book details

Book: Riding The Mainspring - A Collection Of Steampunk Short Stories by Andrew Knighton

categories: Book, Fantasy, Retrofuturism, Victorian, Adventure, Invention, Crime, Weird Western, Short Story, Collection, Steampunk

Andrew Knighton

about this anthology: Welcome to worlds full of marvellous machines and thrilling adventure. From a wild hunt through the sewers of Venice to a desperate chase through the clouds above volcano-torn Europe, see visions of futures that might have been. An ever-moving city. A steam-powered cowboy. A mechanical prison. Meet all these wonders and more as you jump on board and ride the mainspring.

Riding the Mainspring is a collection of steampunk short stories. It was inspired by dozens of wild ideas and flights of fancy, trying to make the familiar new again, the mechanical magical. It's an ode to the machines that make our lives more amazing, and the people who invent them. And like any good set of stories about technology, it's about how we live with those changes.

I wanted to show a wide range of steampunk settings, not just the Victorian Britain that is so common in the genre - though that's there too. So there's an African scientist in France and an American in Italy, as well as several worlds unlike our own. I also wanted to make sure that the consequences of technology and 19th-century social conditions were present. There are high class adventurers, but there are the less well-off as well, criminals and dissidents as well as the elite.