Why
Steampunk Turns My Crank
When
I think of steampunk, I think of gorgeous costumes, nifty props, tough
heroines, and romance. Why romance? Just browse through Google images on the
topic. If that's not a flight of romantic fancy I don't know what is.
But
steampunk is also about science. Oftentimes improbable science that's really a
lot more like magic, but you can't define steampunk without talking about
science. Here is the shortest definition of steampunk I've ever seen, from The Ministry
of Peculiar Occurrences[SF1] :
Steampunk is modern technology—iPads, computers,
robotics, air travel—powered by steam and set in the 1800s.
Steampunk is earthy and weighed down by
Newtonian physics. Even those balloony dirigibles look like they’re about to
drop out of the sky. So why do we find the aesthetics so appealing? Possibly
because our modern world has been overtaken by sleek, sophisticated, and cold tech that makes us both more and
less efficient.
A few years ago, the Aether Emporium wiki
posted a collection
of steampunk definitions [SF2] that
included this from a contributor identified as Datamancer:
I see it as a reaction to the utter
soullessness and disposability of modern tech. There are only so many garish
space-eggs and tech. bubbles you can look at before you just stop appreciating
them. Steampunk harkens back to a time when technology was still novel and
romantic, when the world was still marvelling at its own cleverness with
childlike pride and wonder, looking hopefully toward a strange and wonderful future.
I’m on the pep squad for science.
Despite hailing from a family of engineers, my math was never strong enough to
go into a scientific field myself. But I’ve always loved science and science
fiction (I’m a total geek over quantum physics). I’m also a romantic at heart, and
I love how steampunk combines that pioneering, inventive spirit with an
aesthetic beauty that manages to feel both inspiring and grounding. (There’s
nothing more Newtonian than gravity[SF3] !)
A HEART FOR COPPER was my first
steampunk story, though I’ve been admiring the genre from afar for years. I
love that it’s a Pick Your Path story, inviting you to examine its parts and
understand how it all fits together. To work it like a puzzle, in a sense,
unlocking the path to an eventual HEA. And COPPER’s hero, William, is an
inventor who married an interest in aesthetic beauty with his love of
mechanical tinkering to create an actual being — a being he hopes will
understand him more than the “real” people in his life do.
COPPER also features an archetypal
character called Hephaesta, named for the Greek god Hephaestus, an inventor and
blacksmith who created automatons to assist him in his workshop. Hephaesta is
part alchemist and part philosopher, but she too is a tinkerer at heart. She
considers herself “a woman of science,” and she can rock a steampunk gown:
That
she was old I did not doubt, but I could not have said how old. Her silvery hair was pinned neatly
atop her head and crowned with a tall black top hat. Her black corset showed
her figure was still quite neat, and yards of satiny, patchwork skirt flowed
around her hips and legs. Her eyes glinted through a pair of wire spectacles
that rested on her dainty, curved nose.
So what is it about steampunk that
turns your crank?
Image By Eugene ivanov (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
[SF1]http://www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com/what-is-steampunk/
[SF2]http://etheremporium.pbworks.com/w/page/10454262/What%20is%20Steampunk
A Heart for Copper
Sharon Lynn Fisher
Genre: Steampunk romance
Publisher: SilkWords
Date of Publication: May 9, 2014
ASIN: B00LDYFKQ6
Number of pages: 67 pages
Word Count: 14K
Cover Artist: Indie Designz
Book Description:
An automaton created by an inventor's son, Copper has finally been given a heart by her young master. Her choice of whether to keep the key or give it to him will determine what happens next in this "pick your path" steampunk fairy tale.
Will she join his family in their English country manor, where she'll be forced to consider the question of whether she's really human? Or will she search out the quirky alchemist responsible for giving her life?
Will her master hold onto her heart, or will she be tempted by the charms of an automaton man?
Excerpt:
I have a heart-shaped hole. Like
an empty bird's nest, it rests among marigold-hued ruffles above the topmost
hook of my corset.
The hole was not left by
something removed, but for something anticipated.
I am an automaton. I have never
moved of my own volition — never lifted so much as a finger, save by the power
of the windup mechanism at my back. Never felt a chill-bump, or the orange yarn
rising on the back of my chicken-wire neck. My amethyst eyes follow my young
master without motion. The dead, glass eyes of a doll. My face no more than a
bone-colored mask with faint pink smudges where my cheekbones would be.
If I were alive.
My brain is sacking stuffed with
cotton, my torso salvaged from a discarded mannequin. My limbs are dark,
spindly things, like they belong on crows. But my master has wrapped them in
ivory silk, and in the dim light of his workshop, I can pretend they are arms
like his.
I am not a living thing, but the
work of man's hands. Man does not give life. Not since The Regression. The
Digital Age machines are all dead. My master was born into the Neoclassical
Age, named not for cultural or artistic reasons, but for the laws of science to
which all citizens are required to conform. Post-classical physics are banned.
Reserved for the gods, the only ones fit to wield them.
How does a stuffed-head,
cobbled-together, life-sized doll know all this? Know anything at all? Because
my master talks to me. Reads to me. From the time he was a schoolboy, he has
shared every lesson with me, from The Odyssey to odious French (his descriptor,
not mine). I was his schoolmate. Watched him grow to manhood while I remained
the same, unless he himself wrought change — replacing dingy fabric with fresh,
tinkering with moving parts, shifting my head so I could watch him work.
