The sequel to Larklight, the young-at-heart-person’s novel set in possibly the most delightfully Steampunk solarsystem, is called Starcross, and much to my surprise the nice people at Amazon saw fit to furnish me with my preordered copy almost a week before I expected it.  Hurrah!

Once again following the adventures of the Mumby family and their very dear friends, what was initially set to be a delightful retreat from the chaos of redecorating a ramshackle orbital home becomes something much more sinister and thrilling!  The hotel Starcross is an example of refined opulence and where your every need is catered to by custom made automatons, but through unnatural phenomena the hotel and its guests are cut off from the outside world and a double ‘murder’ is discovered.  With aether pirates, secret agents, space trains, perfectly wonderful Hats (the best in the known galaxy), time travel, rousing rowdy drinkinghall songs, and enemies both familiar and new – this is most definitely an excellent continuation of the Larklight trilogy.  If you’ve ever wished you could spot and name a hundred inhabited asteroids and hunt giant icthyomorphs from the luxury cabin of your trans-aether steamtrain, then you’ll be in good hands. I did feel that once again that when one or other of the parents were in the scene, that the book fell a little flat – as parents do have a terrible habit of taking over and doing everything right, just like in real life.  I would also highly recommend that Starcross should not be read in isolation, but as a continuation of Larklight – there are several characters that could possibly confuse, otherwise.  However I still very happily commend it to anyone who fancies some exciting and wonderous adventure, beautifully and richly illustrated, in a wonderfully realised Steampunk universe.  I look forward to the third in the series – Mothstorm! (Starcross: UK/US Amazon. Larklight: US/US Amazon. These links are affiliated, your hood not winked by me.)

AlexCF (who has made too many wonderful things to mention) has just finished his latest masterwork – the Bio-Ætheric Laboratory.  From a world where Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was closer to the truth than polite society would like to believe, this mobile laboratory of shamed and shunned Doctor Belacleese contains some of the artifacts of his gruesome trade and obsession.  Utilising the very life-force of the poor and desperate, the ‘good’ Doctor exploited the Victorian fear of death to fund his re-animation research – resulting in the above moving, twitching, ‘living’ ape arm, now rotting from decades of unlife.

As well as the arm, the laboratory contains dissecting tools, syringes, unidentified biological liquids and detailed notes and diagrams.  More pictures from the forum thread, or from Alex’s own page.  Stunning, dark and wonderful – a triumph of skill.

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Oh what a beautiful, well crafted babbage-related machine this is!  From the Mod-Planet forum (in Polish?), in a thread entitled “Steampunk FTW!”, forum member Korko_Czong has made this wonderful, beautiful brass and wood PC case that is water cooled and glows in a most disarming manner.

It’s a stunning piece of functional work – the pipes on the top actually do transmit the cooling liquid, though from what I can gather from the garbled online translation I think the guages are ornamental.  I may be wrong though.  There are a great many more images on that thread, both finished and in progress.  My hat is off to the gentleman who made it – I hope he is exceptionally proud of his creation!  I believe he’s looking to other PC accessories now for his next project, but how can he top that!  Thanks to Mr Epp (for spotting this on BoingBoing) and Mr MagnusApollo on the Steampunk Forum!

Dr Julius T. Roundbottom, scientist and philosopher extraordinaire, writes from a world not quite like our own, and documents his findings in the realm of (un)natural science.  Using new-fangled aetheric trasmission technology, we are able to read and indeed communicate with the good Doctor, and are able to discuss such photographic studies as faery tree mating displays, miniature golems from Outer Klall, and the shy, but common, maned sprite.

Dr Roundbottom seems to still be getting comfortable at the moment, but it certainly bodes well for more studies from a world not quite like our own.  Read more from the good Dr at Clockpunk.com.  Thanks to Mesdames Kowall and Henderson for bringing this to my attention.

Mr Dantes, of the forum and DeviantArt, has created this most marvellous of Steampunk costumes! With a brass breastplate, back-mounted Aetheric Generator and really rather formiddable looking gun – this is a gentleman (or rather, a well spoken scoundrel) who would trawl the skies for tea and plunder in a Steampunk world. I very much admire the skill and detail that has gone into this – there are hinged pocket covers on the breastplate so that the pocketwatch may still be used, for example.

