[Riot]

any good steampunk novels that people can recommend? Have read China Mieville stuff, and enjoyed Whitechapel Gods and have read some George Mann. extraordinary league of gentlemen is superb too, but is there much else out there?

[Aptorian]

Warhammer 40K has something of a steampunk feel but isn't quite the same deal.

[Riot]

there's just something about warhammer that doesn;t interest me, the covers really put me off

[Aptorian]

Fantasy warhammer or sci-fi warhammer?

Personally I'm not very interested in fantasy warhammer because the whole thing is so cliche, but the 40,000 universe is perhaps my favorite story setting ever.

How can you not like a story that revolvs around 9 foot tall, genitically and technologically enhanced super soldiers roaming a gigantic universe kicking ass where ever they go? I mean, I have yet to read a warhammer story that felt like it had a proper story, but who the hell cares. It's the equivelant of watching 80s action films. It's just so damn cool.

[Garak]

Have to agree with you Apt. Of course, I'm Guard all the way.

For the Emperor!!!




Anyway TvTropes has the best description of 40k I've ever seen:

Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has expanded across the galaxy... to discover that the galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit himself in terror, and that it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons (as well as soulless death-machines and nightmare daemons); from within, treachery, heresy, mindless incompetence and the festering taint of Chaos threaten to tear it apart.

Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black, takes a running jump and hurls itself head first over the edge, bellowing "WAAAGH". The Imperium of Man is an oppressive, stark, and downright miserable place to live in where, for far too many people, living isn't something to do till you die, but something to do till something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way - quite probably something on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.

The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, they're not quite as bad as many of the other factions. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal and in one case omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The basic sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid, has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying by inches to feed the machine. The faster-than-light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. There are also chainsaw swords, armored gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. And sometimes even that doesn't work. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.

And you are going to die.

The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme, and in some cases, beyond. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life further than most people could believe possible. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of supercharged daemonhunting super soldiers and fanatical power-armoured battle nuns. The ancient and mysterious manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead so that small handfuls of their own may survive, while their depraved cousins cannot live without torturing numberless innocents to death in unimaginably horrible ways. There's a Bug Swarm trying to eat everything in the galaxy, a light-years wide hole in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilisation of undying Omnicidal Maniacs serving their star-god masters' desire to exterminate all living creatures, down to the last bacterium. There's a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything else in the galaxy because it's literally hard-wired into their genetic code. The closest thing to the good guys you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions, and they may or may not have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment, sterilization, and concentration camps, but they will at least offer you admittance to their club. And you may even find solace like that, being, as most of their race, mind-controlled by a few "benevolent" elites. That's your best bet at happiness in 38 000 years from now.


PS: I just posted something with a link to TVTropes.... that black hole of a site where I end up wasting an afternoon from time to time. Gods, I'm evil.

This post has been edited by Garak: 04 April 2010 - 07:14 PM

[stone monkey]

Ah Steampunk! A quirky and interesting little subgenre that, 20 years later, launches a thousand hipsters...

Anyway, recommendations...

You can go to the source and read Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates or James Blaylock's The Digging Leviathan or his Langdon St Ives sequence;and there's also KW Jeter's Infernal Devices or the seminal The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

If you like your Steampunk mixed with high fantasy (and given you like Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, it would appear that you do. If you ask me, they fall more into the whole New Weird subgenre... But these things are pretty amorphous, after all...), you could have a look at Stephen Hunt's loose series that begins with The Court of the Air.

For stuff that could be considered a little further out there, Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword and Veniss Underground are worth looking at too, as is the new Alastair Reynolds Terminal City

You might also like M. John Harrison's Viriconium, although (like The Book of the New Sun which it slightly resembles and is also well worth reading) that is set in the very, very distant future.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 04 April 2010 - 09:33 PM

[aschwiig]

The Witches of Chiswick by Robert Rankin. This is part near future sf, part steam punk, and part time travel story.

Note that Rankin describes his work as far-fetched fiction, and really is a genre unto himself.

[Aristai]

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld which came out last year looks all kinds of good.

[Gothos]

Wish they made a novel based on the Thief franchise, I'd have something to reccomend then...

[Abyss]

Some solid recommendations above. I would have chimed in with WHITECHAPEL GODS but i see the OP already ref'd it, ditto Mieville.

I really, really disliked THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE. By far Gibson's weakest work imnsho.

Alan Campbell's DEEPGATE CODEX trilogy jumps around quite a bit between fantasy and sf and has some strong steampunk elements. It I really enjoyed the first one, liked the second and haven't read the third yet but am absolutely grabbing the mmpb.

On the internuts, ERRANT STORY, GUNNERKRIG COURT and to an extent Warren Ellis' FREAKANGELS have steampunk elements to them.

- Abyss, steamy.

[Bauchelain the Evil]

Abyss, on 09 April 2010 - 01:58 PM, said:

Alan Campbell's DEEPGATE CODEX trilogy jumps around quite a bit between fantasy and sf and has some strong steampunk elements. It I really enjoyed the first one, liked the second and haven't read the third yet but am absolutely grabbing the mmpb.



- Abyss, steamy.

Don't. I can understand how you want to know how it ends but, really, don't. Believe me I too really liked the first two and bought the third as soon as I saw it in the bookshop. I wish I hadn't. 16 euros wasted.

[caladanbrood]

Definitely second any Vandermeer and Tim Powers recommendations. Also, though it's probably a bit borderline, Gormenghast.

[Salt-Man Z]

The Gormenghast books barely qualify as SF, let alone steampunk. Well, the third book has some sci-fi-y elements, but even that's never the focus of the book. The focus of the Gormenghast books are rich characters, imaagery, and language.

[caladanbrood]

Not all steampunk is sci-fi though

[Salt-Man Z]

True enough, though I meant SF in more of a "Speculative Fiction" vein than "Science Fiction".

[Inkantic]

hmm... you've already mentioned a few good ones (China Mieville, George Mann)

Tim Akkers, Heart of Veridon
Jay Lake (more clockwork-punk tho)
Dru Pagliotti, Clockwork Heart
Holly Phillips, The Engine's Child
Chris Wooding, Retribution Falls
Ekaterina Sedia, The Alchemy of Stone (sort of)
John Meaney, Bone Song and Dark Blood (again, sort of -- similar type of style, but sci-fi)
Jeff VanderMeer
Felix Gilman, Thunderer and Gears of the City
Cherie Priest, Boneshaker
William Gibson, The Difference Engine
Paul Di Filippo, The Steampunk Trilogy (very weird)
Jonathan Barnes, the Somnambulist
Scott Westerfield, Leviathan (haven't read this, but I have seen it get good reviews)
Stephen Hunt (already mentioned earlier)
James P. Blaylock (again, haven't read as he's difficult to find, but many have recommended him)


some short story collections for other ideas too:
Extraordinary Engines (Ed. Nick Gevers)
Steampunk (Ed. Jeff and Ann Vandermeer)


That should give you lots to look up

This post has been edited by Inkantic: 11 April 2010 - 09:08 PM

[Werthead]

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville is a good book in the genre, whilst Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding is an excellent recent book in the genre (basically Firefly in an airship). Scar Night by Alan Campbell is also worth a look (even if the sequels are somewhat less steam-punkery). Alastair Reynolds' brilliant new novel, Terminal World, features a strong steampunk element as well.