Virginia Marybury
Virginia Marybury read Russian and French at university, and wrote her M.A. dissertation on late Soviet corruption, so you may imagine the sort of people she writes about!
In a Bright Glass is the first of an alternative history series, a history of climate cooling, which came out of a short sequence about the Little Ice Age in Andrew Marr's History of the World series for the BBC. Following chance encounters with articles (in both the Guardian and Telegraph) about Rjukan, Norway, where a mountainside heliostat now brings sunlight into a gloomy valley in winter; suddenly there was a picturesquely wintry setting for smuggling and greed for technology.
The Electric Gingerbread House, an "Easter Egg" short story in this ice-age steampunk world, appeared in Steampunk Fairytales, Volume II, in October 2016.
Another novella, interlocking with In a Bright Glass, is in progress, and expected in 2018.
Separately, in another universe, "Iron Curtain," was published in the Tau Press anthology The Faraday Cage, in May 2016.
Steampunk from the Little Ice Age
by Virginia Marybury
An alternative history of climate cooling, which came out of a short sequence about the Little Ice Age in Andrew Marr's History of the World series for the BBC. Following chance encounters with articles (in both the Guardian and Telegraph) about Rjukan, Norway, where a mountainside heliostat now brings sunlight into a gloomy valley in winter; suddenly there was a picturesquely wintry setting for smuggling and greed for technology.
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Nik's Revenge Road Trip Mixtape
on June 15, 2017
There are so many fates and lifetimes and identities in this that it's hard to believe it's just a novella. There's not the confusion you would expect from the multiplicity of stories, either: somewhere in here is a transcendant, uniting mind, mixing and editing stories and plans like the mix tape of the title.
With the Californian setting and the drugs and the conflict between revenge and redemption, it reminds me strongly of Seth Morgan's brilliant "Homeboy," but that's a huge novel, and I grew closer to the characters over many, many pages, whereas here, Nik had me on his side from page one.