I’d recommend looking at the two links above for more pictures, in particular the aetheric generator has been cunningly crafted and has a wonderful blue glowing unnatural look to it that you don’t expect to see without a hefty special effects budget. In fact, the whole set itself looks like a hero-quality movie/film costume – it certainly wouldn’t look out of place on a suitably steamy set somewhere. Very well done, Mr Dantes – and good luck for the future, particularly your costume making commissions!

Just a quick update to the Wallpapers page – three new images from the Museum of Victorian Science posted below in three sizes each and there’s one widescreen proportioned image too. I realise some may find them a little ‘noisy’ for backdrops, but others may find them suitable.

For the last three days I had been on a short holiday/vacation to the historic town of Whitby on the east coast of England. My main reason for visiting was to see the Museum of Victorian Science in nearby Glaisdale. On arrival, and after paying, the owner ushered us into the hallway of his house and checked to make sure we weren’t about to either drop dead (pacemakers) or explode (mobile phones or blackberries). Then, he lead us into the museum/room itself.

To say that I was astonished would be to understate most cruelly – it was a single room, no larger than the floorsize of a decent car and yet it was from floor to ceiling covered in contraptions and thingumajigs of brass, glass and wood. In some places the shelves groaned under such things stacked three deep, and the owner (Mr Swift) had constructed ingenous temporary shelves that were moved from place to place to allow the shuffling of things of interest. And oh – there was so much of interest! The majority of the two hour talk involved electrostatic contraptions powered one of his handsome Wimshurst machines that delighted us with handcranked four-inch sparks – this provided the magical, Victorian, lightning-power for display pieces that spun, flexed, swung and rolled with seemingly unnatural grace.

Beyond that there was the history of the X-Ray (and I learned how to pronounce Röntgen, finally), the research that went into discovering what eventually turned out to be the electron, lots of fun with Radium, a Jacobs Ladder and more besides – all demonstrated with displays old or remade by the owner himself.

Speaking of the owner, he’s such a very knowledgable man and gloriously demonstrates so much that Steampunk adores – an ex-horologist and retired educational science technician with a love for brass and wood and the wonderful drama of Victorian science and a deep feeling of dismay at the modern watering down of science education.  He makes many of the demonstration models himself with a lathe and some cunning. I’d recommend a visit most highly to anyone who finds themselves in the area, and should you do so please mention Steampunk – it would be very nice to let him know there are quite a few people who like Victorian science almost as much as he does!

Over at Neatorama today, they posted about the War of the Worlds webcomic from Dark Horse comics.  An adaption by Ian Edginton and art by D’Istraeli, this looks like a rather faithful adaption of the classic HG Wells tale of invaders from Mars.  With heat rays and human resistance, this is one of the wonderful ancestors of Steampunk.  Enjoy!

On wonderous joy – while I’m sure a large and happy proportion of the aethernet knows about The House on the Rock, it had managed to slip under my consciousness like a naughty child beneath a tablecloth.  But no longer – thanks to Mr Vernian Process, he found the most amazing collection of photographs of this place – a place filled with so much wonder and oddness that purely by accident some of it falls soundly in the realms of Steampunk.

Huge rooms of machinery with stained glass lights and shining brass drums, stairways that function as bookcases so well that it makes me terribly sad that I live in a flat/apartment, whole barbers offices done out with fantastic stoves and whole rooms of ornamental guns, eggs, masks and puppets!  My mind reels at the sheer amount of heavily emotive relics in this place – no corner left unadorned, no wall left normal and bare.  A great deal of it can’t really be said to be Steampunk, but should you adore the strange and the beautiful mind of a collector, then you’ll be in very good hands.  I imagine, that to actually visit the place in Wisconsin, US, would be akin to turning off your adult brain and letting a thousand fairytales paint the inside of your skull.

What a curious creation this is – a computer case design (the creator mentions that as there is no original case, it is not a mod as such) based around a retro look that is very pleasantly Steampunk called the DialupPC.  EnVaDoR, the creator, was asked by Intel to create a case on short notice and this was combined with some quick antique shopping to create the unusual case above.  With a very respectable spec list, the most quirky aspect to this case is that while normal sound will emerge from the front of the case, should you recieve a Skype call or chat initiation, you may pick up the telephone handset to switch the speaker and microphone functionality to the phone automatically.  Very clever indeed.

There are many more photographs on the site, including both internal and before and after shots. Thank you, Mr Brass Alchemist – you were right, I do like this!  Shame about the coasters, somehow – when the rest is so very nice.