I love Alternate History books. Love, love, love. Because…
Why, I cannot tell you NOW. Not when, as announced by Leila at Bookshelves of Doom, “for the entire week of December 13th, we’re going to celebrate and discuss — and we, of course, invite and encourage you to do the same – Alt History and Steampunk novels. (We’re mostly focusing on the YAs, but I suspect we’ll do some branching out — there’re a TON of adult titles, and loads of those have insanely excellent crossover potential.)”
Leila is having a contest as part of the celebration! Nutshell, design a better book cover. Full details are at her blog.
Basically, alternate history is fiction where something has changed in the historical timeline. Steampunk is a particular subset of this genre.
If you want to read a whole lot more about it, as prep for what you want to post about the week of December 13, check out this post at Tor by GD Falksen: “steampunk is Victorian science fiction. Here “Victorian” is not meant to indicate a specific culture, but rather references a time period and an aesthetic: the industrialized 19th century.” And if you want to read even more, here is Scott Westerfeld talking about it in Genre Cooties.
Image from Finding Wonderland.
About Elizabeth Burns
[...] as promised in my post about Steampunk / Alternate History Week, I’m just going to talk about Alternate [...]