Click the Flywheel to be transported to any of a myriad rewards, sites across the internet replete with coal dust, engine grease, and all things Steampunk.
Popping back here for a moment as we’ve just been told that AST has just bought Russian rights to Steampunk! […]
We have 2 copies of Monstrous Affections to give away here!
New book, ToC, starred review, events! This September Candlewick will be publishing our second YA anthology, yay! This one, disappointingly, […]
There’s a ton of fascinating steampunk things out there in the world, but this mechanical tiger really takes the biscuit. It […]
The paperback is flying off the shelves, yay! Hey, Kelly and I will be in Boston this week for the […]
Headline says it all! There will be a reading, Q&A, and signing at 3:30 PM at Back Pages Books (289 Moody St.) in Waltham as part of the Watch City Festival. We went last year and loved wandering around meeting all the different artists, seeing the parade, and just being part of a great day.
The weather is supposed to be 80 degrees and fair, bring your parasol!
Hey, so we didn’t win but it was an honor to be nominated: thanks, booksellers!
Also, Dylan Horrocks, author of “Steam Girl” posted a couple of great paintings that we absolutely love from his story:
We’re over the moon* to see that Steampunk! is a finalist for the Indies Choice Book Awards. As two former booksellers (who met while working in a bookstore) this means a lot to us. Plus, there are a lot of great books on that list!
For poetic justice I kind of hope Shine by Lauren Myracle wins in the YA category. Also, I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen must win the picture book award. There’s still half a chance we will be at BEA, you never know, so maybe we will see in person who wins.
* Ok, so we’re actually in New Zealand at the Writers Week, but it is very away from home and it is awesome to be here so it is sort of like being over the moon.
And this week we get to meet Dylan Horrocks, whose Hicksville we’ve been a fan of for years. I even bought a second copy of it (somewhere, where?) because it was signed. Which explains, I suppose, why I do not have it here. Eek!
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The Guardian and the Observer both served up great reviews of Steampunk! this week—that’s the UK cover to the right!
The run in on the Observer review—which makes sense if you read the previous review of a Jill Wolfson novel—is hilarious:
“The only cure for hissy fits this Christmas is to stomp off to a cosy corner with a copy of Steampunk! (Walker £9.99) – and perhaps suggest that your teenager reads it too. This anthology of “fantastically rich and strange stories”, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J Grant, is firmly in the tradition of Jules Verne and HG Wells, and is packed with grotesque automata, devilish toys and tricksy time machines. Kelly Link’s own contribution, “The Summer People”, adds fairy folk and US backwoods gothic to the mix in a chilling tale. Slam the door very loudly and make sure you’re left alone for the duration.”
Mal Peet in The Guardian says:
“Steampunk! is a plump and handsome book consisting of 14 stories, two in comic-strip form, by American and Australasian writers, eight of whom are women. It’s a delicious buffet for anarchic teenagers whose minds strain at the leash of teen fiction.” All right!
1 Comment »The LA Times has a lovely list of holiday picks—mouse over the covers to read comments—including this lovely Steampunk! book of ours!
I’ve got my own quite different kind of list on Indiebound (of course!). Haven’t added many books, recently. Too busy catching up with the to-be-read stack!
Leave a Comment »The start is a little slow but it was fun to watch the first two episodes of Steampunk Stacie while doing other thing:
Steampunk Stacie Episode 1 from Seth Foreman on Vimeo.
Steampunk Stacie Episode 2 from Seth Foreman on Vimeo.
Leave a Comment »Or even the month before. Just watched this CBS Sunday Morning clip, “Yesterday’s Tomorrows,” which includes a lot of great people, amazing gadgetry, and even some books. Want want shiny stuff!
Leave a Comment »In Sept. 2010 Locus Magazine did a special Steampunk edition and this was my contribution, which later became the bones of the introduction(!):
A couple of years ago my wife Kelly Link and I realized we knew quite a few young adult authors who were writing steampunk novels—or, in the case of Cassandra Clare and Scott Westerfeld — steampunk series and, while driving up from New York City to Massachusetts with Holly Black and Cassandra, we came up with the idea for an book: Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories. (I’m not sure if my enthusiasm for the exclamation mark will make it through to the final published book—we’ll see what the acquiring editor, Deborah Noyes at Candlewick says.) [I’m very glad that it did make it through!]
That subtitle became the editorial statement that we sent to writers in response to their question: “But what is steampunk?” We mined movie (Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, Caro and Jeunet’s City of Lost Children) and literary history (The Difference Engine, The Golden Compass, etc.) but what we asked for were explorations and expansions of the genre.
If steampunk is only a design aesthetic, then surely any story can be steampunk if enough brass goggles (or brass Googles) are added? Almost, but not quite. Because what attracted us to the genre was something else: the DIY/maker/Etsy/individual artist contributors who were making the genre up out of whole cloth (and, yes, brass widgets) as they went along. Is there anyone who saw Mary Robinette Kowal’s 2007 Kowal Portable Typewriter and Adding Machine who didn’t want one of their own? Mary wasn’t just dropping a twenty at Borders for a sticker: she made her own. Is there anyone reading this who doubts their coffee table will not soon be weighed down with the VanderMeers Steampunk Reloaded? Jeff and Ann have gathered new and reprint stories, but they’re also including a lot of original art.
What we loved about the genre was that openness to new interpretations and to new contributions from unexpected places. If every steampunk story is set in nineteenth century London, readers will soon start looking elsewhere. Which is one of the reasons it has been fun to see writers such as Cherie Priest take the genre and remake it from the ground up (and combine it with a few others) in a new location.
So we took this rather wide-angled and definitely non-specific request for stories to writers whose work we loved, some we knew, many we didn’t, and what we were hoping for is that they would show us sides of the genre we couldn’t have imagined.
What did we get? Steampunk stories set in Canada, New Zealand, Wales, Ancient Rome, future Australia, alternate California, and even a post-apocalyptic steampunk story—how’s that for genre crashing?—from authors including M.T. Anderson, Holly Black, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Knox, Garth Nix, Delia Sherman, Ysabeau Wilce, and others. A genre, by definition, is defined by what it includes so this book will be steampunk but it is also, we hope! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories that readers within the genre will enjoy beside other favorites and that readers (of all ages) outwith the genre can use as an introduction to a genre that’s getting it’s brassy paws all over every other genre it can.
Leave a Comment »you are causing a riot!
Leave a Comment »You can read Holly Black’s lovely dancing automaton story, “Everything Amiable and Obliging” on Storyville!
And, Wired’s Geekdad blog reviewed the book and said: “All fourteen tales are enjoyable, but I especially liked Clockwork Fagin and Oracle Engine — the former because of the fun and interesting ways the author offers up to show this group of misfits taking control of their own lives and the latter because of how the author took an ancient Greek story and updated it with some gears and steam.”
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