I posted the other day on my need to be better read in the steampunk genre (Since then I’ve received The Difference Engine and Boneshaker and have them piled comfortably on my desk, ready for reading). In addition, for the last seven or eight months I’ve periodically surfed the internet for information on anything from steam engines to dirigible flight to static electricity to historical Mediterranean commerce. I can’t say that I’ve understood everything I’ve read, but the time I’ve spent researching these things has been in an effort to inform Shadow of the Black City with believable, yet fantastic elements. If presented in the way I hope, those strange, yet somehow familiar things will be fun to read and imagine.
Lavie Tidhar explains the draw of steampunk in his guest post at the SF Signal website:
Technology has always been a kind of magic. And our lives today are suffused with a magic we can rarely fully comprehend. The Internet, mobile phones, reusable launch vehicles (RLVs), jet planes and stealth bombers, GPS and smart bombs, Google and Twitter and Facebook, PCs, satellites and a forty-year old flag on the moon… technological advances expand exponentially, and Victorian London represents the moment when technology exploded beyond a single person’s ability to understand the mechanisms underlying it.
The thread of burgeoning technology and the wonders and fears it evokes can be woven throughout countless stories and myriad themes. I like this flexibility because there is so much that can be done with it from alternate history to fantasy to retro sci-fi.