Andrew Mayer will be giving a sneak peak into Book 2: Hearts of Smoke and Steam (coming out Nov 22nd!) Friday night, reading excerpts from the first 2 books in the Society of Steam Trilogy.

And, be on the lookout for some limited edition character stickers (and maybe some T-shirts too).

(Click the image for Full Size)

Want to know more about Andrew and Society of Steam? Come to the Auditorium Sunday morning to watch the Airship Ambassadors interview, and check out other places he’ll be appearing below:

FRIDAY

4 pm: Steampunk Lit to Watch For
Location: Regency C
Description: What writers and new fiction should we be looking out for this year?

5 pm: Non-Human Characters
Location: Regency B
Description: Your character is a human-hating robot; how do you write about it’s feelings without assigning gender or other human characteristics?

9 pm: The Falling Machince and Hearts of Smoke & Steam
Location: Auditorium
Description: Readings from the first two novels in the Society of Steam Trilogy, including dashing heroes, dastardly villains, and a variety of outrageous accents.

SUNDAY

10am: Hero Building
Location: Regency C
Description: What makes a hero?  Is it the villain or rising to the challenges put before him?

12 pm: Meet Andrew Mayer
Location: Auditorium
Description: The Airship Ambassador interviews author Andrew Mayer.

Preorder The Society of Steam Book Two: Hearts of Smoke and Steam now from amazon!

I’ll be officially signing at the following times:
Friday, September 2: 2:00 – 3:00 pm
Saturday, September 3: 1:30 – 2:30 pm
I plan to be there for most of the show, so come by and meet me!

Also arriving just in time are the brand new Anubis T-Shirt! Check it out:

You can pick them up directly from me at the booth!

They’re absolutely gorgeous, and I think people will dig them whether they’ve read the books or not!
The art is by the talented Ted Naifeh, with a design by Laurenn McCubbin.
The shirts are by SighCo, who will also be selling the shirts in their booth.

People say that it’s easy to see the visitors in New York because they’re always the ones who are looking up. Real New Yorkers are far too jaded to look up. They’ve seen it all before.

But while the giant buildings that loom over the pedestrians in the city may have a purpose, they also have a point: big structures make the people who stand underneath of them feel very small.

The Trump Tower, NYC, completed in 1983

The Chrysler Building, Rockerfeller Center, The Empire State building, The Brooklyn Bridge: The giant structures in New York aren’t just places to work or live, they’re also edifices to the point of view of the people who created them. And what may seem big and gaudy today, can seem quaint once they have put on the patina of decades.

The Empire State Building, NYC, completed in 1931

The Twin Towers were like that. While they will now forever be remembered in American history, when they were first erected in the city skyline, they weren’t very popular. I’m old enough to remember people commenting thought they were pretty ugly, or at least boring and pretentious. But after a man walked between them, they gained a little more appreciation as something unique, and very New York. And as the 80s slid into the 90s, they became a double punctuation point on the skyline. Almost empty when they were opened, but it only took a few decades for them to become a prestigious address.

But it wasn’t until you went to the area around the financial district that existed below the towers, that you realized the World Trade Center had reset the scale for that entire section of Manhattan. The buildings that had been built at their feet were designed in a way that made sure that anyone standing beneath them (even jaded New Yorkers) could feel their power. Once upon a time financial buildings were mighty vaults, protecting the wealth within. But in the modern era, our wealth is virtual and fluid. We understand the idea of wealth, even though we can no longer hold it in our hands.

Gladiator, 2000

The massive structures that existed in the pre 9/11 financial district were as close as we’ve come to creating a virtual vista in the real world, except without the exceptionally well-timed flock of birds.

The scale was unreal, except that it was.

New York is a science fictional city, because like science fiction it is built from the dreams of our technology. Where other places may take decades or even centuries to implement new ideas, New York constantly hungers for new solutions, and often wipes away the past with little pity for what had come before.

In a place where everything for miles around has existed in someone’s imagination before they’ve laid the first foundation stone, it’s important for a storyteller to understand that while there are many accidental discoveries in the city, everything in it was created with intention.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt revisits his chat with Andrew about  steampunk, games, comics & more.

Check it out here.

I’m the guest on this week the SF Signal podcast.

Patrick Hester and I discuss a wide range of topics in and around steampunk, and there’s some in-depth discussion on how I put the book together, and why.

You can find it here.

This review almost makes me curious to see the genre taken to its ultimate form, but at almost three hours long, I’ll probably skip it.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

- The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Strange Attractor: In Physics—An attractor for which the approach to the final set of physical properties is chaotic.

If you’ve never heard of a strange attractor before, it’s a mathematical concept that describes a relatively stable set of equations that doesn’t actually have a center but a tendency towards a “space” of results. Applying that to the real wold, and what you get is an object in motion around the “idea” of a center.  There tends to be a lot of them in weather related phenomena, with the eye in the hurricane being a good example of one you can see. (You can excoriate me for my layman’s mis-interpretation in the comments.

A strange attractor is the reason why the center of a widening gyre can hold, even if there’s nothing there but a hole.

And I think the “strange attractor” is a a pretty good metaphor for the current state of Steampunk on both aesthetic and cultural grounds. Most popular genres are built around a defining idea(usually a particularly successful piece of media), But Steampunk is different. The fundamental conceit is simply an anarchic concept of a fantastic retro-history. It’s about having our past is re-visioned in light of modern knowledge of materials and science. But it’s not actually about the past, materials, knowledge, or science. That’s because when it’s at it’s best Steampunk projects and aesthetic as it’s result.

Still with me?

The end result is our current temporal mash-up of vests, corsets, rayguns and goggles.We want the Victorianism, but without the imperialism. We want the steam, but without the grease, and the poverty without all the grim. So what we get is often Boba Fett filtered through the lens of the Lumière brothers. We want all of the condition, but with only just enough human that we can accept it into our modern values and technology. And that, to be honest, is a pretty damn Victorian attitude in and of itself.

But all that said, it’s difficult to imagine what the future holds for this genre. My best guess is that it will end up being the 19th century equivalent of the “Fantasy” genre: a pseudo-historical reality in which to tell stories that mythologize our past through fiction.

But fantasy has something Steampunk doesn’t: a genuine eye at the center of the storm. In fact, it’s the Eye of Sauron. Having the Lord of the Rings at the heart of that genre means that no matter how ridiculous things can get, or out of favor it becomes, there’s something to return to when you need to start over again.

But like it’s plucky protagonists, Steampunk is a proven survivor. This genre spent over two decades toiling away in the fictional workhouses before springing back into popular culture on the back of the Maker movement. It’s tough old thing, and I’m hoping that now that it’s here, it’s going to stick around for a while.

I’ve even heard the term used to describe the movie Sucker Punch, and I get the confusion. It’s definitely period, although that period seems to obviously be the 1950s/60s for the primary world. And none of the imaginary worlds appear to actaully be Victorian in intent or nature. That said, the movie seems to have struck a chord in the community. I think the obvious reason for that is that it is, like Steampunk itself, it seems to be drawing on elements of the past (including now retro ideas of the future) in order to create a pastiche of old and new. There’s no arguing that appropriation is at least part of what makes Steampunk work, and It’s likely that for many fans of the genre that love of things old and new will spill over into any period as long as it’s done well, and manages to feel thematically consistent. But it doesn’t make it Steampunk. Perhaps we need a new term…

Take a look at the trailer, and let me know what you think: