Gunnerkrigg Love

(This is TicToc, a mechanical bird at the court.)

In keeping with the spirit of steampunk week I'd like to make a plug for one of my favorite webcomics today. Tom Siddell is 24 chapters into a marvelous unraveling of his tale of the kids at Gunnerkrigg Court, which has a fascinating blend of the mechanical and mystical. As for the nature of the court and what the kids are doing there, I'll let you find out. It updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I wait impatiently for each one. Make sure you block off a good chunk of time for reading....the story is intricate and many-layered, and the evolution of Tom's art over the course of the story is fabulous. Enjoy!

Steampunk!

It's Steampunk Week! How fun is that?

Don't know what steampunk is? That's OK. I had to get one of my students to explain it to me because I had never heard of it either, till about a year and a half ago. But once explained, it makes sense. Almost. Because steampunk is a very narrow subgenre, but with vaguely distant boundaries.

I'm probably like a lot of Americans - my introduction to steampunk has been largely through movies (like Wild Wild West; or the airship in Stardust; I would even put League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in that category - remember Nemo's ship?). But I confess - for someone who really likes visually rich and inventive stories, I haven't read much in the way of steampunk. I took Airborn, by Kenneth Oppel, to read on the plane to Australia a few years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. (Just the thing for a long trans-Pacific flight!) It's the only true-blue steampunk book I've read to date; although I do intend to check out Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars at my earliest opportunity.

I'm sure my readers have their own favorites and opinions, so of course I'm curious: what steampunk novels do you recommend?