Demon Hunting and Tenth Dimensional Physics

Words on writing from a speculative fiction author.

Announcing Dark Dancer, a Steampunk Fantasy Novel

What do you get when you mash together steampunk airships and metal men, Shakespeare's fairy world, legends of the fae, monsters, a prophecy, pirates, evil wizards, a young woman with stolen memories, and crystals full of power? You get Dark Dancer. This is how I do fantasy.

The idea for the series came from several places. I found a cool piece of art on DeviantArt (http://anacorreal.deviantart.com/art/Release-80921725) that sparked the idea of a woman with the power to open gates between worlds. I read a series by Frances Pauli where the passages between our world and the fairy world are re-opened (Changeling Race -http://www.amazon.com/Moth-Darkness-Changeling-Race-Book-ebook/dp/B005GRBYNE/) that fired my imagination about elves and magic and their world crossing with ours. I watched too many anime episodes with airships and cool steampunk tech. I've always been in love with Errol Flynn's version of pirates. Out of this tangle came the story for Dark Dancer.

Sabrina has magic that can open the portals to the fairy world. But with that power comes great danger. Her mother tries to keep her hidden and her power a secret, even from her. Sabrina's ties to the other world are too strong. Ruthless Seligh Lords, hungry for power, will stop at nothing to gain control of Sabrina and her gift. And magic will find a way to express itself, even if it destroys the one holding it.

I'm excited to release this book. It's my first fantasy novel and it's a stand-alone story, not part of a series. I have eleven other novels out, all part of a science fiction adventure series. I've published several dozen short stories ranging from science fiction to silly horror to fantasy, so I'm no stranger to the genre. Writing about magic really isn't that much different than writing about technology, though. And for me, it's all about the characters and story. Everything else is window-dressing to make it all more exciting.

Dark Dancer has lots of great characters. I had way too much fun dreaming them up. From elves with pointed ears, slanted eyes, and a penchant for arrogance, to ferocious pixie warriors, to renegade pirates, to evil sorcerers hungry for power, to talking birds, the book has a rich cast. The star of the book is a bewildered young woman trying to figure out who she is and how her past ties her to the world of the Seligh.

With magic, mayhem, monsters, and just a touch of romance, Dark Dancer is the type of book I love to read. I hope you enjoy it, too.

You can find a complete list of all my work athttp://www.jaletac.com

Available in ebook and print.
Smashwords (all ebook formats) -https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/465920
Kindle - http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Dancer-Jaleta-Clegg-ebook/dp/B
00MRANX5A

Source: vossfoster.blogspot.com

Airships in Space ?!

"Astronomy From High Altitude Airships"

Sometimes the edge of space can almost be as good as space itself — that is, when it comes to telescopes riding airships at the top of Earth’s tenuous and rarefied stratosphere.

High Altitude Airships (HAAs), until now largely the purview of defense-related research, may ultimately find their rightful place as vehicles of science and industry.

At least that’s the hope of Sarah Miller, an astronomer and Chancellor’s ADVANCE Fellow at the University of California at Irvine.

Miller and colleagues are hoping to turn a February 2014 Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) report on the potential uses of stratospheric airships for science into a NASA-sponsored challenge to make HAAs a viable astronomical observing platform.

“The military has tried and failed to develop a vehicle, because they tried to move from a [stratospheric] ‘Kitty Hawk’[-type] situation to a ‘Boeing 747’ on extremely aggressive timescales that were all doomed to fail,” said Miller, one of the workshop study’s co-leads. “But astrophysics, cosmology, and earth and atmospheric sciences all motivate the development of these vehicles. So, we could actually see them succeed over the next decade.”

Jason Rhodes, a cosmologist at NASA JPL and also one of the workshop study’s co-leads, thinks an airship should be able to operate at a fraction of a cost of a dedicated space mission and at some 20,000 ft higher than the highest flying commercial aircraft.

“About 60,000 ft in the stratosphere is the sweet spot for these craft,” said Rhodes. “That’s about as high as you can go and still have enough of an atmosphere to propel against.”

Yet researchers say the atmospheric turbulence at that altitude is still low enough to get what is known as telescopic “diffraction-limited” seeing at optical wavelengths. That means the telescope’s resolution of distant objects is only limited only by the size of the telescope’s mirror and not by the blurring effects of the atmosphere.

