SJ Chambers – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Cover and interior designs by Galen Smith.

Arriving in your book emporia this week is The Steampunk Bible by Jeff VanderMeer & SJ Chambers, a comprehensive guide to the sub-genre which is now a thriving sub-culture. I contributed some bits of graphic design as well as a bespoke dirigible illustration (see below). The book also features a few other steampunk-related pieces of mine among its wealth of photos and illustrations. This is a typically lavish production from Abrams, beautifully designed by Galen Smith with a cover based on the celebrated Hetzel editions of Jules Verne’s novels. Inside there are essay contributions from Bruce Sterling, Catherynne M Valente, Jess Nevins and others. If you’re a steampunk enthusiast (or know one) this is an essential purchase. Some links and page samples follow below.

• The official Steampunk Bible site
• The Steampunk Bible: Mecha-Elephants, Raygun Rocketships, and Great Stories, a feature by Jeff V.
• Amazon US | Amazon UK | Book Depository | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound

My cover for KW Jeter’s Morlock Night which has just been republished by Angry Robot.

My brief was to create a cannon-bedecked piscine dirigible so this is what I came up with. See it in all its belligerent glory here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk Reloaded
• Steampunk overloaded!
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

Cover design by Ann Monn. Cover image by Dan Jones / Tinkerbots.

Here at last is the steampunk anthology I mentioned back in September and whose interiors I designed. This is another Tachyon publication, and also another anthology edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. I went further with the design for this than I have done for other Tachyon books, partly because if there’s one thing steampunk lends itself to, it’s decoration but also because the book includes illustrations from Ramona Szczerba, Eric Orchard, and others, plus a comic strip by Sydney Padua; adding extra spot illustrations stopped the pictorial material from seeming too isolated.

Title spread. The illustration on the left is one I created last year.

This is a sequel to an earlier steampunk anthology by the same editors but the contents are just as strong as the first collection with excellent stories throughout. (For a review, see here.) By coincidence the book is published in the wake of a recent (and inevitable) backlash against steampunk as science fiction sub-genre and cultural phenomenon. This collection can serve as a repudiation to some of the lazier accusations that writers are ignoring the moral and physical squalor of the Victorian era and the legacies of imperialism; several stories in Steampunk Reloaded address those very issues. For my part I’ve read Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld so I don’t feel in urgent need of a lecture on the iniquities of the 19th century, thank you very much.

While we’re on the subject, the cover of The Steampunk Bible, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and SJ Chambers, has been revealed here. Abrams will be publishing this next year and having seen some of the interior pages it’s going to be a splendid book. More about that later. Further pages from Steampunk Reloaded follow.

Update: A couple more reviews here and here.