. After reading his 1901 young-adult novel Kim, I’ve concluded […]
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 […]
In my never-ending quest to experience more classic steampunk, I acquired an audio-book copy of Shelly Adina’s Lady of Devices: A Steampunk Adventure. Recently I’ve been complaining about how some of the novels that are classified as steampunk don’t fit the genre. Lady of Devices is not one of those – it’s as steampunk as […]
