The Best of 2010 Steampunk Facebook Awards

Not a picture of Lou.

The steampunk page on Facebook has just announced "The Best of 2010 Steampunk Facebook Awards." They write, "The largest steampunk fan page on Facebook now has a set of yearly awards to acknowledge the best of the best, those people in the arts and other creative fields whose work has shone through above the rest or who hold the most worldwide popularity among the steampunk community for their work this year. As this is the first year of these awards, we will be taking into account the work that individuals have done over the course of the past decade when determining who to select."

I suppose I'll be needing a pair of brass goggles now as I've been named "Best Editor." But before I start affixing gears to all my gadgets, what this announcement really means is that someone appreciates all the wonderful steampunk books that Pyr has released in the last few months, books like The Ghosts of Manhattan, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, The Greyfriar, The Horns of Ruin, and The Buntline Special. For my part, I certainly appreciate their authors.

Steamed at this Punk

Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines is one of the best young adult novels I've read. So I'm really disappointed in his recent blog post, "The Stink of Steampunk," where he bags on all the writers jumping on the steampunk bandwagon, while admitting that pretty much everything he's ever written utilizes the same tropes. He claims that his own work is exempt from his criticism on the grounds that it uses a non-Victorian setting and mixes in other elements amid the tropes. Oh, and is well done. Then he is snide about Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, despite the fact that that too uses a non-Victorian setting and mixes in other elements. Of her, he says, "As if the authors can already scent the whiff of decay rising from their chosen genre some recent books have started throwing in elements from other mini-ghettoes; Cherie Priest's Boneshaker added zombies to the mix, and is highly regarded by people who don't seem to care that it is itself a kind of literary zombie." This in the same paragraph wherein he says, "I'm not singling out any particular books or individual authors when I say this." Right.

To be fair, I do take his point about the greater potential of SF. He says, "What I used to love about Science Fiction as a teenager was the way that, when you picked up one of those yellow Gollancz SF titles at the library, you had no idea where it would take you; it might be to some dazzling technological future or post-apocalyptic wasteland; it might be to another planet; or it might all be set in the present, just around the corner. But when you pick up a Steampunk book you know pretty much exactly where you're going."

That he says all this below a website banner that has him posed with a cup of tea and an umbrella in front of an airship and a row of Victorian style houses atop a big, hulking city on treads is just laughable. I can't think of a clearer case of "do as I say, not as I do." Dude, you might want to put the brolly down before you bag on Victoriana.

More to the point, steampunk has already begun to evolve outside its confines in exactly the way he says his own work does. As well as the aforementioned Priest, we have works like George Mann's Ghosts of Manhattan, not so much steampunk as an American 1920s that has evolved out of it's 1890s steampunk past, or Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire in Black and Gold, which sees the rise of technology in a fantasy setting.

But there will always be time-travel novels, outer space novels, vampire novels, parallel world novels, apocalyptic novels, and yes, steampunk novels. We work inside a genre that has established conventions and tropes. That's what a genre is. Personally, it's my believe that there are no good or bad tropes, simply varying degrees of skill on the part of the writer utilizing them. And steampunk wouldn't be popular now if it weren't popular now (duh! But think about that) and crying that other people are playing in your sandbox is dangerously close to telling readers that they shouldn't like what they like and you know better about what they do or should enjoy than they do. Reeve has a perfect right not to write any more steampunk himself if he's grown tired of it, but he shouldn't denigrate those who still chose to write - or read it. And when he complains about being swept up in a movement, he comes dangerously close to sounding like he's whining that he's managed to connect with a readership who like the sort of things he does. Don't tell us we're zombies for liking what we like. That's insulting to us all, readers and writers.

And that's what has me steamed.

Update: June 17, 2010 - Reeve's post seems to have been taken down. Meanwhile, it looks like Reeve and I agree on something, which is that we both think Paolo Bacigalupi's Shipbreaker is genius.

The Agony Column: A Conversation with Lou Anders : New Fantasy Triangle, Steampunk and Illuxcon II

Artist Dave Seely at Illuxcon II

I'm up in Rick Kleffel's latest Agony Column Podcast: 


12-11-09: A Conversation with Lou Anders : New Fantasy Triangle, Steampunk and Illuxcon II

Rick says, "That was, of course, my first question when we started talking. And indeed, I'd tend to agree that the three writers do sort of triangulate on the new aesthetic for fantasy fiction, the post-Perdido world of gritty and weird fiction. But that was only the starting point for our conversation.

