Month: October 2011

The Immersion Book of Steampunk and “The Clockworks of Hanyang”

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While I sit on some other news that I cannot announce yet, there is something I forgot to mention in terms of a story publication! The Immersion Book of Steampunk is apparently out (since 20 September — I’m sadly a bit late), and editors Gareth D. Jones and Carmelo Rafala saw fit to include (among stories by a great list of contributors) my Korean Steampunk story, “The Clockworks of Hanyang.” (More information about the story is here, and you can get the book here (USA), or here (UK), or if you’re in Korea, it’s here. Or, you can order direct …

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Two-Day Brewday (Day 1): Fruitcake Ale

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It’s Christmastime! Well, for brewers, anyway: if you’re making anything to be consumed around Christmas, and you haven’t already gotten around to brewing it, now would be a good time. For me, Saturday would actually have been a better time, but I was a bit sick, and the mill-shop where I have my grains crushed was unexpectedly closed. (I’ve had a lot of unexpectedly closed / unexpectedly sold-out types of experiences lately, enough to drive me to ranting, indeed. But I’ll save that for another post, except to say that after a failed attempt to find someone else to mill …

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A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

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Every novel I read by Vinge seems to me to be better than the last. Maybe it’s because I started with earlier work, or maybe it’s just the impression that each of his books gives me. But one thing is for certain: A Deepness in the Sky certainly is a hell of a novel, space opera or not. I finished it last night, on the couch, very late into the night, and found myself in an odd position for such a time: I was excited about it, and wanted to talk about it. But it was the middle of the …

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The Clockworks of Hanyang

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“The Clockworks of Hanyang” appeared in The Immersion Book of Steampunk, edited by Gareth D Jones and Carmelo Rafala (Immersion Press, September 2011). It was reprinted in Sean Wallace’s anthology The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures in the fall of 2014. This story was my response to the discussion I ran across in 2010 of the revisionist historiography that seemed inherent to a lot of steampunk writing and fandom. (As discussed in like this one by Charles Stross and this one by Nisi Shawl, along with this critique by Tobias Buckell and the post that brought the discussion to my attention — this one …

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The Pain of Prescience That Missed the Train

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When I was at the Clarion West workshop back in 2006, Vernor Vinge (our last instructor) spent a certain amount of time talking about the idea of “future-proofing” an SFnal story. The idea is that, since you’re talking about the future, you’re likely to get a bunch of things quite wrong. Anyone who’s read older SF knows this problem well, the signal example being the one everyone cites, of people on spaceships calculating the math for some complicated ship maneuver using slide rules, because nobody imagined calculating machines might get invented (and/or that such machines might become small enough to use …

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