Engrossed

I almost missed my stop this morning on the way to work because I was busy reading "The Effluent Engine" by N.K. Jemisin in the e-anthology Steampowered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories.  I had just gotten to the scary part.

I would be getting back to this book tonight but a NYT article about the upcoming movie "Pariah" caught my eye while sitting down on the couch.  This is on my shortlist of things to watch out for in 2012.  Though the amount of hype it's getting is starting to make me skeptical.  But only so much.  It sounds quite well made, with good acting.  Almost too good to be true...

Another thing to look out for was Steampowered 2, until I found out the e-book was already out from Torquere books.  Their website search engine was kind of wonky.  Both Tables of Contents are chock full of interesting sounding stories, which should make me almost late for work for weeks to come...

I spent some time this weekend in Wisconsin, and besides enjoying tasty latkes at Monty's Blue Plate Diner during a rest stop, I used the GF's grandma's wifi to catch up on the best analysis of the politics of steampunk on the web, particularly Beyond Victoriana.  I have to do some rereading and thinking before trying to say something more, not being as familiar with steampunk due to my tendency to like harder SF better, but there was much food for thought out there.  Some discussions were linked to those had at Wiscon in prior years, which have also been deep and wide conversations with some very incisive analysis.

The Steampowered books seem like a good stab at taking the genre in the direction that more critical analyses have outlined.  Will have to see...

Finally, here is A very good best of 2011 book list.