We jumped next to a discussion of a barrel-full of Steampunk novels that are forthcoming from Pyr, including a French novel, the first in a series that is described as "Dumas with dragons." And we talked about Lou's experience at Illuxon II , an intriguing invite-only meeting of artists and art directors. You can hear a fascinating look at contemporary science fiction from a variety of angles by following this link to the MP3 audio file."

The Clockwork Jungle Book (Shimmer Issue #11)

For someone who averages one story every four years, I've produced a LOT of fiction this year. I wrote a piece for a Solaris anthology that, unfortunately, was scraped in the change of ownership, and a piece I wrote years ago with Chris Roberson just surfaced in Dave Hutchinson's Under the Rose.I knocked out a sword & sorcery story after being inspired by my forthcoming anthology(just for myself, you understand, though I "have plans" for both it and sequels). I even managed to complete 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo, and then, there's this:

Welcome to the Clockwork Jungle Book: our collection of twenty fabulous steampunk animal tales. We’ve got an origin story from Jay Lake, and a tale of the end of the world from Sara Genge. Stories set in London, China, Alabama, Castle Frankenstein, and the moon. We’ve got snakes and dinosaurs, elephants and wolves, bees and fish, birds and goats, and yes, even a monkey or two.

"And How His Audit Stands" is my steampunk western contribution to Shimmer magazine's 11th issue, The Clockwork Jungle Book. Featuring tales by Jay Lake, Blake Hutchins, Jess Nevins, Shweta Narayan, Marissa Lingen, Vince Pendergast, Susannah Mandel, James Maxey, Gwynne Garfinkle, James L Cambias, Genevieve Valentine, Sara Genge, Barbara A Barnett, Amal El-Mohtar, Chris Roberson, Rajan Khanna, Peter M Ball, Alethea Kontis, Caleb Wilson and Yours Truly. Very proud to be in their number. And they even ran an interview with me on my author page.

Steampunk is the New Black

Interesting piece in The Galaxy Express, claiming "Steampunk is the New Black." I agree. Watch this space for news.

I cannot wait for this!

I am really excited about this book. I think the move to commission an actual bit of physical hardware for the cover is an inspired bit of brilliance too, as I think the truth of whether steampunk really is "the hottest trend in science fiction" as Solaris proclaims depends largely on whether all the steampunkophiles residing in other media (games, cinema, fashion-culture, etc..) can be induced to follow the path back to its literary roots. The big question for me is whether this anthology, and the other one,will be "all the steampunk anyone needs" or the launch of the next thing. Either way, whether it's the end-all/be-all or just the inception, I'm pretty sure Extraordinary Engines is a must-have for any serious SF reader and collector. Certainly for this collector.

The Age of Steampunk

A friend asked me today whether steampunk is viable or whether it's past its sell by date. Which is an interesting question, because steampunk was only ever here by the slenderest margin - it's "major canon" something you can count on the fingers of one hand - Gibson & Sterling's The Difference Engineand Paul Di Filippo's The Steampunk Trilogybeing it's most visible works. Yes, China Mieville's more recent Perdido Street Stationcan be counted, but perhaps because the book's category contains so many hyphens that steampunk is bound to be one of them.

Yet, as has been remarked upon elsewhere, steampunk may just now be coming into its own. We have the new Steampunk Magazine, and we have two steampunk anthologies forthcoming - Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's for Tachyon and Nick Gever's Steampunk! for Solaris Books. (I'll be picking up both of these.)

Even more interesting, we have steampunk breaking out of prose into all sorts of other areas, including the DIY of the Make magazine variety, as witnessed by the remarkable Steampunk Workshop. See this article, "The Age of Steampunk," in the Boston Globe. Another good site for tracking steampunk in the culture at large is Brass Goggles. And, of course, we all know Dr. Grorbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators & Other Marvelous Contraptions. What's really interesting there, beyond the gorgeous ray guns themselves, is the metafictional way they've built hints of a story around the props. To say nothing of the various comics and animated projects. And, of course, a visit to Wikipedia shows how large the canon of steampunk really is, including a lot of alternate history, much of Tim Powers, and labeling a lot of classic fiction as "proto-steampunk" in the same way PKD and Bester are sometimes said to be proto-cyberpunk.

So, is steampunk a niche of a niche of a niche? Or is the real age of steampunk just beginning?

Update 9/21/07: This discussion has jumped over to George Mann's new blog, and is really worth checking out.