The Best Steampunk Books

You’ve described steampunk as more of a style or a lens than a genre. Could you tell us what makes something steampunk?

I identified three things when I did my PhD work. There’s technofantasy, which is gadgets and technology that look like science but work like magic. There’s retrofuturism – not necessarily how the past imagined the future, but how a reimagined past imagined the future. Everybody thinks this is the technofantasy, but in steampunk – now, at least, not in early steampunk – it’s almost always a social thing. So issues of gender inequality or racism or homophobia are reimagined through this retrofuturist lens. We write the way we wish the 19th century had been.

Then the last thing is what I call hyper vintage. Many people will say Victorian or neo-Victorian, but that’s too limiting, because not all steampunk is set in the Victorian period. Sometimes it’s not in Britain at all, so that’s too confining. You get instances where the story is not taking place in our world – it resembles our world, but you can’t nail it down and say, ‘Oh, that’s Denmark at such and such a time.’ Just about any of Hayao Miyazaki’s films that are steampunk don’t take place in a world where anybody says anything about real nations. So those are as secondary as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

You mentioned a distinction between early and more recent steampunk there. In your book, Steampunk FAQ, you’ve written about a second wave starting in 2009. All your choices today are in this second wave – could you explain that distinction?

The first wave of steampunk, depending on who you talk to, starts in the late 60s, early 70s… I put it in the 80s, because that’s when the term was coined, but it’s also when there was a critical mass of writers working on it. It didn’t reach the public’s attention until the early 90s, with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. Even then, it didn’t really go big –  it made this little impact, and then until the 21st century we only saw steampunk again in a very underground way. The odd movie, usually made somewhere other than America, and comic books – there was a comic book that was straight up called Steampunk in the 90s.

The first wave is messy. There’s no cohesion as to what they’re doing, other than that they’re playing in a toolbox that isn’t high epic fantasy. They’re not doing the medieval period; they’re going with an age that is old-timey, but not knights in shining armour. In the same way that cyberpunk in science fiction was trying not to be Star Wars, steampunk was trying not to be Lord of the Rings at a time when there were a million clones of Lord of the Rings.

The second wave is more cohesive, and it emerged from cosplay and costuming and the subculture of steampunk that emerged from a number of different places. Video games, especially 90s video games, had a huge impact on that. The distribution of Miyazaki films by Disney put that steampunk look in people’s imagination. There was Will Smith starring in Wild Wild West, with cogs and gears and goggles. And there were several big communities in the States. It was a shift between the renfaire scene and the goth scene. People who got tired of the strict hierarchy of renfaire, and just wanted to dress up and go to fun events; and people who got a little tired of it being a bit too dour… Some people hate this statement, but there’s a joke that steampunk is what happened when goths discovered brown. It did emerge, at least in the San Francisco Bay area, from the goth scene.

Your first choice is from one of the defining writers of this second wave. Tell us about Gail Carriger’s Etiquette and Espionage, the first in the Finishing School series.

This is the second series from Gail Carriger. Really, any of Gail’s stuff is great, but Etiquette and Espionage was more overtly steampunk than her earlier series had been. It features a fourteen-year-old girl named Sophronia who is sent away to a finishing school, which is a lovely pun in these books: a finishing school is where you go to learn manners, and this finishing school is where you go to learn manners and to finish people off. It’s literally a school for young assassins who will enter society. They know which fork to eat with or whatever, but they also know how to stab you with it and take you out. So it’s very fun.

We talked about technofantasy… The school itself is very like the magic schools that are all over the place – you know, like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts – but it’s technofantasy magic. So the school is on an airship, but the airship would just never work, it would crash, you would get bad weather and that would be a bad day. But because it’s steampunk, hands get waved – ‘Oh, it’s an airship. There are reasons.’ There’s an entire group of sooties, an underclass, working steam boilers in the lower levels of this thing – the ship would weigh as much as a regular ocean-going vessel. You’d need an awful lot of lift to get this thing off the ground. But again, no one cares, because it’s fun.

It gives Sophronia an opportunity to do espionage on board in the tradition of these great magic school stories, where you sneak around after hours and solve mysteries among the faculty and your classmates. But because it’s in her Parasol Protectorate world, it features werewolves and vampires and ghosts, and that all gets mixed in with this steampunk veneer. So it’s really good fun, and I think that’s the thing that’s a hallmark of most of these books: they aren’t taking themselves too seriously. I personally think that the best steampunk knows how to wink at the reader. Most of it anyway – of course there’s going to be an exception to that.

So underneath the steampunk veneer, this is paranormal fantasy… What genre can’t we combine with steampunk?

