K.W. Jeter

K.W. Jeter is best known for coining the term Steampunk, and being compared favorably, or unfavorably, to Philip K. Dick.

His career began with a couple of novels for Laser Books: Seeklight (1975) and The Dreamfields (1976).

His steampunk works began with an H.G. Wells continuation Morlock Night (1979), and continued with his Infernal Devices series beginning in 1987.

His cyberpunk novels include Dr. Adder (1984), The Glass Hammer (1985), Death Arms (1987), Farewell Horizontal (1989), Madlands (1991), and Noir (1998)

His horror novels began with Soul Eater (1983), and continued with Dark Seeker (1987), Mantis (1987), In the Land of the Dead (1989), The Night Man (1990), Wolf Flow (1992), and Kingdom of Shadows (2011).

Jeter also wrote media tie-ins through much of the 90s for franchises such as Blade Runner, Alien Nation, Star Trek, and Star Wars.  His most recent series is his self-published Kim Oh hit-woman books, some in ebook, some not.

Jeter has been releasing his back catalog in ebook, though it's a bit hard to navigate on Amazon with the stock photo covers and multiple short stories mixed in.  The links above are to the Kindle versions - sadly, most of his horror hasn't been reprinted.

The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle by Ron Goulart

The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle
by Ron Goulart
1984 Avon Books
Reprinted Wildside 2015 in Harry Challenge: Victorian Supernatural Sleuth

Early steampunk which has Ron Goulart in his element.  Set in 1897 Europe, Harry Challenge is a Pinkerton style detective who is hired to rescue a man believed held prisoner in a foreign castle.  Along the way he faces lifelike automatons, a werewolf, and a vampire.  Well, I say face.

What works here is Goulart's trademark humor.  Very few books are laugh-out-loud funny, and he doesn't try for it here, but the humor works to give the book charm, which it has in spades.  There are good guys galore: Challenge, his estranged love Princess Alicia, stage magician and genuine psychic the Great Lorenzo, spunky reporter Jennie, her rival reporter the braggart McMillion, and his foul-mouthed valet Tubbs.

What it's short on are bad guys and action.  There are few quick sword fights that last a couple sentences each, but very little actually happens until the end of the book, and almost nothing even then.

Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman (Books 1 & 2) - Balogun Ojetade

Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman (Books 1 & 2)
by Balogun Ojetade
Roaring Lions Productions 2012

Harriet Tubman is martial arts expert government agent who rescues the child of Secretary War Edwin Stanton at the request of John Wilkes Booth.  We start with alternative history and from there we get the whole kitchen sink added one element at a time: super powers, anachronistic technology, clockwork tree creatures, zombies (ghuls, but yeah, zombies), a serial killer, were-coyotes, mythical heroes, and magic curses.

At first this seemed like world building, but soon it becomes clear it's ADD.  This is the best and worst thing about the book depending on your point of view.  Things are light and fast paced, but the story jumps from one set piece to the next regardless of whether the last bit got resolved.  By the end we barely even see Harriet, and I lost track of what happened with the main conflict.

There's science fiction set in the 19th century and there is steampunk.  This is steampunk, and you could make a drinking game out of the words steam, brass, chrome, and goggles.  Despite having black characters and being set during the Civil War, slavery and racism are far from the worst things they encounter.  They are acknowledged but Ojetade doesn't let it get in the way of the fun.

This has nothing to do with Ojetade's book, but I imagined how this kind of thing would have gone down in the early 90s.  Most of the book would have been a heavy handed account of the horrors of slavery and racism, but with some sympathetic white folk shoehorned in so it didn't seem too militant.  And white readers would pat themselves on the back for being progressive enough to read it, all the while feeling a bit guilty and unsettled.

I'm not going to lie and say we're in a post-racial society, but I'm glad that we're at a point where we can get black genre fiction without having the characters and stories be defined by white racism.

Steampunks, Get Off the Grass

I like Victorian era science fiction.  I like some modern day science fiction in the same style.  I dig retrofutrism.  I hate steampunk.

Maybe that's too harsh.  The actual movies, books, and general aesthetic I enjoy.  What gets under my skin is steampunk as some kind of subculture, specifically how I hear about its "rising popularity" every couple of years.

The first thing that annoys me is the "-punk" suffix.  It made some sense when originally used in cyberpunk, but it's spiraled into meaninglessness, kind of like how all indie bands were in some obscure "-core" genre.  It kind of fit with splatterpunk, but decopunk should not be a word.  Dieselpunk sounded stupid and obscure until I figured out it meant "Sci-fi from and set in the 1920-40s, but written today".  Then you get your stonepunk (caveman days), clockpunk (Renaissance), atompunk (1950s-60s).  I would make a joke about nowpunk, but neologist Bruce Sterling beat me to it.  Instead I'd like to introduce my series of science fiction about hackers on the fringes of society that have implants in their brains that allow them to interface directly with computer networks, written in the style of 1980s books by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.  I'll call it cyberpunkpunk.  If that isn't already a thing, it will be.

Such things are largely meaningless in the 21st Century, but there is nothing edgy about steampunk.  Disney embraced it at Disneyland Paris back in 1992 while hipsters and nerds found out about it with 1999's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the same year Will Smith's Wild Wild West came out.  It was uncool long before it was cool.

Bleeding Edge!

Meanwhile, steampunk has spun off into some weird directions.  There's a collection of steampunk Sarah Palin cheesecake and more than one steampunk mime band.

Mainly it gives me bad flashbacks to some of the idiots that embraced cyberpunk a couple decades ago.  I knew a guy that had a tall stack of issues of 2600.  He would go through the dumpster in the back of Radio Shack, take apart old calculators, and sew circuit boards into his jacket.  He did not own a computer.  There was also a guy that would show up places in a full blown Borg outfit.  These people were idiots.  As is the guy in a waistcoat that held up my bus this morning because he kept missing the coin slot because he couldn't see through his welding goggles.