I spend many lonely hours in my
master's workshop, when he is away at school or in the city with his family. In
those hours I feel empty and soulless, and I have often prayed that when he
loses interest in me — which he inevitably shall —he will also unmake me,
rather than leave me collecting dust in my chair.
For my master is the only light
in my life, though I am no more to him than the toy ships he played with as a
boy. Less than the pup who licked his heels, followed his footsteps, and
finally sank into a straw-stuffed bed near the fire, from which, occasionally,
I still hear the thump, thump, thump of tail against floorboards.
***
"Hullo, Dutch. Hullo,
Copper."
Thump, thump, thump.
If I could have wagged, I would
have. Master William entered the workshop, light beaming from his every
feature. I knew the expression well. He'd been out in The World. He'd
encountered something — or someone — interesting. Something he wished to share
with me. You'd think he'd tire of my colossal implacability.
"I have something for
you," he said, sinking onto the stool in front of me.
At moments like these I almost
imagined that the hole in my chest had been filled. I could feel an ache there
— an ache that should not have been. His eyes were green as the ribbons of my
corset. His hair black as the coal in the bin. His lips were soft and
expressive, like the women of the house — his mother, his elder sister, the
chambermaids. Master William was everything lovely, everything beloved, in my
dust, dark world.
He slipped a bronze chain from
his pocket. A necklace, with a heart-shaped pendant — the shape of the symbol,
not the visceral, beating thing itself.
The shape of the hole in my
chest.
Tiny metal gears and copper
springs were encased behind a small glass window embedded in the crimson resin.
It was beautiful, a work of art. As I watched, he slid open a small compartment
in the back of the pendant and produced a key. He held out the pendant in the
palm of his hand.
"Happy birthday,
Copper," he whispered.
The echo of my nonexistent
heartbeat sounded in my cottony brain, behind my porcelain mask.
If my lips had breath, his
proximity would have stopped it as he moved to slip the chain around my neck,
letting the heart fall into its readymade grave. Pinching the key between his
fingers, he inserted it into a tiny keyhole in the tapered bottom of the heart.
Bolts sprang from the sides of
the pendant, penetrating the stuffing in my chest, locking the heart in place.
I felt it as if I were flesh and bone.
A loud, dry, sucking sound came
from my throat as I took my first breath.
Master William's eyes widened —
with shock? with horror? — as the change took me over. The pain was
excruciating.
"The old woman was
right," he murmured, aghast.
I could barely hear him from
behind the wall of pain — or over the very real pounding in my chest. His face
blurred, and I was sure I felt moisture seeping from the holes in my mask. What
was happening to me?
"You must choose,
Copper," he continued. "Hephaesta said if you want to be like me, you
must give me the key. If you want to be like you, you must keep it."
I glanced down at the tiny thing
of brass still lodged in the base of my heart.
What did it mean? A riddle,
perhaps? What was I to do?
"Quickly," he said,
worry dimming his brightness. "The heart will stop beating without the
choice."
Pain spiked up my arm as I raised
it from my side. My wooden, wire-jointed fingers wiggled to life. I grasped the
key and removed it.
1.
I've waited all my non-life for this. I give him the key.
2.
I want to find out who I am. I keep the key.
About the Author:
An RWA RITA Award finalist and a three-time RWA Golden Heart Award finalist, Sharon Lynn Fisher writes stories for the geeky at heart — meaty mash-ups of sci-fi, suspense, and romance, with no apology for the latter. She lives where it rains nine months of the year. And she has a strange obsession with gingers (down to her freaky orange cat).
Sharon has written three science fiction romance novels for Tor Books — Ghost Planet (2012), The Ophelia Prophecy (2014), and Echo 8(2015) — and she's indie publishing her erotica series Fantasies in Color.
She’s also the editorial director for (and a partner in) SilkWords!
Sharon has written three science fiction romance novels for Tor Books — Ghost Planet (2012), The Ophelia Prophecy (2014), and Echo 8(2015) — and she's indie publishing her erotica series Fantasies in Color.
She’s also the editorial director for (and a partner in) SilkWords!
Visit her at www.sharonlynnfisher.com
http://www.pinterest.com/sharonlynfisher/
SilkWords is the go-to source for interactive romance and erotic fiction.
With gorgeous custom covers and a clean, sophisticated design, the SilkWords site offers a secure, upscale reading environment. In addition to content on their web site, they offer stories for purchase in the standard e-book formats.
SilkWords is owned and operated by a full-time mom with a background in genetics and an RWA RITA-nominated, multi-published sci-fi romance author.
Their technology guy and site designer was the founder of Microsoft Xbox Live.
SilkWords features two formats that allow readers to choose how the stories will proceed.
Pick Your Path:
Will she or won't she? With which man (or woman) in which location? With Pick Your Path romance, you decide. Romance and branched fiction are made for each other, like picking your favorite flavor of ice cream...positions, partners, and paraphernalia, oh my!
Reader Vote:
Readers vote at choice points and decide how the story will continue. These stories are a great way for readers and authors to connect. It’s exciting to be part of a developing story!
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