SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

The Anubis Gates (Tim Powers)
Perdido Street Station (China Mieville)

Cherie Priest's The clockwork century. You might want to start on the second book as I found the first one kind of slow.

Nefertiti's Heart by A.W. Exley is a great place to start

Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. I really enjoyed the main character, a young prostitute in the frontier northwest.

Silvana wrote: "The Anubis Gates (Tim Powers)"

That.

Also, Soulless by Gail Carriger and Mainspring by Jay Lake

You might say - or rather, I would say - the great grand-daddy of steampunk was H.G. Wells, so check out The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon if you haven't already read them. I'd skip Jules Verne; his books are readable only for historical context, but there are lots of fun and truly steampunk-y period illustrations of his work to be found on the web. The late 19th C illustrators Harry Grant Dart and Fred T. Jane drew the best flying machines.

On the centennial of Wells's birth, Stephen Baxter published an authorized sequel to The Time Machine called The Time Ships which I rather enjoyed; it arguably edges into so-called 'dieselpunk' but there's considerable overlap IMO. Anti-ice by the same author posits an Industrial Revolution fuelled by anti-matter.

And I'm a big fan of Wm Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine; it doesn't wrap up in any narratively conventional sense but it's got a lot more on its mind than a top hat and goggles...;)

More alternate historical fiction than fantasy or scifi, the novel Queen Victoria's Bomb might also be up your alley.

Ooh, ooh - one more to add: War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches is a fun short story collection with various authors riffing on Wells's Martians coming down here and there around the world during the Victorian era, from Imperial China - in a story called Foreign Devils, to small town Texas - in the amusingly titled Night of the Cooters.

The question is what is a steampunk story and how do you write it?

A steampunk story is one based on anarchonistic steam technology. The classic example is one where the computers run on gears and steam.

Ones I like:
Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders and Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War
More SF than most.

Girl Genius, Vol. 1: Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank and all the rest of its series, even if the authors tend to prefer "gaslamp romance."

A Midsummer Tempest also features anarchronistic steam technology -- that is, the Industrial Revolution and the English Civil War are happening at the same time.

Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter. There is a nice intro by Tim Powers (author of The Anubis Gates, already mentioned, and a must). Jeter coined the phrase so he's a good one to read.

If you are going steam punk you have to read Mortal Engines

The Death of the Necromancer was wonderful and thrilling!

I'm thinking of starting reading The Digging Leviathan. Someone said the series was steampunk. Has anyone read any of these?
if so were they interesting?

I thoroughly enjoy Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series. (Just about to start book 4) and Colleen Gleason has two books out in her Stoker & Holmes series, also excellent. :)

I thoroughly enjoy Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series. (Just about to start book 4) and Colleen Gleason has two books out in her Stoker & Holmes series, also excellent. :)

Off-hand, I recommend Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine and Mieville's Perdido Street Station.

A few books ago I read and thoroughly loved Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear . Set in in the late 1800's, in a city like Seattle, but called something else, the main character is a prostitute, among other things-- and a great heroine!

I don't think The Steampunk Trilogy has been mentioned. It's very tongue in cheek, title included, and very fun. In the vein of much of the best steampunk, it is feminist, anti-colonial and class-conscious. His Dark Materials also has definite steampunk undertones.

Warren Ellis has written several comic books that swing to this tune, the best being FreakAngels. It used to be a webcomic, but I'm afraid that's no longer the case. On the other hand, I've just discovered that there's now an... animated series?