I asked the photographer Nadya Lev if I could reproduce this beautiful photo here; Nadia is a progenitor of Coilhouse, which I dare not look at too often lest I lose many hours. Rather than attempt to describe the magazine I'll link you to their mission statement. I've been hanging on to Nadya's steampunk hunk for a while not sure when I should premiere him. He seemed too suave and sleek a thing for my little scrapbook.
Today's the day! Polluto's Steampunk Orange issue is now available. My story, "Copper Heart," is a queer mash-up of Clockwork Orange with Poe's "Berenice." I love the cover art for this. Obsessed with imagery here, so I get very excited when something I'm in looks pretty:
Of all the new genres that have arisen in the past few decades steampunk is the only one I've attempted to write in. I make free with old surrealist, gothic, and magical realist tropes in my writing, but when I write in the steampunk genre I become a rule-follower. More established genres seem a bit more resilient, I don't imagine that they'll be harmed if I use them roughly. A budding genre requires more delicacy.
You don't want to be the guy who slaughtered steampunk.
The definition of steampunk I rely on is the one given on Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days blog by guest blogger Catherynne M. Valente. It's given in the form of an admonition. Here's a sample:
If you’re going to go prowling for tophatted villains at night, seek out the pure stuff, the real, filthy, ugly, euphoric sludge at the bottom of a spoon, because that’s the Victorian era, that’s steam power, that’s a world shredding itself to death on the spindle of industry, hoping to wake up to a prince in a hundred years.
I'm sure my pre-Raphealite heroes would find it odd and unsettling that I'm interested in all the early-industrial imagery that so horrified them that they constructed a life and an aesthetic in opposition to it.
Maybe good steampunk is steampunk that honors and shares that horror.
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