I haven’t seen one. And this is the thing: when you see it as a genre, you think steampunk has to tell a certain story. But by the time I was into my second or third year of working on my research, I had read romance, westerns, straight-up adventures, horror, quest fantasy… And by that point I concluded, I’m pretty sure we can do whatever. You can take any genre and steampunk it. I might be wrong about that…

Let’s turn to your second choice, another of the key titles in recent steampunk. Could you introduce us to Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan?

Leviathan also has a wild airship. Airships are a hallmark of steampunk – you would think that it would be trains, but it’s not. And in this case, it’s not even a steam vessel. It’s a flying whale, which has been gene hacked – it’s a form of gene splicing, playing off the idea that we’re dealing with a period where evolution is new in the public imagination, and somebody could take that and run with it. What if we crossed a whale with all these other things, and created an animal that could fly through the air? They walk through the whale, there’s decks and things inside, it’s absolutely bananas. K. W. Jeter, who coined the term steampunk, said something about gonzo fantasies when he was describing steampunk early on, and this is definitely a gonzo fantasy.

Most steampunk novels will take place in the 19th century, but this is an alternate version of World War One. It follows two main characters, one who’s on the Austro-Hungarian side, and one who’s on the British side. It’s a boy and a girl, and they’re set on a collision course to each other. It’s a romance, but it’s very slow burn, because the girl on the British side has masqueraded as a boy to be able to enter the air service. That’s one of those instances of social retrofuturism, looking at that inequality. So she dresses as a boy, she goes for training, and she ends up on the Leviathan. In the meantime, the young man – who is the prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and being hunted by political enemies – escapes his home in something that is essentially a steampunk version of one of the smaller two-legged walkers from Star Wars. It’s still somewhat technofantasy, in that we can’t get robots to walk on two legs very well –  we’re getting there, but it’s not an easy thing to do. When Scott Westerfeld imagines this, he does a bit of hand-waving by invoking real world engine manufacturers, and saying, that’s why this thing works so well…

So they’re set on this collision course to meet each other, and then ultimately go on to the further adventures in the other books. It’s high flying, it’s exciting, it’s fast paced. And if you love audiobooks, you can’t go wrong. Alan Cumming narrates, and he’s amazing.

Could we talk a bit more about the technofuturism here? Gene splicing is maybe not what comes to mind when people think of steampunk… So it’s not all clockwork and steam power?

No! In this book you do get literal steam on the Austro-Hungarian side, and there’s the walker… And this is where some people will get fussy and say it’s dieselpunk. Okay, so now we have to change the name every time we change the fuel source? That’s ridiculous! There really, ultimately, isn’t that much steam in steampunk. And even if there is steam, it’s at this ridonkulous level… there’s this anime called Steamboy where steam technology works like nuclear technology. I’m pretty sure we can’t do that.

For quite a while, people were trying to break the word down into some etymological compound thing. Is there steam? Is there punk? And so Westerfeld wasn’t steampunk because he had a flying whale, which is bio, so it’s biopunk…. But I think, get real! These terms only have meaning from the way that we use them. People would look at things like Firefly episodes, or Doctor Who and the design of the TARDIS, and say, is that steampunk? And if somebody’s asking if that’s steampunk, there’s a really good chance that that’s what the word is coming to mean. Language is always on the move, it’s always shifting. And Leviathan was definitely marketed as steampunk. Westerfeld never shied away from that – unlike some other writers of steampunk, who didn’t want to be lumped in with all this ridiculous frivolity.

Your third choice is a novella, P. Djèlí Clark’s The Black God’s Drums. Please introduce us!

When I was first doing steampunk, we had just come through a thing called RaceFail in the science fiction community, where there was this recognition that there weren’t enough people of colour writing characters, and there weren’t enough protagonists who were people of colour. And there were discussions regularly in steampunk circles about how incredibly white it was, which is when I began to think, this Victorian thing has got to go. If we keep describing it as Victorian, then we’re stuck in a rut; you change that to ‘vintage’, and it gives you the opportunity to open the gates. Not that you needed that necessarily, because even before that whole conversation, there had been Western steampunk with the Wild Wild West film… I think the most interesting steampunk that’s been written in the last ten years has been from writers of colour. It’s been absolutely fantastic. And that’s not in some tokenist move, or me representing any one group; I’ve just noticed it.

I put The Black God’s Drums on here because it’s an incredibly fun book that’s doing a lot. It checks a lot of the boxes that we would normally associate with steampunk. We’ve got the street urchin, the waif, in the character of Creeper. When people were trying to break down ‘punk’ and what it meant, they said, it needs to be somebody who’s pushing against the system. I still think that’s not really what K.W. Jeter meant, and this compound word doesn’t mean those individual things… But there was an expectation that you would have characters like this. You see them in Etiquette and Espionage down on the lower deck, but they’re not the main character; and you see the one character in Leviathan, the young woman masquerading as a boy who comes from a family that is of lower means. But she’s not a Dickensian street urchin or orphan. P Djèlí Clark gives us Creeper the street urchin, and that’s a steampunk type (I don’t want to say archetype – I don’t like that word.)

