1 July 2019 Volume XII Number 2 ASKANCE Whole Number 46 The Steampunk Issue Edited & published by John Purcell, 3744 Marielene Circle, College Station, TX 77845-3926 USA Proof reading on this issue courtesy of our cats Inga, Eyegore, and Froderick. If there are typos anywhere in this issue, these are the responsible parties. Good help is so hard to find these days. Contents © 2019 by John A. Purcell. Contact information: [email protected] Even so, all rights revert to original artists and authors upon publication. Disclaimers are a dirty business, but are always included. You understand. I know you do. What you have here in your hands (or on screen) is another Mythical Publication. Copies of this fine, back on a quarterly schedule fanzine can be had for The Usual, which means expressed interest, submission and eventual inclusion of articles and artwork, letters of comment, and cold hard cash in the amount of $3.00 USD if you want a printed copy mailed to you. Bribes are also accepted. Of course, if you send in locs, articles, and artwork, you just earned a life-time free subscription. Consider yourself lucky, indeed. Table of Contents Bemused Natterings………………………………………………………..…..3 All Steamed Up: an introduction to “Writing Steampunk”……5 Writing Steampunk: author perspectives from Gail Carriger, Paul di Filippo, Jonathan Fesmire, and Rie Sheridan Rose……………………………………………………….6 Becoming a Steampunk Vendor, by Lloyd Penney……………..11 The Grime is Afoot, fiction by Taral Wayne…………………………14 Sun Thunder, fiction by John Purcell………………………….……….16 Steamy Book Reviews!: Writers of the Future, Vol. 35, David Farland, ed……..….…25 The Osiris Ritual, by George Mann………………….………………26 Figby, By Bill Fischer……………………………………………………..…………..28 From the Hinterlands, the lettercolumn…………..….….………….29 Regional Convention Calendar……………………………….……..……30 What’s Next………………………………………………………….…….………38 Art Credits Front Cover by Steve Stiles; Sheryl Birkhead – 2; Teddy Harvia – 13, 19; photos by Lloyd Penney – 11, 12, 13; clip art – 14, 24, 27, 37; nicked off the internet – 3, 4, 5, 10, 16, 18, 22, 29, 30, 38 Member: FWA (since 2007!) 2 Time keeps on slipping, slipping… Indeed it does. After all, the issue in front of you was supposed to appear in January of 2019, and if I am reading the calendar correctly, it is now mid-July of 2019, so it is A Good Thing that Steve Stiles’ cover art for this Steampunk—themed issue did not have a date imprint. That makes it very easy to simply ignore the time element and still produce an issue that definitely needed the chance to germinate and grow. Quite frankly, that works for me. In any event, no apologies are forthcoming from this quarter, so it is time to get on with the show. Or, to be more precise, the fanzine. Put a few gears on it and call it Steampunk Or so goes the song by Sir Reginald Pikedevant, Esq., released back in 2011. In actuality, Steampunk does not require an exorbitant amount of hardware adorning one’s clothing, baggage, armaments, or whatever. When Valerie and I devised and began to create our Steampunk outfits, we kept the hardware add-ons to a minimum, instead opting for more of a cohesive costume. Hers is a Sphinx tamer named Philomena Tiberias Barnum – yes, P.T. Barnum – while mine is a more genteel intellectual sort who goes by the moniker of Professor Cames Jennimore Fooper – one C.J. Fooper, for short – a schoolmaster at the Highland School of Degenerate Literates. Half the fun of creating your own Steampunk character is devising the back-story, and boy, have we had a blast doing ours. Overall, in my mind Steampunk is more about an attitude and a general sense of wondrous adventure, exploring the “what ifs” of a time that might have been that offers a range of experiences from highly romanticized adventure to the bleakness of war, pestilence, and a positively dystopian view of humankind. Steampunk literature thus ranges from energetic, fun adventures for a young adult audience to serious explorations of human foibles and fears. Already mentioned is the character building and costume creation aspect of the genre, but something that sets Steampunk apart from science fiction fandom is the musical side. Because the literature is a genre mash-up, so is the music. Listen to any of the steampunk channels on Pandora and you can hear the influences of classic rock, folk, jazz, country, Dixieland, techno, metal, progressive, and punk rock in the recordings of artists like Steampunk Giraffe, Professor Elemental, Darwin Prophet, and dozens more. In the first article of this issue I will do my best to expand on these initial musings to put readers into the Steampunk milieu. I surveyed a handful of popular Steampunk authors and pulled their responses into an article about