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Now Available: Copperwood Double #1

May 9th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

Copperwood Double #1: Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings

I am pleased (and you wouldn’t believe how relieved!) to announce the availability of the first Copperwood Double, Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings, in both print and ebook editions. The ebook edition is available from Amazon’s Kindle store in mobi format, and from B&N in epub format, both at $2.99. No DRM in either case. And because there’s no DRM, you can download the free app Calibre and use its excellent conversion utilities to convert mobi or epub to any of several additional ebook formats. The print edition is distributed through Ingram/Lightning Source and is thus available from online retailers who work with Ingram, which would be basically all of them. $11.99. (Note: The print book is not available from Lulu.com. This was a major decision that I’ll talk about in a future entry.)

If the cover image above seems bizarre to you, well, you’re younger than you look. The grayhairs among us know precisely what I was reaching for: The Ace Doubles of the period 1952-1973. Each volume consisted of two short novels from 25,000-50,000 words in length, bound back-to-back and inverted, each with its own cover image. Ace did not invent the physical print/bind arrangement, which is called tete-beche (head-to-tail) and has existed for almost 200 years. They did make it a mainstay of recreational reading for two decades, and most of us back then had a pile of them.

A lot of people thought it was a weird idea (and many made fun of it) but we forget that the short novel as a form essentially vanished from SFF after Ace stopped publishing doubles. The magazines won’t publish something 40,000 words long, and 40,000 words is too short for a conventional print book unless you’re way out there in small and very small press. So there was this huge hole between 20,000-word novellas and 80,000 word novels. I fell into that trap in 1981, when my Firejammer clocked in at just under 30,000 words. I shopped it, but unless you’re Larry Niven no one’s going to seriously look at something that length.

I like the short novel as a distinct literary form. It’s long enough to develop some ideas and a few interesting characters, but short enough to require a certain focus, and a fairly linear plot line. It deserves to have a place in the SFF world, and two recent developments have conspired to give it one: ebooks and print-on-demand publishing. Ebooks have no strong length requirements, and from what I’ve read, the length of original ebook novels is drifting downward. More to the point, a story can be given the length it needs, and authors aren’t under pressure to pad an idea out to print novel length, or compress it to magazine novella length or less.

Print-on-demand publishing allows publishers to try interesting things without betting the house on the outcome. I will always love print books and still buy them in respectable quantities, but in these troubled times print publishers must be conservative to avoid going broke. (Do I know a little bit about that or what?) The beancounters require that a book recoup its capital costs, which means that books hover within certain boundaries set by retailer expectations. (Remember that if retailers won’t stock a book, customers never get the chance to vote on it. Retailers therefore have what amounts to a veto on print publisher publishing programs.) Slightly whacky things like tete-beche double novels fall outside ordinary bricks’n’mortar retail channel expectations, but POD manufacturing and online ordering make a lot of things possible.

So I offer you a book with two covers, and two authors telling two stories in one world, the Drumlins world that I introduced in Asimov’s back in 2002 with “Drumlin Boiler”. There’s much more to say, and I’ll continue the discussion (with specifics on both stories) in days to come.

Odd Lots

Apr 30th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is out, and hardly anybody’s even mentioned it. Could it be that nobody’s really upgrading every six months anymore? (My workaday Linux system is still running 10.04.) I’m not bullish on Unity, and may reconsider Kubuntu when I set up a GX620-based Linux box in coming weeks.
  • The formidable Al Williams has a three-part series on DDJ explaining how to use the visual tool App Inventor to create Android apps. I have not used App Inventor yet, but Al’s analysis of the challenges of using it (and of visual metaphors for programming generally) are worth reading. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
  • John Scalzi has written a brand new Fuzzies novel. (Not furries, Fuzzies–tiny aliens created by H. Beam Piper.) Scalzi’s good–this one could be fun. I’ve read all the Fuzzies books (by Piper and others) and truly only like Little Fuzzy (the original) and Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning. Fuzzy Sapiens is so-so, and Fuzzies and Other People is so awful that Piper chose not to submit it for publication after he wrote it in 1962. It was found in a box after he committed suicide in 1964, and not published until the late 1980s.
  • Interestingly, most of Piper’s copyrights were not renewed, and a great deal of his work (including Little Fuzzy) is now in the public domain. Go to the “P” author page on Project Gutenberg and scroll down.
  • I heard years ago that armadillos are the only other mammalian species that contracts leprosy, but now there’s evidence that virtually all human cases of the disease (which is vanishingly rare these days) were contracted from them. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Illinois is banning trans fats in its schools (with a notable exception for doughnuts, how healthy!) but does anyone dare remind them that there is absolutely no trans fat in unhydrogenated lard? In terms of monounsaturated fat (the good fat) lard comes out better than butter, and both are far better than the vegetable oil spreads we call margarine. Funny how the more animal fat I eat, the more animal fat (my own!) that I lose. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the Illinois link.)
  • And the much-reviled Dr. Eades makes the point that Mediterranean people who supposedly take all their foods as olive oil are actually doing a lot of their cooking in animal fats, especially lard. (They export the olive oil to people like us, who think it’s healthier.)
  • This gets an award for something. I’m still not sure what.

