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This is my list of Essential Steampunk Reading, for those who want to know where this recent Steampunk boom originated.
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! – Harry Harrison
The Warlord of the Air – Michael Moorcock
The Anubis Gates – Tim Powers
Morlock Night – KW Jeter
Homunculus – James Blaylock
The Difference Engine – William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Anno Dracula – Kim Newman
Queen Victoria’s Bomb – Ronald W Clark
The Steampunk Trilogy – Paul Di Filippo
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Those of you who are just becoming aware of the marvellous delights of Steampunk might be surprised to learn that it’s been around for some time. And I don’t mean Jules Verne and HG Wells either, for they aren’t Steampunk. They’re the ancestors and inspirations for Steampunk and revered for it. True Steampunk can really be said to begin in the early 1980s. Three friends – Tim Powers, James Blaylock and KW Jeter – decided to write in this mode and thereby both defined and kicked off the genre.
Despite their wonderful work, however, Steampunk really remained a minority interest, unknown to most people until quite recently. Some superb books were written in this period – Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age – but it has only been in the last four or five years that Steampunk has broken out and hit the big time. Wherever you turn, now, you bump into Steampunk – in books, in movies, in fashion – but this is the second flowering of Steampunk. It’s been sleeping for thirty years, but now it’s awake.
This is why I say we are now living in the Steampunk Renaissance. Long may it thrive!
I took a break from my latest Work In Progress and started thinking about how I could save the planet. As you do.
I swivelled away from the computer, hands behind my head, tossing up between instituting a utopian regime and formulating a plan to maximise innate human potential without our developing those really huge craniums when my gaze landed on the bookshelf in my study. That’s when I realised that, in many ways, I’m already doing my part in saving the world.
You see, with the accepted science pointing out that we have an unfortunate rise in Carbon Dioxide levels and that these increased levels are responsible for an accelerating Greenhouse Effect which is bumping up global temperatures with some decidedly nasty outcomes waiting for us, it behoves us all to do something about reducing the amount of Carbon Dioxide floating around and doing its best to make us all miserable.
That’s why we have all this talk about Carbon trading and Carbon Offsets and Carbon Sequestration – which is where I see my greatest contribution coming to the fore.
Carbon sequestration is generally thought of as pumping vast volumes of Carbon Dioxide into underground reservoirs, but it can mean locking up carbon in many ways – just so long as it doesn’t break down and become CO2 in the atmosphere.
My answer? Gazing at my bookshelf, there it is. Books. Books are made of paper. Paper is made of trees. Trees are made of carbon (mostly). If we burn trees, that’s bad because it releases carbon. If the trees rot, it releases carbon (bad). But making the paper into books which sit on shelves all neat and protected, well, that’s locking up all that carbon for hundreds of years. It sits there, unspoiled, a handy carbon sink for posterity. Every book is helping, every shelf. Every library is a vast world-saving lock-up, doing its best to keep up from the devastating effects of world-wide Climate Change.
Think about it. Buy books and save the planet. It’s your duty to do so.
It’s poorly appreciated, but writing is an occupation which has hazards. Most writers, at one time or another, will suffer from at least one of the following diseases, conditions or injuries. Most are treatable and with appropriate therapy writers can look forward to living relatively full and normal lives.
Adjectivitis: condition especially pronounced at first draft, where adjectives spawn, multiply and run rampant through one’s writing.
Criticosis: a type of writing paralysis caused by overly active and insistent self-criticism.
Swelled Head Syndrome: condition that comes from reading too many glowing reviews. Rare.
Commadosis: An proliferation of commas so virile that they infect and convert all other punctuation.
Over Capitalisation: particularly common in Fantasy writing, where everything is made strangely Portentous by Splashing Capital Letters around Willy-Nilly.
Adverbia: the helpless need to add adverbs to every verb, relentlessly, inexorably, unstoppably.
The Grumps: envy stemming from the success of other writers. Common.
My Own Myopia: a form of selective blindness where a writer cannot see his or her own poor writing.
Forehead Hematoma: bruising to the brow, resulting from banging one’s head on the desk because of recalcitrant scenes, characters, plot developments etc.
Weighty Word Syndrome: a condition where every single word seems to weigh hundreds of kilos and requires commensurate effort to put in place. See ‘Immense Sentence Disorder’.
Hyperplotting: a deep-seated compulsion to construct narratives that rely on the regular use of the word ‘suddenly’.
Complications Complex: a form of writer delusion where ‘Complicatedness’ is mistaken for ‘Complexity’.
Naturally, this list is not exhaustive. Writers are more than capable of inventing new conditions at the drop of a hat. It is only through regular donations to writing-related medical research that we can hope to ameliorate the effects of Writing Diseases.
Once upon a time, the job description for a writer was fairly straightforward: you sat down and wrote. After that, you worked with an editor and revised your work through to publication.
Now, the requirements of the job are somewhat different, particularly if you are a writer for young people. It’s not enough just to do the writing – you have to be able to talk about it. Over my writing career I’ve presented to thousands of people, young and old, all over Australia. I’ve talked to crowds of hundreds of people. I’ve run intensive writing workshops. I’ve been a writer-in-residence. I’ve been on panels, I’ve chaired debates, I’ve even doing the MC thing and hosted glittering occasions. So far this year, I’ve spent nearly forty days away from my desk doing that other part of the job, at schools, libraries and festivals. In the beginning, I was uncertain about this part of the job, but I’ve grown to enjoy it. I’ve learned about presenting and honed my skills by the time honoured method of trial and error followed by reflection. I thought I’d share a few things that work for me:
1. Introduce yourself. Part of the success of your presentation hinges on your credibility, so you need to establish this straight away. Even if you get an introduction, it’s worth spending a bit of time expanding on it, establishing why the audience should bother listening to you. You have some expertise, but tell the audience what it is!
2. Outline the presentation. This is a simple way of connecting with the audience. Let them know, broadly, what you’re going to cover. Let them know that there will be time for questions at end – or that you’re happy to take questions along the way. Tell them at the beginning that you’re going to cover the Top 5 Ways to Write a Detective Novel (and then tick them off along the way). Tell them that you’ll spend time on the Life of a Writer, then you’ll read an excerpt from your latest book, and at the end you’ll show them something from your Work in Progress. These signposts help your audience’s expectations, and get them ready for your presentation.
3. Engage. Easier said than done, of course, but try to connect with the audience near the beginning of your talk. Some suggestions: tell a short anecdote about your school days or your reading; tell how you got to the venue (a funny thing happened to me on the way …); ask a leading question that most of them will answer in the affirmative (‘How many of you saw [insert name of latest popular movie here]?); thank them for having you as a speaker – because it’s important market research for you …
4. Keep an eye on the audience. Try to judge from their expressions and posture how your talk is going. Speed it up, if necessary. Slow down and explain more if they’re looking puzzled.
5. Audio visual is helpful, but not to be relied on. No matter how well you’ve prepared your PowerPoint or images of book covers, there’s no guarantee it will work on the equipment at whatever venue you’ve arrive at. I have multimedia presentations but I use them very judiciously, usually at places I’ve been before. If I take them to an untried venue, I have a complete alternative, low-tech presentation ready to go, just in case.
6. Mention your website at the end, and it can be worth mentioning if you have a Facebook and Twitter presence.
7. As you finish thank the audience. It never hurts.
I enjoy the talking side of the writing job. It’s refreshing, challenging and it gives me a chance to meet my audience face to face – or my potential audience, anyway.
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