writing this particular type of story. Then I gathered together contributions from some 3 other folks who enjoy the genre, and even include a young adult steampunk story I wrote a few years ago. As for the other people involved this time around, here they are: Who is in this issue Bill Fischer I am extremely happy to welcome Bill back into these pages with a new Figby cartoon strip. Last issue I mentioned that Bill was recuperating from a heart attack, and his computer was recovering as well, so when he emailed me recently about doing Figby again, I was thrilled. Wish him well, folks, and let’s see what our favorite little lab assistant is up to these days. Teddy Harvia He really doesn’t need an introduction, but this Hugo award winning fan artist – who is also planning on helping out for next year’s Corflu here in College Station, Texas (which I am chairing, by the way) – sent in a batch of illustrations that are perfect little comic strips. Each features Harvia’s distinctive style and his well-known sense of humor. Next issue (in three months, I definitely hope!) should see the return of “Chat: the Fourth Fhannish Ghod.” I am looking forward to that already. Lloyd Penney As this issue is hitting the electronic newsstand known as efanzines.com, Lloyd and his wife Yvonne have recently returned from a jaunt to England, enjoyed their trip for assorted reasons, one of which was meeting with Steampunk-interested friends of theirs, besides seeing all sort of sights around London and England. In their daytime lives, Yvonne is retired, which Lloyd would love to be, but they traipse around their corner of Canada plying their Steampunk wares at various festivals and conventions, and that is the subject of Lloyd’s article herein. Taral Wayne Besides being a prolific writer of fan articles and artwork, not to mention producing numerous fanzines, Taral enjoys writing fiction. His contribution to this issue fits very neatly as a short pastiche of a famous Victorian era detective, and as anybody who has ever hung around fandom, they know I love a painful pun. The ones that hurt are usually the best. A special welcome goes to the Steampunk authors whose responses to the questionnaire made the first article possible: Gail Carriger, Paul di Filippo, Jonathan Fesmire, and Rie Sheridan Rose. Sadly, Cherie Priest is under a deadline crunch and other affairs, so she could not contribute. Still, I thank Cherie for responding as “interested, but sorry I cannot.” 4 When I stop and try to remember the first “steampunk” novel I ever read, I guess that would have to be The Anubis Gate (1983) by Tim Powers, which I read about a decade after it was published. Or it might have been Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air, published back in 1971, and it has been years since I read that book. Then again, I was a big fan of The Wild Wild West television show, which aired from 1967-1969, and then The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., which aired for only one season (1993- 1994), but was also a lot of fun. Add into the mix that I have always enjoyed H. G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine (1895) and the various works of Jules Verne were all set in the steam-powered era. Ergo, it could be concluded that the seed for my being a Steampunk fan was firmly implanted. Frankly, I did not even know at that time the term actually existed; according to popular tradition in this field, author K. W. Jeter coined the term in the late 1980s. Who knew? Heck, I have even written an article about Mark Twain being a Steampunk author during the age of steam, which appeared in Thomas Sadler’s fanzine The Reluctant Famulus #102 a number of years ago. (FYI: that article is now being revised for publication in the literary journal Mark Twain Studies, which I want to have done before I get too involved with fall semester this year.) My real interest in this sub-genre of the overall science fiction field began not quite a full decade ago when I read Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker (2009), the first of her Clockwork Universe books. I immediately began looking for other similar Steampunk-styled novels not only online, but also in our local Half-Price Bookstore, which is where I discovered the novels of Scott Westerfield and James Blaylock. Shortly after Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series began with Soulless (2009), those books really got Valerie and I hooked on Steampunk. When DeepSouthCon 49 was paired with FenCon VIII up in Dallas in 2011 (its convention nickname was “Southern Steam”), we brought the entire book series (up to that point) with us for Miss Gail to autograph. That weekend was also the debut of our Steampunk costumes.