Daywander

Mar 31st, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Well, it’s the end of a long March, either way you want to see it, and finally we’re starting to get a little weather I’d consider springish. Old Dan Beard had this at the start of the kites chapter in his Outdoor Handy Book (1900):

Though marble time can’t always last,
Though time for spinning tops is past,
The winds of March blow kite time here,
And April Fool’s Day, too, draw near.

The winds of March were way too strong for any kite I have in the house–they were shoving my 200-pound gas grill all over the back deck and making my fireplace vent pipe sing like Lady Gaga–so here’s hoping April calms down a little and I can get something in the air again.

And on the air, too: For the first time in six or seven years I’ve been seeing daily sunspot counts (not smoothed sunspot numbers) greater than 100. Here and there midafternoon I’ve actually heard human voices on 15 and even 10 meters. Time to get the inverted vee off the shelf and set it up off the back deck again.

The long march this March was getting a new book produced in cooperation with Jim Strickland. I haven’t said much about it because I want it to be available before I start talking it up too much, but we’re finalizing the cover art and getting the ebook versions prepared, looking toward a launch on or about April 15. We read from the book (which consists of two short novels) at Anomaly Con last weekend. I hadn’t read publicly from my own fiction since the mid-80s, specifically at a 1984 SF event at SUNY Brockport where I read one of my stories (“Marlowe”) between Nancy Kress and Norman Spinrad. (No pressure!) I need to work on my presentation skills, which were honed in eighth grade, when I was chosen to be one of the readers for the daily morning masses at Immaculate Conception grade school. Carol critiqued me prior to the con, and suggested that I strive to make Drumlin Circus sound a little less like Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians.

If I didn’t intend to make all of my work available in ebook form before, I certainly did yesterday, after finally getting a little hands-on time with the Motorola Xoom at the Verizon kiosk at Chapel Hills Mall. Unlike the Galaxy Tab (which I briefly groped a few months ago) the Xoom has an ebook reader demo, and I spent a minute reading Jane Austen on its very crisp display. I would like to have loaded a technical PDF, but the Xoom’s XD card slot isn’t (yet) recognized by the OS, and that will keep me from pulling the trigger right now. My former collaborator Joli Ballew (Degunking Windows) is much of the way through a Xoom book, and she thinks that the XD slot issue (and a few other loose ends) will be corrected by summer. Let us pray.

freepistol.jpgAnd triggers, yeah. One of the most popular events at Anomaly was a do-it-yourself maker session for building steampunk ray guns. Pete Albrecht sent me a note about a whole category of real-world firearms that has a certain steampunk whiff about it: free pistols, which are highly evolved single-shot .22 caliber handguns designed and often hand-crafted to excel at target accuracy. They must be held in one hand only, and aimed using purely mechanical (i.e., metal) sights. The outlandish-looking wooden grips are designed to enclosed the entire hand for maximum stability, and are often sculpted specifically for a single competitor’s hand. The idea is to sink 60 rounds into the two-inch center of a target at fifty meters, each round loaded by hand and all within two hours. The sport is very old and was practiced in the Victorian era, so it has a steampunk pedigree, at least, even if the machinery is inescapably high-tech.