And at such altitudes, astronomers would expect to do much better in the ultraviolet and the sub-millimeter and millimeter ranges.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is currently the only space telescope operating in that ultraviolet wavelength range, says Rhodes, and it will reach the end of its lifetime in 5 to 10 years. Thus, he says in the next decade, even a one-meter aperture stratospheric telescope could “really complement” NASA’s space missions.

However, as Rhodes notes, at 65,000 feet, the airship will still encounter some telescopic jitter from stratospheric winds. It’s a problem that Rhodes says HAA designers are still trying to work through.

In principle, a one-meter airship telescope could be up for many weeks or months at a time and do station-keeping which would allow for line of sight communications with a ground station. Likely powered by lightweight propellers, such an airship’s instruments and propulsion system would be run by energy gleaned from solar photovoltaic arrays within or on the airship’s surface.

But to date, as Rhodes notes, no one has even demonstrated an airship that could fly for 24 hours at a time at such altitudes. Even so, if there’s enough interest in such an airship for astronomy, Rhodes says NASA will run an X Prize-styled challenge over the next couple of years.

Rhodes says NASA has not yet committed itself to running the challenge, but sometime this Fall he and colleagues will initiate a Request for Information (RFI) from potential challenge participants.

“It would be a two-tiered challenge,” said Rhodes. “The first would be to fly an airship for 20 hours with a small 20 kg payload at an altitude of 20 km for a $1 million prize. A second would be a 200 kg payload at 20 km for 200 hours for a $2 to $4 million prize.”

Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Raven Aerostar, the Near Space Corporation and the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) have all expressed interest in further work on HAA technology.

Rhodes says there are parallel drivers for the airship tech to develop and mature. Thus, aerospace companies interested in HAAs for defense or telecommunications applications might end up developing an HAA design that astronomers could then adapt as an observational platform.

“I could see NASA having a fleet of these airships that they could either rent out, or let the public use through a competitive process,” said Rhodes.

To cut costs, Rhodes says such research airships could be multi purpose — using the platform for earth science observations during the day, while switching to astronomical mode at night.

Rhodes says it might even be able to compete with SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy), actually a modified flying Boeing 747, which he says can have operational costs of up to $70 to $80 million a year.

“These stratospheric platforms are much more stable, still, and flexible than traditional fixed wing aircraft platforms [like SOFIA],” said Miller.

An astronomical HAA could potentially access wavelengths that SOFIA can’t, which would be a real boon for millimeter and sub-millimeter observations. Such observations are crucial for detecting water in emerging protoplanetary disks around other nearby stars as well as taking high-resolution images of the very early universe’s Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

And as a helium-filled structure, an airship could be launched from regions of the world that normally wouldn’t be conducive to optical astronomical observations. Then the onboard telescope could either be controlled remotely or be fully automated.

Unlike traditional low altitude blimps which need a sizable ground crew, Miller says, some of these airships have been designed to be launched “out of a box” by one or two people.

“At least a 4-meter class airship telescope is possible using full-scale design concepts and without an onboard crew,” said Miller. “We’ve gotten very good at automation and remote control of these telescopes.”

And unlike most spacecraft, NASA could keep reusing these airships; switching out telescopes and instruments as observations warrant.

For the last 14 years, Rhodes says he’s been working on mission concepts to study Dark Energy with both NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. But Rhodes says he is looking for a game-changing way to make that whole process faster. One that allows access to space-quality astronomical data without so much lag time from idea to launch.

This would help astronomers quickly and affordably react to new science discoveries and do astronomical observations from a space-like environment.

Rhodes says an affordable airship platform would also fill gaps in NASA’s observational capability, particularly when trying to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

If such airships could be had for only tens of millions of dollars, institutions that could normally never access state of the art telescopes would suddenly find themselves with their own private windows onto a pristine sky.

Source: forbes.com

Heathrow's stairway to heaven!

