the_grip on 28/12/2010 at 15:03
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
Boneshaker and its sequel, Dreadnought, are both pretty great. They're not just steampunk, they're pretty solid alt-history. With zombies.
Thanks for the clarification. From the
Boneshaker Amazon page under the Publisher's Weekly section:
Quote:
Starred Review. Maternal love faces formidable challenges in this stellar steampunk tale.
Steampunk seems to be a very loose category from what I can tell.
Two other books I'm considering right now, in addition to some of the recommendations above:
China Mieville's
KrakenJonathan L. Howard's
Johannes Cabal the NecromancerNot trying to get too OT, but any comments on these two are appreciated.
p.s. would have put this whole discussion in the "What are you reading" thread, but I can't seem to find it for some reason.
demagogue on 28/12/2010 at 17:13
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
Burroughs was neither 19th Century nor Victorian.
I guess the lesson here is obviously I don't care enough about him myself to bother checking my preconceptions. He talks about the intersection between respectable society and the disconcerting weirdness of the "real" (fantasy) world, more than Verne I thought, which is at least an American caricature of a Victorianesque kind of theme. But "steampunk" itself is a later caricature of Victorian norms + steam-scifi and not really Victorian itself at all (if anything a later romantic, distorted look back on it they'd probably find very foreign), so the exact period was sort of beside my general point anyway. As for being pulp, steampunk is essentially a pulp genre isn't it? We're talking about guys with steam-powered jetpacks.
Edit: By the way, I found the early (1920s) moon / Mars travel movies quite steampunkish (along with Metropolis of course), one of my favorite being (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL6hG1erfFo) Aelita. I don't know why I like this version so much; something about the fantastic costumes and sets of the Martians, and the lone troubled genius building a rocket in his workshop.
SubJeff on 29/12/2010 at 00:47
Quote Posted by the_grip
Specific recommendations are always welcome... got any?
Dickens. Or Orwell.
Rendezvous with Rama,
Anything that isn't so tightly pigeonholed for the sake of that pigeonhole. If you stumble across good Steampunk then fine, but with such a niche bandwagon jumpers will be utter trash.
And fwiw I got bored of The Difference Engine after about 50 pages.
june gloom on 29/12/2010 at 02:04
The main problem with The Difference Engine is that the real climax of the story happens well before the proper end of it. Everything else is just a denouement.
Melan on 21/2/2011 at 22:58
Quote Posted by Queue
[edit] Speaking of a high-tech, steam-powered metropolis, I'd love to get ahold of the novelized version of Fritz Lang's,
Metropolis.
I stumbled on this thread by accident, and on the off chance you are still reading: (
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1123/metropolis)
Metropolis by Thea von Harbou (Fritz Lang's wife and main collaborator in a lot of his movies).
And on the same note, check out the new 2010 restoration. It adds about half an hour to the running time with footage that had been presumed lost and was found in the Buenos Aires film archive. While the new parts are rather grainy even after computer cleanup, they finally recreate the entire movie more or less as Lang intended before Paramount butchered his work. Entire subplots and minor characters are returned to their place, events are in order, and Dr. Rotwang actually has a motivation now (well, still crazy, but for a good reason). Plus the restoration uses the original, epic score. If you haven't watched it yet, you've got to!
june gloom on 21/2/2011 at 23:41
Oh shit! I gotta get in on that! Thanks for the heads up!
system shocker on 22/2/2011 at 00:53
If I were you I would spend the amazon gift cards on other items. I buy games and hardware from amazon all the time. Just the other day I bought some liquid diamond thermal paste.
june gloom on 22/2/2011 at 05:34
That was a thoroughly useless post in a forum full of useless posts. Good job.
catbarf on 22/2/2011 at 06:06
Quote Posted by the_grip
Cherie Priest's
Boneshaker.
Boneshaker is currently sitting on my shelf in a pile of other books I intend to re-read. It is an excellent book that I found especially interesting as its aware of the tropes it employs, as well as others typical to the genre, and so alternates between embracing them wholeheartedly and subverting them entirely in an unpredictable manner. It keeps the plot and setting fresh in spite of what amounts to a mish-mash of Victorian science fiction, steampunk, zombie, and general post-apocalyptic cliches. It's actually good fiction, rather than passable fiction you'd read solely because of the theme (something I've been guilty of).
I wasn't aware a sequel had been written, though, so that's something I need to get.
