

Weird West: Dark Fantasy reimagining of the Wild West where lawmen and gunslingers share the frontier with fantastical creatures, each playing with their own rules and their own peculiar motives. Form a posse or venture forth alone into an otherworldly confines of the Weird West and make each legend your own.
Weird west steampunk series#
Each journey is unique and tailored to the actions taken - a series of high stakes adventures where everything counts and the world reacts to the choices you make. Journey through the story of a group of atypical heroes, written into legend by the decisions you make in an unforgiving land. I tend to eschew the more romantically themed stories and to prefer more action oriented works.īearing my personal bias in mind, I'd personally recommend looking at Retribution Falls, The Aeronaut's Windlass, or perhaps Agatha Heterodyne & the Golden Trilobite: A Gaslamp Fantasy with Adventure, Romance & Mad Science.Discover a dark fantasy reimagining of the Wild West where lawmen and gunslingers share the frontier with fantastical creatures.

My own definition of Steampunk is much narrower than what's presented here. Wells in the Steampunk category, though of course the concept didn't exist at the time he was writing. Retroactively, it would be safe to include many (most) of the works of H. The sub-genre derives its name from the earlier literary movement Cyberpunk (also defined by William Gibson's works), which was an attempt to render more traditional Science Fiction with a more deconstructionist, "punk" approach.

The book which originally defined the sub-genre is William Gibson's The Difference Engine, which ponders what the world would have been like, had the Victorian empire mastered Charles Babbage's mechanical computational tool: The Difference Engine (of the story title). The definition of Steampunk is "Yesterday's Tomorrow".įrequently Steampunk stories are set in a re-envisioned Victorian era, with fantastical, sometimes magical technology added in, but that's not a requirement. Being inclusive is all well and good, but I'd prefer to see tighter curation on most of these lists.Īlberta wrote: "I thought I would acquaint myself with the world of steam punk and hoped I would find out what it was and some recommendations as to what to try to see if i would enjoy - so far Goodreads is lettin." I agree with Brittney, there should be a way to vote to remove books from a given list. If I'm looking for more books like The Black Lung Captain, or The Horns of Ruin, or Boneshaker, then I'm not going to find this list too helpful. There are a LOT of books out there, the whole goal of lists like this one and of library curation in general is to help potential readers make sense of it all. It's a great book, it won the Nebula for its year and tied for the Hugo, but that doesn't make it steampunk. The technology of the setting is fairly low because it represents a world-after-the-oil-is-gone, but it's still a science fiction setting with extremely high levels of bio-tech and gene manipulation. The Windup Girl is pure Hard Science Fiction. I loved the book, but I don't think it belongs on this list.

Stardust catches my eye, that one is a Fantasy, pure and simple, no "steampunk" about it in my opinion. That having been said however, there are still some books I see on this list that shouldn't be here. It doesn't require England, it doesn't require the gears and clockwork or the Victorian (or even Edwardian) era(s). Well, the definition of "Steampunk" that I've always preferred is: "Yesterday's Tomorrow".
