St. Jerome's Steampunk Talk Book List |
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My books on children's fantasy literature |
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 Beyond Window-Dressing: Canadian Children's Fantasy at the Millennium
- Recipient of the
2004 Frances E. Russell Award. Examines children's fantasy
literature at the turn of the millennium, and discusses whether the
genre in Canada has matured to the point of being able to compete with
the best works of the UK and the USA. |
James P. Blaylock ~ website One of the original 'steampunks', along with with Tim Powers and the coiner of the term, K. W. Jeter. |
 Homunculus by James P. BlaylockDoes the night seem uncommonly full of dead men and severed heads to you? Langdon St. Ives, Victorian scientist-of-leisure, grapples with the vivisectionist, animator-of-the-dead Narbondo. Homunculi, the late Joanna Southcote, and carp run amok in late-Victorian London. |
 Lord Kelvin's Machine - James P. Blaylock "They're a dangerous breed when they go ferral, academics are." Langdon St. Ives clashes again with Dr. Narbondo, who has murdered the gentleman-scientist's wife and is threatening to use volcanoes to push the earth slightly closer to the path of an approaching comet. This means that the earth's magnetic fields will attract the comet's iron core, thus making collision and the destruction of life on earth certain. The Royal Academy intend to counter this threat by reversing the planet's magnetic poles; this, they believe, will cause a brief period wherein the earth will have no electromagnetic field at all, thus allowing the comet to sail safely by. The great Lord Kelvin is at work on a device to effect this. |
 The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives - Blaylock steampunk omnibus A good deal of controversy arose late in the last century over what has been referred to by the more livid newspapers as The Horror in St. James Park or The Ape-box Affair.... So begins the first chronicle in the long and often obscure life of Langdon St. Ives, Victorian scientist and adventurer, respected member of the Explorers Club and of societies far more obscure, consultant to scientific luminaries, and secret, unheralded savior of humankind. From the depths of the Borneo jungles to the starlit reaches of outer space, and ultimately through the dark corridors of past and future time, the adventures of Langdon St. Ives invariably lead him back to the streets and alleys of the busiest, darkest, most secretive city in the world -- London in the age of steam and gaslamps, with the Thames fog settling in over the vast city of perpetual evening. St. Ives, in pursuit of the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, discovers the living horror of revivified corpses, the deep sea mystery of a machine with the power to drag ships to their doom, and the appalling threat of a skeleton-piloted airship descending toward the city of London itself, carrying within its gondola a living homunculus with the power to drive men mad.... This omnibus volume contains the collected Steampunk stories and novels of James P. Blaylock, one of the originators of the genre, which hearkens back to the worlds of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, a world where science was a work of the imagination, and the imagination was endlessly free to dream. The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives will contain the original illustrations J. K. Potter created for the novel Lord Kelvin's Machine, plus many more for the novel, Homunculus, and the short stories. Includes: -"The Ape-Box Affair" -"Two Views of a Cave Painting" -"The Hole in Space" -Homunculus -"The Idol's Eye" -Lord Kelvin's Machine |
 The Ebb Tide - Blaylock's new Langdon St. Ives novel. A flaming meteor over the Yorkshire Dales, a long-lost map drawn by the lunatic Bill “Cuttle” Kraken, and the discovery of a secret subterranean shipyard beneath the River Thames lead Professor Langdon St. Ives and his intrepid friend Jack Owlesby into the treacherous environs of Morecambe Bay, with its dangerous tides and vast quicksand pits. They descend beneath the sands of the Bay itself, into a dark, unknown ocean littered with human bones and the remnants of human dreams. In this tale of murder, infamy, and Victorian intrigue, the tides of destiny shift relentlessly and rapidly as the stakes grow ever higher and the pursuit more deadly.... |
Paul Marlowe ~ website |
 Sporeville - by Paul Marlowe A darkly humorous steampunk mystery set in 1880s Nova Scotia, featuring a séance, a girl who is part werewolf, and a Confederate eugenicist with an army of sleepwalkers.... |
Tim Powers ~ website |
 The Anubis Gate - by Tim PowersTime travel back to the 19th century, where the 20th century's pre-eminent scholar of poet William Ashbless makes a surprising discovery about the object of his academic career. Poet William Ashbless is a joint creation of Powers and Blaylock, who have him turn up from time to time in a number of their works. |
Philip Reeve ~ website |
 Larklight - Philip ReeveAlchemy allows wooden etherships to ply the spaceways of a British Empire extending to the edge of the solar system. |
 Starcross - Philip ReeveSinister top hats from the end of time threaten to destroy the Empire and all the peoples of the Solar System. Secret agent Richard Burton has been turned into a tree, and Myrtle is stuck on ancient Mars with only a bathing costume for defence. Woe for the Queen, and the Mumby family! |
 Mothstorm - Philip ReeveThe catastrophe foreseen by the knitters of the World-Cozy has come to pass - a swarm of moths from the dark etherways beyond Georgium Sidus is engulfing the Empire! |
 The Difference Engine - William Gibson Bruce SterlingThe completion of Charles Babbage's difference engine brings the computer revolution to the 19th instead of the 20th century. |
Real Victorians The inspiration for steampunk |
| The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope |
| Professor Challenger by Arthur Conan Doyle |
| 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne |
| The Time Machine by H.G. Wells |
| The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson |
| The Story of the Treasure-Seekers by E. Nesbit |
| Nomad of the Time Streams by Michael Moorcock - not a Victorian himself, Moorcock's character Oswald Bastable comes from Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers. |
Steampunk in Films & Anime |
| Secret Adventures of Jules Verne |
| Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water |
| Laputa |
| Steamboy |
| Metropolis |
| Last Exile |
Quests and Kingdoms
Introduces children's fantasy literature, from its origins to its
recent burst of popularity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
cenury.