In the last few years the genre has seen a pretty substantial growth from what I've seen, in almost every respect. If you're only now being introduced to it, Google it, and you'll wonder how you ever missed it. Now there are entire sites dedicated to Steam Punk themed Lego creations, or themed Star Wars art, and conventions and writing and cosplay and just about anything else.
There is a metric TON of this stuff, and again, I couldn't be happier about it, but there are two things fans of the genre don't have much of yet, in abundance or quality. The first is movies...if you look it up online a lot of places will tout the horrible Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West as THE Steam Punk movie...which makes me sad. Sucker Punch borrowed a lot of themes from the genre, but other than being pretty to look at, didn't offer hardly anything of substance. Some of the stuff from the new Three Musketeers movie (namely the airships) looks pretty bad ass, but it isn't really a GENRE film, not like you have films that are wholly and specifically Fantasy or Sci-Fi or Western or Cyberpunk genres. None of them are.
The other thing is writing. Now, there is a lot of it, but for every goggle-wearing airship captain you have fifteen angsty but neutered teenage versions of the classic monsters we all grew up on.
Now, I'm even more of an avid reader than I am a movie-lover, so this just sucks. I want more. It is in this spirit that I finally decided to try my hand at writing the genre (a large part of it was Belikov's enthusiasm, but he can go into his reasons when he has time.), but I didn't want to make a the cardinal mistake that so many genre-authors make...writing a story simply for the sake of writing IN that genre. I wanted something I could be proud of, like the rest of my work (HA, the stuff I let see the light of day that is), and I think E.C. and I accomplished this quite nicely.
I grew up a big fan of spaghetti-westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider and all the rest, and am a HUGE fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and though we tried to infuse the work with the more classic Steam Punk Victorian Era themes, we did stay more on the western side of things.
See, one of the first things to draw me to the genre were the abundance of airships...I grew up gaming and one of my favorite games as a kid were the Final Fantasy series, and I always loved the airships, especially the really old school 8-bit ones, and I've long had this visual of a giant airship cutting through the empty and blameless blue desert skies, and often I've imagined them, just large enough to see, somewhere in the background behind Clint Eastwood's head.
I also loves me a good Apocalypse, and even more so I love the Post-Apocalypse, years after everything has fallen apart and the ragged survivors are doing their best to put things back together, or just make it day to day. While I love Alternative History fiction, I've always loved reading and writing the distant (or that classic "not-so-distant") future, so we settled it there, too.
As for the female lead, I've always noticed a lack of decent female protagonists whose main concerns went beyond being rescued by a prince or who should she take to the prom, the dog or the corpse...even more so now that I've got two daughters of my own.
On all these major points...the time, the place, the lead, Belikov was down, and again, I'll let him explain why himself, but once we agreed upon all these things and a thousand more, we cautiously waded in...writing with someone was an entirely new experience for me, and he'd been burned once before--and badly--but the writing went so much better than I'd even dared to hope for we knocked the central story of about 25,000 words out in about a month, each of us writing sections of our own and then re-writings sections the other had written to really blend our styles together (this too worked amazingly well, we think, and hope you agree).
What turned into a lark became all this...a novella, a website, and hopefully, just a beginning. We have a pretty solid three-story character arc for the main three characters already figured out, which will most likely take place in pieces of roughly the same length as LHCA, as well some shorter pieces to fill in the gaps.
We'll let Future Elias and Future Belikov worry about that though...for now we hope you dig what we've written, whether you're new to the genre or you're organizing conventions for it, and we hope you let us know what you think, too.