Much remains to be done here. The SF portions of my Web presence haven’t been touched since the release of The Cunning Blood in 2005, and need to be completely rewritten. The goal is to mount something useful on hardsf.com, a domain I’ve owned for over ten years without ever quite deciding what to do with it. I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Anomaly Con 2011 Wrapup

Mar 28th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

JimBySteamEngine.jpgI got back from Anomaly Con 2011 last night, and realized by 9 PM that it had worn me out. I used to do weekends of nonstop socializing and concept-absorbing without blinking, but those days are gone, and I just don’t have the stamina anymore. My collaborator Jim Strickland (left) did much better than I, but I’m guessing we both slept pretty well last night. I certainly did.

Not that I didn’t learn a lot, nor enjoy it. To the contrary: It was a great time, and I suspect I made a few new friends, even if I didn’t raise my profile as a writer very much. One of the things I learned is that the steampunk phenomenon is less about books than about culture, and it’s held together much more via social networking than I would have predicted. The sessions on clothes and characters and even absinthe were SRO. The sessions focused on writing were less so, though anything involving Sarah Hoyt was reasonably well-attended.

I haven’t read her yet and intuit that her work isn’t exactly my thing, but Sarah in person is insightful, funny, and completely on top of the writing game. Furthermore, she’s willing to dump on all of the writerly rulebookisms now doing the rounds at workshops, like never use any said-bookisms, avoid adverbs, and so on. Though she didn’t say it straight out, the summary is simple and would-be writers need to drink deeply of it: You can’t write well by rules alone. Black-and-white thou-shalt-nots of this sort are particularly misleading, and are perpetuated by people who make their living trying to teach people without a good ear for the language how to write. Backwards, backwards: Get your ear first, then apply the rules when your ear detects a rough spot.

One great surprise for me was Pandora Celtica, a (mostly) a capella group of five who do Irish folk songs and their own Celtic-themed compositions in marvelous close harmony. It was accidental: I was on my way to the men’s room when I passed the group’s vendor table, just as they were striking up an impromptu number. I bought two of their CDs on the spot, and was not disappointed.

A couple of my conversations suggest that a rift is developing in the steampunk world: Those who would like to see steampunk remain true to its roots, in fiction faithful to the science, technology, and culture of its time, versus those who feel no hesitation in pulling steampunk ever more toward deep retro urban fantasy. I need to read more on both sides before I can have strong opinions here, but something of this sort was happening in the 1960s, when the New Wave was taking on traditional hard SF and enough bricks were thrown in both directions to build several thousand brick moons. The New Wave eventually drowned in its own self-indulgence, but in fairness, it freed both fantasy and hard SF to explore sexual themes in ways simply unthinkable prior to 1960. The term “steampunk” may have to be broadened to include any fantastic literature in a Victorian setting–which will clear the way for others to create “hard steampunk” as a distinct subsubgenre.

The Tivoli Building at the Auraria Campus is not brightly lit, and many convention events were held in cavernous spaces where my pocket camera couldn’t grab enough light to image well. So (having reviewed everything in the camera this morning) I don’t have much in the line of photos to show you, and nothing at all of me. Jim may have some better shots (he had his DSLR with him) and if so I’ll post what I can in coming days.

Back Off, Man. I’m a Steampunker.

Mar 27th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

MattSchapsProtonPack.jpgAt the first annual Anomaly Con in Denver, at the Tivoli Building on the Auraria Campus downtown. It’s a specialty SF convention, catering to the steampunk subgenre. I came up Friday night and met Jim Strickland Saturday morning as the con opened. Jim had set up a panel for us with the concom, and readings from the two halves of our double novel.

I freely admit I had no idea what to expect. I have never been to a comics or media con, and in fact haven’t been to a traditional SF con in four or five years. I used to go to three or four every year, back long ago when the world and I were young and I was writing a lot of SF because my life was simple and I had not yet broken into computer books.

This was, well, different. There have always been a few people at cons in hall costumes. At Anomaly Con, probably 85% of the congoers are in hall costume all the time, and some of them are doozies.

Most, as you might expect, were Victorian gentlemen and ladies, plus the occasional mad scientist. But beyond that were some western card sharps, a few outfits clearly adapted from Civil War re-enactments, a couple of pirates, at least one pith-helmeted explorer, plus a scattering of zombies and a handful of imponderables that might be from some subsubsubgenre I haven’t heard of yet.

The effort and ingenuity that went into some of these costumes was boggling, and the cleverness factor off the charts. My vote for Best of Show goes to Matt Schaps, a young man who created a steampunk Ghostbusters proton pack out of the guldurndest collection of retro junk, including a 3-gang variable capacitor, a Model T Ford ignition coil, a J-38 Morse Code key, five or six vacuum tubes, a couple of IF cans, and a biggish woofer behind a brass shell salvaged from a ceiling fan.

