After almost a year of researching and writing, this past month S.J. Chambers and I wrapped up our work on The Steampunk Bible, a coffee-table guide to the genre, forthcoming from Abrams Image in May 2011. As we both look back at the process, we remain amazed at how much the book changed and evolved during that time. We began with the goal of providing a definitive overview of the genre in all of its manifestations, while also telling compelling stories about some of its movers and shakers. By September, when we held the first pass in our hands, we were happy to find that true synergy had occurred, and that readers would see the connections and interplay between Steampunk as fiction, fashion, art, making, music, and in other creative disciplines.

The book features quotes or interviews with a wide range of experts, from Libby Bulloff to Ay-leen the Peacemaker, Bruce Sterling to Jake von Slatt, Bryan Talbot to Gail Carringer. It even includes an exclusive excerpt in translation from a Brazilian Steampunk story.

[Interview with S.J. Chambers below the cut]

In Angela Carter’s amazing Nights at the Circus, Fevvers, a highwire act if ever there was one, causes disbelief and awe in equal measure because she’s billed as a flying woman, but in flight she takes her time and rudely ignores the laws of gravity. It’s as if she’s daring the audience to call her a fake, to accuse her of being held up by invisible wires and other tricks of the circus trade.

Steampunk has its own version of this high wire act, in that depictions of dirigibles in movies represent a kind of tipping point for the audience’s threshold of disbelief. Most films don’t attempt to realistically map out what a fantastical dirigible might look like—they’re just interested in something that seems visually cool. We can get behind that—cool is good. But sometimes it doesn’t work, especially because a dirigible in a righteous Steampunk movie is a kind of character in and of itself. Not believing in a character, even one made of canvas, wood, and metal, can doom a film.

[Who gets it right?]

Who knows when Steampunk really hit the mainstream? Some point to the long article in the New York Times last summer as a harbinger of ascendancy. Others to the moment when many of us found that our ears contained tiny golden clockwork gears instead of cartilage and bone. Still others to the spontaneous appearance over Beijing last week of thousands of tiny nano dirigibles no bigger than a pinhead—which all winked out of existence a moment later—prompting me to wonder exactly what parallel universe exists just next-door).

But none of those sit well with me as indicators. Me, I say when the top rated new television series in these here United States of America starts thinking about shooting scenes in Steampunk bars, the Steampunk Revolution is here to stay. (Certainly, it now seems perfectly acceptable to reveal in polite company that I am working on the Steampunk Bible for Abrams Books in NYC, a cornucopia of steam goodness, with the aid of the brilliant archivist, Selena Chambers.)

Through sekrit intel sources deep in the Steampunk insurgency—otherwise known as my stepson Jason, who is one of the casting directors for both NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles—I discovered that the LA version had decided to shoot a Steampunk scene. I soon tracked down the mysterious Speed Weed in a clandestine Hollywood bungalow location to get the low-down on the up-high. Weed is one of the eight writers on NCIS: Los Angeles, airing at 9, Tuesday nights on CBS. Starring Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J, it’s the number one rated new show of the season.

[Here’s what he had to say.]

This summer I had a wonderful teaching experience, serving as the assistant director and resident writer for Shared Worlds, a unique world-building/writing camp for teens hosted by Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. For two weeks, along with Wofford staff, I helped nineteen highly creative teens from as far away as Japan create fantasy/SF worlds and then write stories set in those worlds.


(The Shared Worlds students in high spirits, with Jeff on the left, and Tobias Buckell, center, flanked by TAs Stephyn and Zach.)

Also assisting were several visiting writers, including Tobias Buckell, who flew in right after an appearance at Comic-Con in San Diego. Buckell focused on cliche and archetype, getting the students to see their worlds and their writing in a different light. I thought his teaching style was great, engaging the students through a combination of lecture, workshop, and video.

Buckell used the hilarious Skeleton of Cadavra trailer as the jumping off point for a discussion of when to use cliches and when to subvert or think beyond them. As Buckell said, “You can put your heart and soul into something and readers go c’mon—really? Because the writer has missed some portion of the cliches out there.”

One of the first answers when he asked the students for examples of cliche came from Lyndsey Werner, who replied, “Anything Hollywood, especially romantic comedies.” Later, during a discussion of Nature as Villain, student Miranda Severance memorably said, “It’s always the scaly ones that are evil. Never the fluffy ones.”

[More below the fold...]