Recently, I was bitching about the lack of satisfying female characters in steampunk literature. Mere days later, through the magical powers of Twitter, I received an answer to my rant: an advance reading copy of Cherie Priest’s new novel Dreadnought, due out on September 28th. I’d been looking forward to reading it anyway, entirely on the grounds that it starts in a steampunk version of my own home state of Virginia, so I was thrilled to have a chance to dive into it early.

It did not disappoint:
The book has all the steampunk fun one expects after the dirigibles, mechanical arms, and underground tunnels of Boneshaker. Dreadnought gives a much wider picture of Cherie Priest’s alternate history: Mercy Lynch, the main character, starts off in the South, then travels up the Mississippi and out across the Rockies by dirigible, boat, and train, providing plenty of time to see the giant battle robots employed by the Union and Confederacy, the feared battle-ready steam engines, and the mysterious disease sweeping the country.

But where Dreadnought really shines is in its characters. Its pace is more leisurely than Boneshaker: traveling from Virginia to Washington, as Mercy Lynch does, takes a long time, even with dirigibles. Since there’s not as constant a need to fight off zombies, readers get the opportunity to really see the people who inhabit this world of an endless, steam-powered Civil War. Mercy shares her journey west with an astonishing assortment of people, mostly terribly ordinary, yet still endlessly entertaining. To my personal enjoyment, all of these interactions show the racial tensions and gender disparities of Mercy’s world quite well without dwelling too much on them; it’s part of the setting and worldbuilding in a realistic fashion I appreciated.

At the center of it is Mercy Lynch herself, who is currently my favorite Steampunk heroine (Alexia Tarabotti, from Soulless, is a close second, but I digress). She’s a good Southern girl, equal parts charm and irreverence, with a matter-of-fact approach to the variety of odd situations she encounters. And though the book occasionally feels slow (for example, during days of empty train travel across the Plains), Mercy sustains the story with her sharp observations and interesting conversations, all easily imagined in an adorable Southern accent. Priest’s alternate United States is hardly a land of gender equality (unlike some steampunk worlds, which toss Victorian gender roles out the window and just keep the corsets) – but her characters deal with it in interesting ways.

My complaint with Whitechapel Gods and books like it was that, when the ordinary citizens of a steampunk world were faced with adventure, the ladies were told to go hide somewhere. In Dreadnought, the ladies wield pistols, climb on top of trains, and tend injuries, all in long skirts and petticoats, before settling in for tea and a game of cards. And really, the men are pretty cool, too. The characters are awesome characters regardless of gender without ignoring it, and the result is a lot of adorable steampunky fun.

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A quick bit of news, via Time Magazine – the word “Steampunk” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, with the definition ” a genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advance technology.” Congratulations, steampunk world! We are now as legitimate as “cheeseball,” “vuvuzuela,” “hater,” and “The Interwebs,” among other gems of the English language added to the dictionary at the same time.

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The fabulous blog Free the Princess has only recently made it onto my radar by publishing a series about Steampunk and Multiculturalism by Ay-Leen the Peacemaker (It’s coming this way next, don’t worry!), but this post by K. Marie Criddle from a while ago was too funny not to share:

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Here’s an impressively huge collection of steampunk posters that’s been floating around the Twitter-verse this morning! My favorites below…

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Hello everyone!
I’m enjoying my last few weeks of break before school starts, so there probably won’t be much regular posting for a bit, but here’s a bit of shameless self-promotion: The second half of my interview at Airship Ambassador, featuring a small hoard of links and my suggestions about what to call a group of steampunks, is up for your reading enjoyment!

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This is a few days old, but I thought I should point out… The fabulous Kevin over at Airship Ambassador has put up the first part of an interview with me, in which I address such thorny questions as “How would you define steampunk?” and “Why does everyone call you ‘Spiffy,’ anyway?” It’s fun times, and there are some interviews with far more interesting people than myself on his blog also, so I recommend you check it out!

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I knew I had Whitechapel Gods by S. M. Peters waiting on hold for me at the library, so I waited until I could read it to read Steampunk Scholar’s review of it. I finally got through both of them, and this quote from the review stuck out to me:

”Despite some narrative missteps, S.M. Peters’ Whitechapel Gods is one of the most representative works of twenty-first century steampunk currently in print. No other book is as successful as capturing the secondary world of grit, grime, and gilding that the subculture, art, and fashion have suggested.”

And indeed, the world Peters’ has created is fantastic. I didn’t give it as careful a read as it deserved, but it was undoubtably steampunk-y, full of big dark machines and people with mechanical arms and factories and uprisings and all those lovely things. Only one element was glaringly lacking, and that was women.

There are, for the bulk of the book, exactly three women of any importance:: Missy, our “hooker with a heart of gold;” Giselle, who runs a brothel and mostly is in Missy’s head calling her a whore; and Mama Engine, one of the gods of Whitechapel. There’s Mrs. Flower and her girls who run an opium den and don’t really do anything for the plot, a handful of Missy’s fellow prostitutes at the end, and occasional references to someone’s wife, or to the women and children hiding safely while the men do the fighting.

At first, I didn’t notice because Missy is a pretty interesting character, and by the end she helps save the day. But there are long middle parts where she’s either being noted for her unladylike behavior or a helpless pawn of the Bad Guy, and when she finally gets the revenge she’s spent the whole book seeking she’s treated like a madwoman. Of the other two women who contribute to the plot, one is a generic Evil Woman with no character development of any kind, and one is a machine-deity whose biggest contribution to the plot is having an “affair” with the Bad Guy which is written more like a sexual assault.

It’s a very Victorian steampunk world, for all its techno-monsters, and conversations with women (read: Missy) throughout the book are invariably laced with references to propriety. After killing the bad guy in a delusional, suicidal rage and saving the day, we don’t see Missy again until she’s out in the English countryside, every bit the proper young woman, restored from her evil whoring ways. There aren’t any women to be seen in any of the Big Final Battles – they’re mentioned as victims of the gods and their abuses, but while the men do the manly thing and fight back, the women are sent to hide.

This is just one book and a pretty shallow analysis, but if bothered me to see women so poorly represented in “one of the most representative works of twenty-first century steampunk,” especially when I’m not sure the problem is unique to this work. (My favorite steampunk anthology, Extraordinary Engines, features exactly one story with a female main character.) Suggestions of books that do the whole gender thing better would be greatly appreciated!

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When I someday make my fabulous steampunk dream house, my doors are going to look like this:

Via Curbly.

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I’ve seen some pretty awesome things made of reclaimed materials – The Minister’s Treehouse, for example – but this one takes the cake for now:

It’s a 12-meter-high mechanical elephant, made of 45 tons of reclaimed wood and steel. It can carry almost 50 passengers at a time. There’s more pictures (and the original article) over at Inhabitat.

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I really, really meant to have a serious interesting post up sometime soon for you all, but instead, I give you this:

If any of you follow the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, rest assured that the clusterf*ck that was the Last Airbender movie is being remedied by a new mini-series, featuring a girl waterbending Avatar and a STEAMPUNK INSPIRED CITY, called “The Legend of Korra.”

*geeky spazzy excitement*

I am possibly the only person thrilled about this, but I thought I’d share it just in case.

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