At our panel, Jim and I discussed the necessary conditions for the evolution of a Victorian-style industrial age, and whether it was a fluke or an inevitable stop along the path from mud huts to interstellar empire. We used my Drumlins universe as an example, and explained how factors like freedom of thought, economic freedom, relatively benign religion lacking monasticism (and the nasty dualism that monasticism inevitably carries with it) and cheap energy would almost invariably create something like the England and the US of the 1890s. The panel was well-received, and afterwards we spent a lot of time at the tables in the hall tossing ideas around with interested attendees.

I’m about to head over there again, and will post additional photos this evening or tomorrow. My own hall costume is limited to a western-style vest and the ill-fitting top hat I bought for the Coriolis Millennium Christmas Party in late 1999, but it will do for now. Next time I might well lean a little western, since the Drumlins stories I’ve done so far tend toward space westerns more than steampunk. (Drumlin Circus incorporates some of both.) It’s been a lot of fun so far, and the setting is perfect: In the room where we held our panel, a huge two-cylinder stationary steam engine with a 10-foot flywheel lay in state, with small boys dressed like Oliver Twist scrambling all over it and spinning the handwheels. Crazy world, yes, but a good one.

Space Westerns vs. SF Westerns vs. Weird Westerns

Mar 14th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

Back in 2002, when “Drumlin Boiler” appeared in IASFM, somebody in the comments on the IASFM Web site grumbled that the story was “a glorified western.” I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but even though I’m sure the comment was intended to be dismissive, it was true: “Drumlin Boiler” was a story set on the frontier in a society roughly equivalent to 1870s America. The frontier was on another planet, and there were all these alien gadgets lying around causing trouble, but people were riding horses and packing six-guns.

Ever since then, I’ve used the term “space western” to describe the genre of the first several Drumlins stories. (Drumlin Circus is different for a number of reasons, but I’ll get to that in future entries.) The term was floating around in obscurity for years in the SF culture, but then Firefly happened, and abruptly what my Clarion ’73 compatriots once razzed as “cowboys on Mars” became legitimate and even hit the bigtime.

I learned not long ago that there’s a mirror image of the space western: the science fiction western. I hadn’t known that the literary classification knives were cutting that fine, but they are. Space westerns transplant themes and cultural elements of the American west onto other planets. Science fiction westerns transplant SF themes into the actual American West of an earlier time. Think of the difference as “cowboys on Mars” vs. “Martians in Texas.” (For a great example of the latter, see Howard Waldrop’s wry “Night of the Cooters.” I’m guessing, not having seen it nor read the graphic novel, that Cowboys and Aliens is much the same.)

And as if that weren’t enough, there are also weird westerns: supernatural themes transplanted onto the American West. This surprises some but doesn’t surprise me. The era of the American West was also the apex of Spiritualism, which originated near Rochester, New York in 1848 but by 1880 was everywhere in the country, including the western territories. The weird western subgenre goes way back: The mere handful of classic horror comics that I read in my cousin Ron’s basement in the late 1950s always had a few cowboy settings. These days, you can find things like Six-Guns Straight From Hell, which appears to include such genre cross-products as werewolf sheriffs, vampire bank-robbers, and “new-fangled electric zombies.” Many of the stories were first published in Science Fiction Trails, an annual anthology edited by David B. Riley. SFT goes broader and covers all three categories, sometimes with a steampunk flavor, as in Jim Strickland’s story “Brass and Steel” in the recent #6. “Brass and Steel” might well be said to include “new-fangled electric zombies,” a concept Jim pursues with a lot more rigor than the author of your average sparkly vampire yarn, ten-gallon hats or no.

I went a little cold on SF for quite awhile (I’m guessing almost 15 years) because it began to take itself a little too seriously and thereby ceased to be fun. Fun is what we do this for, after all, and sending things a little bit over-the-top is the very best way to puncture the stuffies and get the fun back front-and-center. The first three Drumlins stories were space westerns. Drumlin Circus is a steampunk western, with just a hint of weird, if a postulated sensitivity of quantum computers to human mental states counts as weird. (I stop well short of vampires.) Hell, I can wear lots of hats; hats are among the things I do best. Ask Carol. Or just look in my closet.

