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

[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.)