Steampunk?

[meganbmoore]

 Watching Last Exile made me realize that, though I dislike most mecha, I like most steampunk that I've encountered(I think Steamboy is the only exception, off the top of my head...there are likely others if I think about it, though...I just try not to dwell on things I don't care for) but don't seem to run across it a lot, even though I know there's a lot out there..

Anyone want to rec me steampunk or gaslight romances, be they anime, manga or books?  (And tell me if it's available in the US) 

ETA:  wikipedia's page on steampunk 

ETA 2: crumpeteerhas posted very, very brief descriptions of the various "punk" genres here.

Comments

[calixa.livejournal.com]

What's steampunk/gaslight?

I am out of Deer Man episodes. Woe.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk

*signs onto IMO, not sure for how long, though*

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

I would put Escaflowne (the anime) in the steampunk category.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Really? I put it more in the straightforward mecha category...it seemed to focus on the mecha first, and the other technological aspects of the world second(I would have liked it a lot more had it been the reverse, or better yet, no mecha at all)

[maxineofarc.livejournal.com]

You can't go wrong by going back to the basics: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the pulps.

[crumpeteer.livejournal.com]

Heh. I just realized that Tin Man is actually steampunk.

The Vesuvius Club and The Devil in Amber by Mark Gatiss are both pretty good if you don't mind a main character who you rather want to slap upside the head sometimes (the main character reminds me of Jack Harkness in the "sleep with anything that moves" way).

The Peshawar Lancers by S.M. Stirling is good. I understand Anno Dracula by Kim Newman is pretty good.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Jack Harkness? I dislike slut leads, male even more than female. There are exceptions, but even those tend to be far from my favorites in their respective properties, and rarely work for me as leads.

Tin Man looked rather steampunking to me in pics and vids I've seen. I hope to get the DVDs around when they come out.

[crumpeteer.livejournal.com]

Gankutsuou is also steampunk I think, though it's more concerned with its Count of Monte Cristo ness than the actual steampunk world.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Gankutsuou is one that's on my list, though...was it one of the titles whose company went out of business?

[southerndave.livejournal.com]

"Jack Harkness?"

Main character of the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood. First appears in the Doctor Who two-part story The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. Which I very highly recommend, by the way. (This is from the series when the Doctor is played by the bloke who plays Claude - the invisible man - from Heroes). Anyway... Jack Harkness will flirt with anything: man, woman, robot, you name it. I haven't seen much of Torchwood yet, but in Doctor Who he's all talk.

Anyway, as far as steam-punk that I think you'd actually like a lot goes... I'd recommend the web-comic Girl Genius, if you aren't familiar with it already. Wacky steam-punk setting, lots of mad, mad, mad science and a titular lead character who kicks arse with just her brain.

(Mark Gatiss has also written for Doctor Who, but that's not really considered all that special in Britain; Doctor Who is the sort of thing that everybody gets involved with in some way, sooner or later... e.g. Douglas Adams, Paul Cornell, Zoe Wanamaker, Derek Jacobi...)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen much of Torchwood yet, but in Doctor Who he's all talk.

Well, not QUITE all talk, there was that end-of-the-world snogging with both Nine and Rose!

In Torchwood, what I've seen so far, there is a load of talk (and not just from him -- there's a bit in the episode where Martha comes for a visit where she and one of the Torchwood girls joke that they must be the only people on the planet Jack *hasn't* slept with), but also a fair bit of action implied, if not always shown directly on screen. In one episode we meet an elderly lady who was his lover back in the war years, in another he ends up going back in time and meets (and has an abortive makeout session) with the real Captain Jack Harkness whose identity he stole, and in the start of the second season there's some violent sexy fighting with another male Time Agent who's an ex-lover, and some on-screen snogs with one of the Torchwood guys. The episode that's aired most recently in the US -- we seem to be running a couple weeks behind the UK broadcast -- has them finally coming out and admitting that he and Ianto are currently an item, like there was any doubt about at this point...

So, yeah, Jack's definitely quite the manslut. I find him to at least be of the Gojyo-ish charming-rogue-with-a-good-heart sort, but YMMV.

[southerndave.livejournal.com]

The only Torchwood I've seen is a handful of downloaded episodes... it's never been shown here (I'm of the firm belief that the TV station that bought it, only bought it so that Prime (which shows Doctor Who) couldn't get it).

I must be woefully behind; I didn't even know Ianto was over his HUGE SPOILER.

Is that a Tom Lehrer quote in your icon? Because if it isn't, it's something he should have been the one to think up...

Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately? I've got a hobby, rereading Lady Chatterly...

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

They started dropping Jack/Ianto hints in S1, several episodes after the HUGE SPOILER if you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (early in the first season, another blatant Who crossover?); but the really blatant stuff, the on-screen snogs and verbal admissions, are all S2.