Taking a Breath

Mar 12th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

This has been a helluva month. To finish Drumlin Circus I wrote 26,000 words in two weeks, and then by six days later had polished it, laid it out, proofed it, and combined it with a second short novel (by the formidable Jim Strickland) to make something book-sized, with a twist. (More on the twist in a later entry.) We’re now waiting for the cover art, and so for a day or two I’ve had a chance to pick up my office, read a little, run the dogs around, and ruminate on what I’d learned.

coincellgrab.jpgOh, and I bought a TV for downstairs. A TV. 55″ wide and 1.37″ thick (!!) by my digital calipers. Sure, I’d like a flying car. But this again reminds me that we really do live in the future.

The do-it list was getting long. I’ve needed to replace a couple of coin cells in the Dell USFFs we have here and at church for some time. In most PCs this isn’t difficult, but Dell put the coin cell holder in a bad spot, especially in the SX270. Pulling out the old cell, no sweat–that’s what God made needle-nose pliers for. Reinserting a new cell would be easier too, except that the pliers would short out the cell. So I put a short length of shrink tubing over one of the two jaws and held it over a match for a bit. Shazam! The cells survived the operation, and I broke no fingernails trying to coerce them in either direction. It’s a trick worth remembering if you can’t use your fingers to get coin cells into place behind that plumber’s nightmare of a heat sink you’ve got.

One of the things I had to do to write Drumlin Circus was adopt an older style for the first-person narrator, who is an educated city guy in an 1890s sort of culture, albeit one not on Earth. This isn’t normal diction for me and I had to train myself to do it, first by reading largish chunks of The Time Machine and Food of the Gods, and then by going back to Gene Wolfe’s boggling 5-volume New Sun saga, which I hadn’t been through in ten or fifteen years. Again, the complexity of the tale boggled me a little (as did more than a few of the words he repurposes but never invents) but this time I was ready: I had ordered Michael Andre-Driussi’s Lexicon Urthus and kept it at my elbow. It’s a 420-page index of terms, concepts, and proper names from the series, with not only their meanings in the story but also their derivation from myth, religion, and other languages. If you intend to read the Urth cycle closely, you’re gonna need this. Highly recommended.

Over the next few days here I’ll try to cover a few more noteworthy things associated with Drumlin Circus. Mostly I want to reassure you all that I’m back and looking forward to writing here a little more regularly than I’ve been.

The Long, Long Circus

Mar 3rd, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Whew. Drumlin Circus is done. Or at least complete and intact, if not finished. (Stories are a little like software to me: They’re never finished, not in a truly final sense of the word.) I had dared myself to get it all down by last night, and come four PM I found myself staring at the screen, thinking that I needed a short “resonance” scene to wrap it all up but couldn’t figure out what it might be. (Such scenes are not part of the outline.)

So I sat down this morning and started reading the whole thing through from the beginning. By the time I got through it about 11:00, I knew what I wanted, and fifteen minutes later the words were on the page.

The story came out a lot longer than I planned. 33% longer, in fact: I planned for 35,000 words and my subconscious handed me 53,000. The same thing happened to me in 1998 and 1999: I had intended The Cunning Blood to come in at 90,000 words, and by publication in 2005 was 145,000 words long. Several people have told me that that was a major reason none of the big houses would publish it.

Getting the flu in January slowed me down radically. To make our deadline of introducing it at AnomalyCon at the end of March, I set the completion deadline for March 2. That was a tough one, and in fact, I wrote 25,000 words in the last fourteen days alone. I don’t think I’ve ever written that much fiction in that little time, at least since I was in high school and did little else.

How did it turn out? Reasonably well. It was an experiment on a number of fronts. I’ve never written anything in that length class before. I have a completed but unpublished novella that came in at 27,000 words, and nothing else much past 12,000. It was also a conscious effort to bend the work in a steampunk direction. How that worked I’m not sure yet, though sooner or later people will probably tell me. I wedged in almost every steampunk trope there is, even if briefly: airships, goggles, steam locomotives, strong women dressed provocatively, long-barrelled pistols, and as much brass as I could mention on a planet more or less flooded with intelligent nanocolonies of alien metal. I even tipped the hat to zombies, if only in a metaphor. (Calm down. There are no actual zombies in the story. None.)