Forget their sci-fi image: airships really could be the answer for Heathrow in a post-airport future, says Hawkins Brown’s Darryl Chen

Imagine the sky above London dotted with softly humming airships. Half floating, half jet-propelled, they make for a spectacle as familar and surreal as a dream. You recall the skies used to be streaked with vapour trails and resound with that delayed roar of aeroplanes? They’ve long been banished to somewhere in the estuary, while a new creature has taken its place over central London…

Fanciful? Not say manufacturers betting serious R&D money on airship technologies. Not say the UK government who have invested in airship development, or Hybrid Air Vehicles who plan commercial freight services by 2021. Airships are currently being deployed around the world for scientific missions, humanitarian efforts and even surveying natural disasters. The question of airships in the mainstream is not a matter of if but when.

Airships are becoming faster and quieter, they carry heavier payloads and, importantly, are carbon fuel-efficient. Current models emit 1/7 the carbon of a 787, with half the noise. Ballasts keep them stable in rough weather and they are filled with inert helium which is non-flammable. They benefit from vertical take-off and landing, and can dock in any small field with two ground staff.

Hawkins Brown’s airship port proposal

We have imagined they might take on some of the freight transportation were Heathrow to be decommissioned. The plan would consolidate logistics infrastructure already in place at Heathrow and in west London, and go some way to addressing the void of economic activity in the wake of the airport moving.

Airships will fundamentally alter the geography of distribution, in alleviating congestion on road and rail networks and in reaching both more remote and more built-up areas. (Could this be the lifeline to the north that HS2 is mooted to be?) Some 920 million parcels were dispatched from UK e-retailers in 2013 making Britons the biggest online shoppers in the world. The smooth distribution of goods underpins modern life. It underwrites our material securities. This is the stuff urbanism is made of.

Sure, we should be consuming less. But as long as we are consuming, let’s do it greener. Low carbon-emission airship freight might form an ethical brand, comparable to fairtrade or organic. A cost premium can be added at the point of sale when dealing in comparison goods. And let’s not forget that if we’re still in the EU then they will increasingly be on our back about enforcing emissions cuts.

If airships are the whales, then drones are the mosquitoes. What other creatures will inhabit this airborne ecosystem of the near future?

Source: bdonline.co.uk

Giants of the Skies Return!

Blimps are back, with the ability to carry massive payloads cost-efficiently. But can the industry really rebuild itself?

The Dragon Dream from Worldwide Aeros Corp. Worldwide Aeros Corp

AEROSPACE GIANTS AND startups are preparing the revival of a century-old concept: the Zeppelin. Once envisioned as a way to travel across the Atlantic in great luxury, the new generation of giant blimps is being targeted at industrial sectors with a track record of spending large amounts of money in the pursuit of a competitive edge: telecommunications, mining, and defense.

Some of the top aerospace companies, including Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT +1.35%and Thales SA, HO.FR +1.09% are becoming involved in the lighter-than-air sector that has long been championed by a coterie of smaller companies.

Customer interest is also rising as Icelandair's ICEAIR.RK -0.58% cargo arm and Cargolux, one of the world's largest independent airfreight operators, express interest in the form.

The attraction of the massive hulls, which can measure more than 500 feet in length, is their ability to carry large amounts of cargo from remote areas where planes often can't land. Though slower than a cargo jet, blimps have far lower transport costs.

The German Hindenburg, catching fire on May 6, 1937 Getty Images

One of the biggest problems for the Zeppelin zealots, however, has been one of perception. The most iconic image of the industry is that of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, which was caught on film when the hydrogen-filled hull caught fire, engulfing the vehicle in flames, and killing 36 people.

"We have to change the public perception," said Jean-Philippe Chessel, who heads the StratoBus airship project at France's Thales. The company plans to build a demonstrator in about five years to help build confidence among potential customers and safety regulators. Thales said its vehicle will be solar-powered, fly at 60,000 feet and remain airborne for a year. It could be used by the military in crisis areas, carrying cameras, radars or telecommunication relays. The airship would provide ad hoc coverage at far lower cost than a satellite, said Mr. Chessel.

Other prototypes have already taken to the air. Lockheed Martin flew the P-791 hybrid airship demonstrator in 2006 and in 2012 began the process to win a type certificate for the LMZ1M airship that would feature a gondola for up to eight passengers and two crew members. The vehicle could also carry cargo in an internal bay or externally.

Britain's Hybrid Air Vehicles Ltd. flew its Airlander 10 in 2012 under a U.S. Army contract with Northrop Grumman Corp. NOC +1.46% Its California-based rival, Worldwide Aeros Corp., flew the Dragon Dream vehicle about 30 hours last year. The craft is a half-scale prototype of the planned ML866, designed to carry 66 tons of payload.