We’re in New Orleans, so it’s not Victorian, but it’s still the 19th century. It’s playing with the 19th century in a way that is still technofantastic, though there are other elements too. The technology alone would be fantastic, even without including the fact that Creeper has a relationship with a powerful divine spirit from the Yoruba religion, an orisha. So there are fantasy elements in an alt-history setting, and in any other situation I’d call that steampunk.

It’s a really, really fun short read. I haven’t read anything by P. Djèlí Clark that I didn’t enjoy. He’s great. But this book… It’s a novella, so it’s super short, and it just rolls along. It does something with social retrofuturism: it reimagines the 19th century, where the Haitian slave revolt worked out well and the Civil War is at a standstill. And that allows him to talk about race and class and gender, but he’s just so good that he never gets heavy handed. It’s all there, and it comes in like a stealth bomb, but at the same time you’re just enjoying this rollicking good story.

The book also gets described as alternate history – could you talk about the difference between alternate history and steampunk?

Alternate history is saying, ‘What if there was a moment of break at some point in our world’s history?’ Not all steampunk takes place in our world. Steampunk is always playing with history, but there are lots of instances where people have gone beyond a moment of break to fully invent a secondary world and not make it cohere with ours, save by association. We might look at something in Marjorie Liu’s Monstress, for example, and say, ‘That resembles this culture.’ But it’s not that culture. It’s her own invention. Whereas alternate history is going to say, these are the Confederates; this is the Union; these are the free isles, a conglomerate of the Caribbean nations. And we know what those things are, because those are real – so it’s about a break in our own timeline.

Sometimes the break is utterly fantastical. There was a steampunk book by Jay Lake called Mainspring, and the break ostensibly happens at the creation of the world, so the entire planet is a clockwork device. That’s a huge difference, right at the cusp of moving us over into a secondary world.

So that’s the distinction that I would make. My frustration with the immediate equation of alternate history and steampunk is that if you look at something like Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, he’s not imagining the past. He’s imagining a future. So what do we do with that? Does that make all science fiction that imagines the future alternate history? I don’t think so!

You mentioned Monstress there, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. This is another of your choices, and it’s a graphic novel. Could you tell us more?

Monstress is not only a graphic novel, it’s also a graphic narrative, in that if you don’t like blood and guts, I don’t recommend this one for you. Everything else on this list is somewhat high flying, high spirited, positive adventure. Monstress is dark fantasy mixed with steampunk in a fantasy Asian world.

It’s inspired by early 20th-century Asia. Very early in the process, Marjorie Liu was trying to work in alternate history. And I don’t know exactly what happened, I just know that she abandoned that to create this fully secondary world. I think one of the reasons might have just been that she introduced this whole race of magical creatures called Arcanics; and there’s a little fox girl, there’s people who have animal-like features… I don’t know her process, but Sana Takeda, the artist, draws in this very strongly manga style, so it’s got a lot of anthropomorphic animals or humanoids with animal features, which makes it utterly fantasy.

Like Creeper in The Black God’s Drums, the main character of Monstress, Maika Halfwolf, is possessed or inhabited by a monstrous, powerful being. Her relationship with it is very dark. It is hungry, and needs to feed; she lets it out every now and again; and it gets very ugly….

The title alone is a piece of social retrofuturism. We’re in a matriarchal world, where Maika is a very powerful character. She’s missing half her arm, but she is not treated as less for that in this story. She’s an incredibly powerful woman. And the title plays on that – that a powerful woman is monstrous. I love the way that Marjorie Liu has pulled that in there. Even the villains are really powerful women, and they’re playing against each other in a very Machiavellian Game-of-Thrones-style chess game between these nations.

It’s a very involved book, and the reason I chose it is not only because of its beautiful comic art, great narrative, and this really amazing female protagonist; but also because it’s such a good example of steampunk that goes fully into a secondary world. Marjorie Liu has really imagined this secondary world fully. If I started trying to explain the plot further than I already have, it would become like conversations over coffee with that friend who’s reading a really difficult political fantasy novel, where they’re saying, ‘There’s this faction and this faction…’ and you just think, I don’t know what you’re talking about anymore. It’s very rich. There are many volumes – almost all these books we’re discussing are in a series, and are gateways to much larger narratives. Except for The Black God’s Drums, much to my chagrin. I’m sad about that, I want a series.

This is the only steampunk graphic novel we’re discussing today, but I know there are many you could have touched on. Is steampunk developing differently in the graphic novel world?