I read some Verne and Wells before getting down to business, so that my first-person viewpoint character would sound like an educated city man from 1890, and not like the cowboys and farmers who have dominated the drumlins canon so far. Again, I’m not sure yet how well that worked out. We’ll see.

The story needs some cleaning up, some continuity checking, and as much peer review as I can gather in the next couple of days. Cover art is in progress, and if all the streams collide into the same river, we’ll see Drumlin Circus in book form on or before March 27.

Drumlin Pressure Cooker

Feb 27th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

I guess it’s time to at least let you all know that I’m alive, but I’m in death-march mode on Drumlin Circus. In ten minutes I’ll begin writing the action-packed climax, with repeating pistols, flamethrowers, a small hydrogen airship, a self-modifying steam calliope, and the Big Ball of Cesium. Oh, and a few deinotheria, a couple of woolly mammoths, a dire wolf, and all the expected smilodons. And did I mention a coven of witches who don’t believe in magic because they have something better?

This is a collaboration with Jim Strickland, and we intend to have it finished, laid out, and printed by Lulu before AnomalyCon on the 27th. Cover art is on the way, though not having it won’t stop us. (The dog-ear on the cover will say, “Uncorrected Proof” because that’s the standard excuse for slightly overaggressive deadlines. If I hadn’t had the flu for three weeks the damned thing would be done already.)

I’ve written over 8,000 words in the last four days. I have 38,000 words down, and expect the climax to take another 5,000. The story must be finished by 4 PM Wednesday. I expect to make the deadline with difficulty; hell, do you think writing adventures in Victorian diction is easy?

More when I can take a breath.

Accidental Steampunk

Feb 16th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

5,000 words in two days. Wow. I haven’t done fiction at a rate like that since I was wrapping up The Cunning Blood in early 1999. It’s the main reason you haven’t seen me here much recently: I have a hard deadline for a story (this is uncommon; deadlines are for things like computer books and articles) and if I don’t produce at this rate for a little while longer, Drumlin Circus won’t be finished and laid out in time for AnomalyCon in Denver at the end of March. I have 27,200 words down now, out of a target 37,000 – 40,000. That’s heading out of novella territory into the strange turf of short novels, where I’ve never worked before.

But that’s the idea. Ruts are horizons pulled in too close, and I’m trying to push ’em back as much as I can, in as many ways as I can. Those who are familiar with my drumlins stories have gotten comfortable with a sort of Weird Western ambiance, and perhaps a hint of Cowboys & Aliens, except that the aliens are gone to parts unknown, having left all their incomprehensible machinery behind. (I was actually inspired more by Fred Pohl’s Gateway novels, at least in terms of the alien machinery.) So far I’ve focused on the rural and frontier areas of the drumlins planet, but much of Drumlin Circus takes place in the planet’s largest city. There were cowboys aplenty in 1890s Colorado, but out east in 1890s Chicago or 1890s New York, society was radically different.

The Drumlins Saga as a whole is about human castaways on an Earthlike planet who slowly re-create Earth technology and civilization, hoping eventually to repair their starship and return home. They “pass through” stages of technology roughly corresponding to advances in Earth history, and at the time of Drumlin Circus they’re basically gotten to 1890, with steam power and the beginnings of electricity. (The first three Drumlins Saga stories are collected with others in this book. More are planned.)

However, there’s a wildcard: alien machines scattered all over the planet, analogous to 3-D printers with a back-end database of manufacturable parts. Enter a 256-bit binary code, and…something…comes out. Some of these somethings are familiar and useful, some can be repurposed, and some, well, they’re just weird–and maybe dangerous. (Furthermore, there’s a lot of somethings. Do the math.)

So it’s 1890 with a twist.

Drumlin Circus itself recounts a sort of low-level war between a traveling circus and a cultlike research organization called the Bitspace Institute, which is very much a steampunk bad-guys version of the Ralpha Dogs from TCB. The steampunk part wasn’t deliberate, and when I was first defining the Drumlins Saga back in the early 2000’s, I hadn’t read any of the steampunk canon yet. But it’s tough to set a story in an 1890s technological milieu these days and not be accused of steampunking, so at some point I gave up and said, Awright awready. I’m a steampunker. (I’ve even had a top hat since 1999, and you’ve seen this. And this.) I’ll deal with it.

(More tomorrow.)

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