Hybrid Air Vehicles's Airlander Hybrid Air Vehicles

Modern airships are far more sophisticated than Zeppelin-era designs, featuring advanced buoyancy systems and the use of advanced materials in their structure. The Lockheed airship would feature fly-by-wire electronic controls now widely used on combat jets and modern airliners.

Igor Pasternak, chief executive of Worldwide Aeros, said airships could spur a revolution in air transport. "We are creating the Internet for logistics," he said. The company is working with potential users to explore how best to employ such transportation systems. "The challenge is how do we structure the right business model," Mr. Pasternak said.

Establishing the industry hasn't been without its setbacks. The U.S. military canceled the program involving HAV's Airlander after deciding it couldn't meet military needs in Afghanistan fast enough. Hybrid bought the aircraft back from the U.S. government and is now rebuilding it for demonstration flights, said Chris Daniels, head of partnerships at HAV. The goal is to return it to flight early next year. Work has also started on a larger version, the Airlander 50, with a range of 2,600 nautical miles.

Worldwide Aeros's craft suffered a partial roof collapse of a hangar which heavily damaged the Dragon Dream. The company isn't sure it will rebuild the vehicle, Mr. Pasternak said. It is, however, pressing ahead with construction of the first two operational ML866s. Work on a vehicle capable of carrying 250 tons of cargo will start in two years.

The biggest challenge for the industry isn't technical, Mr. Pasternak said, but financing. Worldwide Aeros is funded for the next 12 months, but needs more capital to complete construction of its first operational vehicles. Hybrid is funded through to early next year and the planned return flight of the Airlander. It hopes to secure orders by then to proceed with building further vehicles.

The companies are confident, however, that the market holds enough promise to help them raise funds. Hybrid sees a potential market of 650-1,000 airships over several decades, although Mr. Pasternak said it is difficult to gauge the size of the market accurately since airships are a disruptive technology.

Production plans are ambitious. Worldwide Aeros has plans to build as many as 12 vehicles a year. Hybrid targets production of 30-40 airships a year toward the end of the decade. "Our biggest issue is likely to be satisfying demand," Mr. Daniels said.

Not everyone is a convert. Airbus Group EADSY +0.94% NV, which explored the airship concept, has shelved plans, said Sebastien Remy, the company's head of innovation. The company saw too many obstacles for a viable system, though Mr. Remy wouldn't rule out an eventual reversal, in partnership with another company.

Source: The Wall Street Journal / wsj.com

Part blimp, part helicopter Airship...

...takes transport to new heights!

The aft of the 26m-high Airlander 10 dominates Hangar One at Cardington, Bedfordshire

In Britain's largest aircraft hangar, near Cardington in Bedfordshire, a new type of hybrid is being designed -- the Airlander 50. "It's like an airship, in that it uses helium to generate buoyancy, but it also has a specifically engineered hull design to generate aerodynamic lift and thrust," says aeronautical engineer Nick Allman, programme director at Hybrid Air Vehicles.

The 119-metre long vehicle, which will make its maiden voyage in 2018, has a hovercraft undercarriage system so it can take off vertically and land on any flat surface, including water, marsh or snow. It will also be able to hover like a helicopter while carrying about 40 per cent of its full cargo, making it ideal for transporting goods to remote areas.

"If you need to build a mine in Africa or northern Canada, at the moment you have to build a road first and then transport materials," says Allman. Early next year, a 92-metre-long version known as the Airlander 10 (pictured), which can climb to 6,000 metres for up to three weeks at a time, will be demonstrated as a stable platform for communications, geological survey or filming. 

Left: Airlander 10's flight deck is positioned directly below the helium-filled envelope. Right: One of four propulsors. Two are fitted to the sides, and two at the aft.

"Our plan is to set up an aerial mobile-phone mast and fly out over areas with no coverage, and also use it during the Rio 2016 Olympics as a satellite and telecommunications platform," says Allman.

Source: wired.co.uk

Airships rise again!

"This Giant Balloon May Become the Way We Explore the Skies!"

MAY 21, 2014. BY JACK DOYLE

Why you should care ?
Because aviation is due for a 21st-century update, and zeppelins can do it in style.