And yes, that's classic Lehrer, well-spotted!

[chomiji]

Lehrer fans - they're everywhere! I think smilla and I first bonded over that icon - Lehrer and Gojyo make a great combo.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I tend to require extreme amounts of angst a la Gojyo or Yukimura to make me like the mansluts. Even then, no matter how fond of them I may end up being, they tend not to be favorites.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Jack has tons and tons of angst, although considering he's had way way more than a normal human lifetime in which to accumulate it, it's not as excessive as it might be. However, it's all rather Saiyuki-ish in that the angst and backstory only comes out very slowly, in bits and pieces; he'd much rather joke and flirt rather than sit and soliloquize about his emo manpain.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Are you already reading Mike Mignola -- Hellboy, B.P.R.D.? They're not strictly steampunk as a whole, but steampunk elements crop up a lot and they're just grand pulpy fun. (Ironwolf is more properly steampunk, though it didn't click so well with me for some reason; and he was involved in the art design on Disney's "Atlantis" -- he really keeps coming back to those steampunky images)

Miyazaki's Laputa is another classic, and the Moorcock Oswald Bastable books mentioned in the Wiki article were early favorites of mine and in retrospect my first exposure to anything steampunky, although they're rather slight, more memorable for the odd tech and alternate-history angles rather than the characters. Paul di Filippo's The Steampunk Trilogy (http://www.amazon.com/Steampunk-Trilogy-Paul-Di-Filippo/dp/1568581025) is pretty good, and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age), while more of a cyberpunk SF, has almost a steampunky feel to much of it due to one culture's use of modern high technology to live out a sort of odd recreation of Victorian society -- fun, although it suffers from Stephenson's usual problem of not being able to write decent endings.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I've had Hellboy recced to me, but never read it. Never heard of Ironwolf, though.

I think Laputa was my first conscious exposure to it, and FMA the first "gig" thing I saw that was steamounk-ish that I identified as such. (LoeG is in a way, too, though I think maybe more gaslight...)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ironwolf was Mignola art but other folks writing, and that just never tends to make me quite as happy -- I like his pulp-and-folklore obsession as much as his distinctive visual style. It's not bad, mind you, lots of swashbuckling, but I just somehow never fell in love with it the way I did with the big red guy and his world.

Hellboy, OTOH, I love to distraction. If I had to fit it into a genre I'd say it's ultimately just pure glorious retro pulp (think Tom Strong, perhaps), gleefully mixing elements of myth and magic and SF and ghost stories and plain old war/adventure yarns into a glorious mish-mash.

One more that I forgot, Elizabeth Bear's done some very gaslighty stuff in her "New Amsterdam" stories -- links here (http://www.elizabethbear.com/short.html) where you can read the novella "Lucifugous" online and hear an audiobook version of "Wax".

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I love my swashbuckling...

'Tis a reason Vincent ended up my favorite in LE(that, and there's just something appealing about a guy who's that overwhelmingly devoted to a person, even if she is hung up on someone else.)

[fairest1.livejournal.com]

Girl Genius, Larklight, Howl's Moving Castle, Five Fists of Science, Back to the Future III, The Golden Compass, The Amazing Screw-on Head, LoEG, Ruse, and Hollow Fields are all quite awesome. All are available in the US.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

RRrrrrrruuuuuuusssssseeeeee....Simon...Emma...*goes to happy place*

Larklight, Hollow Fields? Five Fists of Science?

And are the Girl Genius trades in print?(I remember wanting them a while back, but not being able to get them.)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Girl Genius is a lot of fun and I really need to go back and catch up with it one of these years. Amazon does seem to show the trades are available now...

Screw-On Head is Mignola at his most cracky. It's fun, although I'm not sure I'd suggest it as your first exposure to his work.

Miyazaki's version of HMC feels more gaslighty to me than the original Diana Wynne Jones book, but they're both charming in their own ways.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I need to read more DWJ...I've liked the 2 I read.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Heh, same here -- the two in my case being HMC and the sequel, Castle In The Air (which is flat-out fairytaleish, involving genies, magic carpets, humble shopkeepers falling for beautiful princesses, and so forth...)

[southerndave.livejournal.com]

I recommend "Hexwood".

[fairest1.livejournal.com]

*happysigh* Partners! Doomed to failure only 'cause the publisher went down in flames.

Larklight -- a young adult book, technically, set in what's basically the future as victorian sci-fi saw it; Newton developed entirely on his own*cough* the power source for spaceships. It's now the 19th century, and Queen Victoria is leading jolly old England's expansion across the solar system. It's hilarious and has awesome characters. Including Myrtle, a Proper Young Lady who gets very frustrated when there's no dashing young gentleman to come to her rescue and she must defend herself rather than fainting as a young woman should under such circumstances. A romance, of sorts.

