The empire fights for coal and iron, but the Hron fight for their way of life…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts—available from AK Press.
“You’re using me,” I said.
“That might be true, but I also love you.”
One is the Lady of the Waking Waters, an immortal mermaid. The other is a thief, who steals lives until a wish can be fulfilled, and a life-changing choice must be made.
Margaret Killjoy’s Danielle Cain series is a dropkick-in-the-mouth anarcho-punk fantasy that pits traveling anarchist Danielle Cain against eternal spirits, hypocritical ideologues, and brutal, unfeeling officers of the law. The story continues with The Barrow Will Send What it May, available April 3rd from Tor.com Publishing.
Now a nascent demon-hunting crew on the lam, Danielle and her friends arrive in a small town that contains a secret occult library run by anarchists and residents who claim to have come back from the dead. When Danielle and her crew investigate, they are put directly in the crosshairs of a necromancer’s wrath — whose actions threaten to trigger the apocalypse itself.
Oh, anarchism, what a strange creature you are. Once a major political force all over the world (anarchists outnumbered communists for quite some time in pre-revolutionary China, for example), anarchism is now one of the most misunderstood political ideologies around.
Searching for clues about her best friend’s mysterious suicide, Danielle ventures to the squatter, utopian town of Freedom, Iowa, and witnesses a protector spirit—in the form of a blood-red, three-antlered deer—begin to turn on its summoners. She and her new friends have to act fast if they’re going to save the town—or get out alive.
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy pits utopian anarchists against rogue demon deer in this dropkick-in-the-mouth punk fantasy that Alan Moore calls “scary and energetic.” Available August 15th from Tor.com Publishing.
Does a renewed world still have a place for those who only know how to destroy? While defending a tea-growing commune in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, one person seeks an answer.
The Victorians invented sex.
Okay, okay, there’s biological evidence suggesting their forebears figured it out too, but our cultural understanding of sex in the western world is more steeped in the late 19th century than even us steampunks would care to admit. Sure, they were notoriously prude, but the Victorians were obsessed with sex. They just lied about it, constantly.
For the past six months, I’ve been working with several Victorian historians, professional sex workers, and sex-positive activists to assemble A Steampunk’s Guide to Sex. (Yes, unlike mainstream satires of the steampunk subculture, we’re rather open about stuff like this. And we appreciate sex. A lot.) During our research, we uncovered just how much the Victorian Age had impacted our modern attitudes about love and sexuality, for better and worse. So then, here are four Victorian kinks that existed during your great-grandparents’ time.
Steampunk is, in part at least, a re-envisioning of humanity’s interaction with the things that we make and how we make them. It’s a non-luddite critique of technology that says “Hey, you’re doing it wrong” without trying to eschew technology outright. And that critique is sorely, sorely needed, now more than ever.
I first consciously got into steampunk back in 2004. It was the perfect aesthetic lens for my interests: history, mad science, genre fiction, the underclasses, and radical politics. It was steampunk, really, that helped me realize how awesome it is to be classy yet poor, that we can celebrate individual and communal ingenuity without babbling on about how great this or that nation or empire might be.
Now, seven years later, I’m constantly amazed by how many people, including some of the most die-hard steampunk adherents, seem to believe that steampunk has nothing to offer but designer clothes. There are people (a minority, I would argue, just a loud one) who act like steampunk is simply a brassy veneer with which to coat the mainstream. But sorry, whether folks are happy about it or not, there have always been radical politics at the core of steampunk.