Picture the scene: A massive balloon resembling a prehistoric whale slips out of the fog, looming over the majestic Manhattan skyline. 

It might sound like something out of a fantastical steampunk film, but fewer than 100 years ago, this image wouldn’t have been out of place in the popular imagination. And plans are afoot to bring it all back.

Zeppelins — giant, rigid airships powered by engines — appeared to be the future of transportation in the early 20th century. 

"Goodyear is now leading the way in breathing life back into the giant airships as feasible ways to fly."

The great dirigibles left their mark on science fiction, warfare and even how we shaped our cities. The Empire State Building’s spire, for example, was originally intended as a zeppelin mooring. While airplanes were still in their infancy, nations used zeppelins to wreak havoc in World War I, traverse oceans and spread propaganda and advertisements to millions. 

So what happened to them? The Hindenburg.

Built in 1936, the aerial behemoth was the pride of Germany’s airship achievements and made luxury flights around the world. A one-way ticket cost $400 — $7,000 today — and a transatlantic flight took three to four days. The Nazis also used it as a floating billboard — pictures still exist of the swastika-bedecked airship hovering over Manhattan and Washington, D.C. But on May 6, 1937, the hydrogen-filled zeppelin burst into flames as it docked in New Jersey, killing 36 people. 

The tragedy quickly put an end to further developments — until now.

SOURCE: NY DAILY NEWS/GETTY
The Hindenburg dirigible attempting to land at Lakehurst, N.J.

Goodyear caused a stir three years ago when it announced that the company’s trademark blimp would be phased out. So instead, they decided to bring back zeppelins (though they’re still calling them blimps). 

But these new airships won’t be full of hydrogen like the ill-fated Hindenburg, but rather helium, a safer alternative that was considered too expensive and inaccessible back in the day. In the wake of the Hindenburg disaster, however, modern blimps have chosen the safer, non-flammable route. And today’s zeppelins are also more fuel efficient, making them the modern era’s first ”green aviation” machines. 

The Zeppelin company — the same German company that designed zeppelins in the late 1800s, built the Hindenburg and was re-established in 1993 — has started producing a new class of airship for the 21st century. Zeppelin NTs (“New Technology”) cruise at the leisurely rate of about 70 mph, fly just over 1,000 feet off the ground and measure a whopping 246 feet long. They have internal skeletons, unlike yesteryear’s blimps, which allow them to carry up to 7,000 more pounds in cargo.

Renewing their 70-year-old partnership with Zeppelin, Goodyear is taking the lead in breathing life back into giant airships as feasible ways to fly. They’ve trained 10 new pilots, the first people to fly zeppelins in decades, and have invited the public to participate in naming contests and sign up for free rides in the next-generation fleet. 

For now, today’s zeppelins are mostly used to attract tourists, sell advertisements or conduct scientific research. Zeppelin tourism, still largely based in Germany, attracts thousands every year for scenic aerial views, despite the steep price tag of about $350. But with Goodyear leading the way, others are starting to wonder if zeppelins might have an even bigger future in the skies.

The avionics of Goodyear’s new $20 million airship, code-named the Zeppelin NT

Aeroscraft, a private American aviation company, just got a $3 million grant from the U.S. government to construct giant silver airships that will be able to carry more than 66 tons of goods. By the time the planned 24-ship fleet comes together, the Aeroscraft zeppelins could revolutionize transport, and U.S. government and military contractors won’t be the only ones to benefit. 

"We are able to prove that this technology works."

Because they land and take off vertically, like a helicopter, Aeroscraft zeppelins could bring significant quantities of food and other emergency supplies to isolated areas where jets can’t reach. This could make responding to natural disasters, war zones and food crises faster and more efficient.

Aeroscraft has conducted initial float tests with a prototype of the airship, proving that its new buoyancy system works, and it has received a Federal Aviation Administration certificate for airworthiness. More tests will follow, but the team is excited by the prospect of forging a new path for cargo transport.

“We are able to prove that this technology works,” says Sadia Ashraf, of Worldwide Aeros, the company that built the prototype. 

Zeppelins may not travel at jet speed, but they use less fuel than helicopters and carry far more cargo, making them a great alternative to shipping and airplanes.

The new models are expected to be up and running by next year, and if the trend takes off, demand for zeppelins could lead to increased supply and lower costs, making a zeppelin commute or vacation trip accessible to everyone.

