When I was at Futurismic blog today, imagine my surprise when I saw a little picture of an airship blinking at me from the sidebar. I couldn’t help but click. It was the cover of a novel by Mr Tobias Buckell, called Crystal Rain (Amazon.co.uk hardback, paperback apparently out soon too).  Set in a devolved non-earth world cut off after a wormhole collapse, the two cultures have an uneasy truce.  More interest to me, however, is the fact that the technology level has reverted to rifles, airships and steamships!  There’s even a snowtank.  Sounds like skewed Steampunk flavour to me!

“Cautious, they followed the destruction inward. To walk over the hot ground, they bound their feet with aloe and arm-sized leaves. They choked from the smoke. When they could walk into the destruction no longer, they turned around and found a weary-looking man sitting on a steaming metal boulder. He wore a top hat, a long trench coat, and black boots. His eyes were gray, his dreadlocks black, and his face ashen. It was as if this man had not seen sun in all his life, but was born brown once. He spoke gibberish to them, then touched his throat several times until the hunters understood his words. “Where am I?”"

The authors site is here, and you can download the first 1/3 of the book to read right there.  There’s a review over at the Scifi channel, and an interview at the Speculist, but I’m sure there are more out there.