Hollow Fields -- a manga that tells the tale of young Lucy Snow, who loses her way when headed to boarding school and finds herself signed up at a school for young mad scientists. Only one volume exists at the moment, but it's pretty good.

Five Fists of Science -- Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain, in an effort to make tons of cash and bring about world peace, build a robot and go to fight crime. The highest levels of historical accuracy I've seen on Tesla in a fictional work. Not a romance in any way, but as close as Tesla would ever get without including something inappropriate with a pigeon.

The Girl Genius trades are indeed in print! You can get 'em from Studio Foglio if Amazon doesn't have them in stock.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Ruse...

*'scuse me, mourning a bit...it and Crux and Negation and The First...but Ruse especially*

Amazon shows(in addition to 6 regular trades that could be priced better, but aren't ridiculous) a manga sized B&W trade collecting the first 3 volumes.

[fairest1.livejournal.com]

*bows head for moment of silence*

Route 666 wasn't half bad, either.

That's really a personal call; I've got a complete set of hardcovers, so I'm going to be pretty biased. Or you can just read the entire thing online, since it's all up.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah...Route 666 was good, not to mention Way of the Rat...I have a soft spot for Sojourn, too(Gareth/Arwyn is, IMO, the only decent romantic pairing Marz ever wrote, even if it was eventually wrecked by the obligatory Third party) but the others affected me more when I lost them. Esp. Ruse and The First(is it wrong that I shipped persha and Seahn(I think I misspelled that...the antagonist from the "peaceful" side...)

I prefer having lovely books in my hand to reading online.

[fairest1.livejournal.com]

. . . I only read Ruse and Route 666. And a couple issues of The Crossovers.

Then you'll want to invest in the full-size collections, rather than the manga-size edition. Better quality, plus bonus materials. At this stage, it's crazy to try for hardcovers, so TPBs are the way to go.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oh, and before I forget -- one recurring source of humor in Pratchett is a sort of comic-fantasy angle on steampunk, in which some blend of alchemy and magic is used to recreate technological items you'd not expect in a fantasy setting. This sort of thing is sprinkled throughout all the books -- you see it from the very beginning, with foreign tourist Twoflower's "camera" (a box with a tiny magic imp sitting at an easel, painting very fast) -- but it tends to be particularly thick in the Industrial Revolution (http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/the-discworld-reading-order-guide-1-5.jpg) books.

[southerndave.livejournal.com]

Thanks to Pratchett, I have taken to calling a certain type of Infernal Electronic Device a "Gooseberry" instead of its usual name...

[irenak.livejournal.com]

Someone already mentioned the original Jules Verne, so might as well throw out The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, the Canadian TV series. It was a bit uneven, but great fun. Wild, Wild West - either film or television series - could count as steampunk as well, but I don't know how keen you are on that particular environment versus a more urban one.

You can also try any number of Sherlock Holmes pastiches: the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries graphic novels take a sort of LXG approach, pitting Holmes against various Victorian-era characters.

Hope that helps!

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Also, as an obsessive RoS fangirl I must note that Secret Adventures stars the aging-very-gracefully-indeed Michael Praed as Phileas Fogg... (http://www.answers.com/topic/the-secret-adventures-of-jules-verne?cat=entertainment) hubba hubba.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Very gracefully aging, at that.

Was it released in the US? (reminds me that I need the second RoS set so I can see if my trend of viewing the hated replacement male lead/love interest/etc as a poor woobie-in no true comparison-holds true.)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's out on DVD *anywhere* -- I'm not finding anything even on Canadian or UK sites...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I view Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branaugh as beingt he sole redeeming qualities of the Wild, Wild West movie.

[estara.livejournal.com]

How come no one has mentioned Sakura Wars yet? The TV Series and the OVAs and the Movie are all out in the US (no idea if they are available, though). Especially the first OVA is good. You get lots of bishies as enemies, too, for an added bonus, although the heart is a harem around Ookami, whom I actually don't mind winning girl's hearts.

*remembers buying DreamCast for this series and playing through episode 2 with the help of Koyama's translation of the gaming script*

I still have to see if I can find the rest of the scripts. I own four of the games for DreamCast now ^^.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I've seen the anime series and read the first couple manga.

[chomiji]

Don't forget the Martha Wells stuff!

And some have called Swordpoint (and presumably the better of its two sequels, The Privilege of the Sword, as well>) "Mannerpunk" (as in "Comedy of Manners").

And did you ever read the children's books by Joan Aiken that start with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase? By the time you get to the third book or so, they're showing steampunk-ish characteristics, and they're definitely early gaslight. (And one of my childhood heroines, Dido Twite, shows up in the second book.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I have the Wells trilogy, but I'm waiting until I get ahold of a copy of Death of the Necromancer to read it.

I haven't tracked down the Hodge books yet.