One thing’s for sure: The thrill and romance of zeppelins still have the power to inspire, prompting today’s innovators to transform a symbol of luxury and awe into a bold new way for people to explore the skies.

Source: ozy.com

Letters by Airship Mail!

"Found: Letters from the Hindenburg! A new addition to the Smithsonian collections tells a new story about the legendary disaster."

By Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2012

Every ounce counted onboard the Hindenburg, the 804-foot airship designed to fly across the Atlantic. The metal girders were perforated, and the piano was made of aluminum. Each passenger was assigned a single napkin to reuse in the luxurious dining hall. And yet the hydrogen-filled zeppelin was hauling hundreds of pounds of mail when, for reasons that are still unknown, it burst into flames on May 6, 1937, above a New Jersey field, killing 35 of 97 riders. Transcontinental mail was indispensable cargo; despite the year-old vessel’s glamorous image (tickets cost a whopping $450), the airship covered much of its operating costs by providing the first regular trans-Atlantic airmail service.

The human stories tucked in with the mailbags have always fascinated Cheryl Ganz, a leading Hindenburg historian and co-curator of a new exhibition at the National Postal Museum. In addition to many letters and postcards, the exhibit includes other frail bits of paper that survived the inferno, some of which have never been displayed before, such as a receipt for two in-flight martinis. There’s also a reproduction of the only known final flight map, which has the route from Frankfurt, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, painstakingly traced in pencil.

“We are bringing together these artifacts, these salvaged items, many of them reunited for the first time since they were picked out of the wreckage,” Ganz says. “We can piece together bits of the story that have never been told.”

The Hindenburg is one of two doomed vessels at the heart of the Postal Museum exhibition “Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic,” which marks the disasters’ 75th and 100th anniversaries, respectively. The RMS Titanic was, after all, a Royal Mail Ship, the largest floating post office of its day. When it began to founder on the night of April 14, 1912, the postal clerks made a heroic effort to drag mailbags to higher decks. The exhibit includes a set of mailroom keys and a watch recovered from their bodies. (No paper mail survived the sinking.)

In a postal sense, zeppelins were intended to replace the Titanic-era ocean liners, which took close to a week to deliver trans-Atlantic letters. The Hindenburg made the trip in just two and a half days, and even in the teeth of the Great Depression, bankers were willing to pay extra to get deals done faster. In addition, letter-writing was a key leisure activity for passengers, who didn't have many other ways of passing the time. (Another option was smoking in a pressurized lounge, where the bartender kept the only lighter allowed on the highly flammable vessel.) The airship’s stewards sold Hindenburg stationery, postcards and stamps, which passengers used to impress their friends back home. Burtis Dolan, a Chicago perfume executive, had assured his wife that he would not fly during his trip to Europe, but he was homebound on the Hindenburg, hoping to surprise her for Mother’s Day. “I know I promised not to fly on this trip,” he wrote from the belly of the zeppelin, “but this was an opportunity I had to take.” He perished in the accident.

Of the 17,000-odd pieces of Hindenburg correspondence, roughly 360 withstood the flames, which rose 1,000 feet. Some postcards and envelopes had been placed in a protective bag for later delivery, and others were crammed in the center of regular mailbags, where oxygen couldn’t reach. These singed letters, six of them featured in the show, are among the grandest prizes of philately.

In the days after the disaster, scorched remains of letters were pieced together and sent on. Dolan’s family and friends received several notes that he’d written onboard. (A card to a neighbor is featured in the show.) The zeppelin company also had lists of some of the intended recipients of the incinerated mail. The Hindenburg’s postmaster, who had leapt to safety from an airship window, dutifully informed them via form letter that their mail would not be delivered.

Source: smithsonianmag.com

Politics of Steampunk

"A debate which has been going on for quite some time: The politics of steampunk - in a world full of mad scientists, airships and class."

By Rjurik Davidson 4.Jun.12

The subgenre of Steampunk – that subgenre of speculative fiction set in a fantastical Victorian era filled with airships, mad scientists and mechanical replicas of people or animals – may well have reached its zenith. With the new Sherlock Holmes movies, The Golden Compass or Scorsese’s Hugo, it seems possible that the initial burst of zest and inspiration will now settle into a more subtle ticking over of novels and films as the subgenre colonises the cultural spaces still open to it (Heart of Darkness steampunk? Opium-war Steampunk?).

