Steampunk: The Beginning

Steampunk: The Beginning features over 80 illustrations of characters and scenes from three seminal Steampunk novels: Homonculus (Berkley Publishing Group, 1986) by James Blaylock, Infernal Devices (St. Martin's Press, 1987) by K.W. Jeter, and Anubis Gates (Berkley Publishing Group, 1983) by Tim Powers. All three authors were students at Cal State Fullerton in the 1970s, where they wrote early Steampunk short stories. In a 1987 letter to Locus Magazine, Jeter coined the term Steampunk to describe the three authors' writing - stories that took place in a 19th-century Victorian setting and appropriated conventions from earlier Victorian speculative fiction such as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. Fittingly, the illustrations found in Steampunk: The Beginning are all by Cal State Fullerton students, alumni, and faculty. Essays by the original Steampunks James P. Blaylock, K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers bring the project full-circle.