Yes. Graphic novels broke away from a lot of the conventional trappings of steampunk – so much so that when I say Monstress is steampunk, people will push back and say, ‘I don’t see any cogs and gears’. I just go through my three elements, and it’s all there. And the vintage look of it… The reason it might not look the way that we expect steampunk to look is because it takes place in this fantasy early 20th century Asia, as opposed to 19th century England or Europe, and that just admits that not everywhere in the world was industrialized at the same time. So again, attaching steampunk to a particular time period is very limiting. But there were prose publishing houses that flat out told their writers, ‘It has to be set in London or it isn’t steampunk’; while especially with Image Comics, who published Monstress, they’re not dictating anything to their creators, other than ‘Please make us a good product that sells well.’ It’s the same thing with one of their other graphic novels, Bitter Root, which took place in the jazz era in New York. It’s still steampunk – it sure looks like steampunk – do we have to change it again, and call it jazzpunk?

These comics, at least, were unfettered by trying to be what everybody expected steampunk to be. That’s not to say that there weren’t comics that did more conventional things, but they didn’t do well – any comic that slavishly tried to replicate what was going on in the cosplay community, the fashion community, the scene of second wave steampunk around 2008-10, forgot that they needed to tell a good story. Monstress and Bitter Root told really good stories.

Could you say a little more on that last point – steampunk is not just books and films, there’s a whole scene…?

Oh, yes. That’s also why, when I was doing my research, I kept shying away from calling it a genre. I wanted the framework I came up with to have utility beyond reading; I wanted it to be something that you could apply to any expression of steampunk, and especially with the maker movement, the DIY movement of steampunk. That was a big part of how steampunk sprang into the public consciousness. The second wave had makers like Jake von Slatt and Datamancer making beautiful art objects out of regular everyday furniture or your laptop or whatever it might be; taking things that had become perfectly mass produced and creating a veneer for them that made them somehow special and unique. So it’s not just narrative – it’s these other expressions as well. There are people who have done entire offices in steampunk style, you think you’re on the deck of the Nautilus going to work. People have started fashion lines, and we saw it show up at a couple of mainstream retail outfits too. So it definitely leapt beyond being just something we were writing about.

Let’s get back to the books, and talk about your last choice… You said earlier we see lots of airships and not many trains, but we’ll conclude with a train: tell us about Cherie Priest’s Dreadnought, from the Clockwork Century series.

Yes, it’s one of the few steampunk books I’ve read with a train in it. And of those, it’s one of only two that I love. It’s very much a Planes, Trains and Automobiles story. A Civil War nurse named Mercy Lynch is going home to visit her father, who is dying. She ends up on this train, the Dreadnought, which makes up most of the journey, and there’s all sorts of wild adventure on board.

In Clockwork Century, Cherie Priest imagines a Civil War that hasn’t ended. It’s gone on for decades past when it ended historically. But there’s also a gas which, as you find out in the book before Dreadnought, creates zombies. It’s been refined into a drug, and people are selling it, so they’re basically making zombies at this point. So this is, I guess, the mashup of zombie fiction and steampunk…and it takes place on this confined train. That makes for a great adventure or great horror. Anyone who’s seen Train to Busan knows what happens when you shove zombies on a train: you have nowhere to go. You can’t jump off, it’s going too fast.

The first book in the series, Boneshaker, got a lot of press, and won a Nebula Award – and I didn’t find it all that compelling. I thought the opening was really, really good, and then it kind of slowed down. But this one felt like it just kept chugging along – to use the train metaphor. It was the most exciting of Priest’s books.

It stands out to me, as well, as an example of steampunk in America, done in an almost Wild West way –  there’s a character who’s a Texas Ranger, but there are also opportunities to explore the class differences on board. Mercy Lynch is moving between the third class car, where there are black characters, and the upper class car, because she’s a nurse – she can move between these spaces. It allows Priest to address the history (while completely disregarding other parts of it).

It’s a ton of fun. There’s a point at which two steampunk mechs go at it, there’s a battle between them. Mercy is on the sidelines for some of those things, observing – but that’s not to say she never gets in the thick of it. She’s definitely a very tough female character, and an interesting contrast to Carriger’s protagonists, who are always very prim and proper in an almost Jane Austen way. Cherie Priest’s were more rugged frontierswomen. And with both these writers, when their stuff was coming out, they were largely dismissed by the gatekeepers of steampunk at the time – a lot of men wanted their steampunk to be serious, and said it had to have steam or this or that or the other thing. Some of them would allow Cherie Priest into the fold, but they absolutely wouldn’t allow Gail Carriger in. And what’s funny about that is, if you go to Goodreads today and look at the top 10 books that people define as steampunk, good luck finding any of the guys who they thought were all that and a bag of chips. It’s Carriger, Priest, Westerfeld. I think within another five or six years, it’s going to be P. Djèlí Clark and Nisi Shawl. We won’t remember any of the ones that the gatekeepers thought were cool.