For some time a debate has been raging about the politics of the subgenre.

For some, Steampunk is a reactionary nostalgia for past that never happened. In a review last year, author and critic Adam Roberts claimed that Steampunk is a perfect example of Jameson’s claim that the culture of postmodernism means a loss of any sense of historicity. For Roberts, Steampunk is ‘a studied dismantling of the consecutiveness of history in the service of a particular set of styles and fashions.’ He continues:

the appeal of the genre is in the way it finesses the past into the present. This is an aesthetic strategy it shares with Heroic Fantasy (or much of it) as a mode: a disinclination to encounter the past as past. Most twenty-first century representations of a notional “past” are based on the idea that people in the nineteenth century (or, in post-Tolkienian Fantasy, the middle ages) were basically people exactly like us, and therefore people with whom it requires no effort from the reader to identify.

According to Roberts, Steampunk jettisons a sense of the logic of history. Fundamentally, the subgenre is an irrationalism.

Others have mounted similar arguments. A couple of years ago, science fiction author Charles Stross claimed on his blog that most steampunk refused to face up to the Nineteenth Century as it really was. In that world, Stross claimed:

Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It’s the world that bequeathed us the adjective “Dickensian”, that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It’s the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next).

Evan Calder Williams makes a different point in his book Combinded and Uneven Apocalypse. For him, steampunk is a ‘weak handmaiden of Obama-era capitalism.’ That is, he periodises steampunk according to the conjuncture, much as China Miéville once periodised the ‘New Weird’ according to the development of the anti-globalisation movement. For Evan Calder Williams, the promise behind steampunk is to ‘keep technology, keep consumption, but make it “thoughtful,” make it responsible, make it “sustainable.” All in all, a participation in that great pastime of the pseudo-Left, remembering the era that never was, back when life was simpler and labor was meaningful.’

But if there is a strong current of left critiques of steampunk, there are also those who defend it. In response to Roberts, Jeff Vandermeer, co-writer of The Steampunk Bible and co-editor of the anthologies Steampunk and Steampunk Reloaded, claimed that these sorts of readings were selective. Vandermeer wrote to Roberts that:

you’ve basically defined a subset of steampunk in your analysis rather than the totality of it, that you’ve decided to focus on one small cog in terms of the mindset behind it, I hope you’ll understand that the impulse to defend something that alas from the term itself *seems* intended to be nostalgic comes from somewhere decidedly *non-escapist*. This isn’t from any particular special love for steampunk fiction or from writing it myself – I don’t – but from simply having had to exhaustively document it and the whole creative subculture.

This response has two aspects to it. The first is a purely material objection: many of the works of steampunk don’t fit the claims of its critics. The second is that as a result, these critics get the definition of steampunk wrong. What is interesting is the way that this debate echoes an earlier debate between advocates of science fiction and those of fantasy. For many of the early critics of the genres, science fiction was a progressive form and fantasy the reactionary one. Science fiction was forward looking, a literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’ as critic Darko Suvin famously defined it, a way of rational thinking. It made you consider the way the world of the story worked (the cognitive side of the definition), the rules of the social structure, if you like, and this made the reader reflect back on our own world. If you present a world without sexism or racism, this naturally makes the reader ask, ‘what causes these discriminations in our world?’

According to these critics, fantasy was instead irrationalist; for Suvin, it was a ‘sub-literature of mystification’. It didn’t operate according to the rules of science (either social or the ‘hard’ sciences). It was obsessed with the return to a romanticised neo-feudal world, in which the highest political aspiration was to be ruled by a benevolent ‘king’, be that Aragorn or the kitchen-hand who, unbeknown to himself, was deposed by an evil lord and is yet to realise his destiny. We can be sure that by the end of the series, the king will be restored to his throne, order will be reinstituted (with everyone in their place) and everything will be right with the world.

But this long-accepted critique was blown apart by writers of the ‘New Weird’, another subgenre of speculative fiction who (recalling the writers of the 1930s) broke down the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy. China Miéville’s books were probably at the forefront of this, but just as important was the introduction he wrote for the journalHistorical Materialism’s symposium on fantasy. For Miéville:

The usual charge that fantasy is escapist, incoherent or nostalgic (if not downright reactionary), though perhaps true for great swathes of the literature, is contingent on content. Fantasy is a mode that, in constructing an internally coherent but actually impossible totality – constructed on the basis that the impossible is, for this work, true – mimics the ‘absurdity’ of capitalist modernity.

Indeed, for Miéville, the fantastic is embedded in contemporary capitalism, both in the ways that commodification works and in the way that the human imagination is part of the productive cycle. Real life under capitalism is a fantasy.

Moreover, for Miéville, fantasy can have exactly the same ‘cognition effect’ as science fiction. A fantastic novel about class, race or sexuality might have greater insight into contemporary reality as a novel about the bickering of a middle-class family isolated from great social struggles. In other words, fantasy can be just as good to think with as science fiction. But it depends more on the work itself rather than the specific form.

These arguments seem to me to be true also of steampunk. The point is not so much the ‘content’ of the fiction, but rather the attitude of the work to its own content. Just as one can write a nostalgic view of the Victorian era from the point-of-view of the aristocracy, so one could write a critical view from the point of view of marginalised. Steampunk, like many cultural forms, is a thus site of struggle. The real divisions lie not between genres, it seems to me, but across them.

Source: overland.org.au

New Homage to Jules Verne...the Steampunk way!

"Always amazing to see people putting so much effort and detail in these things: 
Fabulous New Illustrations for a Steampunk Homage to Jules Verne"

Mahendra Singh is an illustrator best known for work that is meticulously researched, intelligent to the point of phosphorescence and executed with obsessive craftsmanship. It should go without saying, then, that his illustrations for steampunk Jules Verne tribute 20 Trillion Leagues Under the Sea are nothing short of fantastic.

I first met Mahendra—a self-described "ink-stained wretch"—nearly twenty years ago when I saw a collection of totally convincing postage stamps he'd created, based on the premise that the Confederacy had won the Civil War (he eventually condescended to provide the uncanny illustrations for my anthology, Pathetic Selections). His beautiful work, which is often disturbing and almost invariably rendered in pen-and-ink, evokes the surrealistic collages of Max Ernst (whom Singh admits has been an enormous influence on his art).

Singh recently adapted Lewis Carroll's surrealistic poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", as a graphic novel. As a long-time member of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and an editor for their journal, theKnight Letter, Singh—who describes himselfas a "Carrollian Nutter...harmless as long as I have access to drawing materials. And pictures of Snarks"—was uniquely suited for the task. 

His illustrations are as much a kind of intellectual treasure hunt—full of riddles, puns, and allusions—as the poem is itself. Singh is also one of the contributing illustrators to the recent New York Times best-selling Adventure Time Encyclopaedia (of all things), created by card-carrying genius Martin Olson. I may as well add a plug for Olson's The Encyclopaedia of Hell,which also was illustrated by Singh. About as different as two books could possibly get...

When young, Singh read everything "from 70s SF to Aristophanes to the Ramayana... What I usually liked was a complex, completely furnished fictional world, along with a nice musicality with words. What really turned me on was when that fictional world would be logically intertwined with the real world, past or present." It seemed natural that one of the authors Singh admired was Jules Verne—a sterling quality we both share. And, like me, he has always had a fondness and admiration for the beautiful woodcuts that accompanied the original editions of Verne's novels (as one of the best-selling authors of his time, Verne's books demanded and got the best illustrators in the business).

When BSFA award-winning Adam Roberts wrote his new steampunk novel-tribute to Jules Verne, 20 Trillion Leagues Under the Sea, that it needed Mahendra Singh's illustrations was probably a no-brainer. "Why not," Singh asked, "illustrate steam-punk with a visual style that actually reminds the reader of the Victorian era?" This was no doubt also the reasoning behind Singh being chosen to illustrate Jean-Christophe Valtat's steampunk epic, Luminous Chaos. Like Franklin Booth, the classic American illustrator of the 1920s, Singh evokes the appearance of the woodcut illustrations of the 19th century by means of a meticulous pen-and-ink style that has a uniquely compelling quality of its own. Just as it's hard to imagine Alice in Wonderlandwithout Sir John Tenniel, it may be that for future generations it will be hard to imagine Jules

Source: io9.com