All Articles Tagged 'books' (35)

First of all, I want to thank my peers here at 'Punks who have gone out of their way to support this series. The feedback from the readers has been fantastic, and truly appreciated.

So I'm pretty excited to release the next installment in the Troubleshooter series: Red-Eyed Killer

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Details: In the prequel to New Haven Blues, Mick Trubble is a partial amnesiac who barters favors in…

Eva and yours truly finally present: Strangers' Journey.

You don't need to guess twice: it's a book, written in Russian, and the artist behind this cover art is Stefan. Actually, he created two…

Ok 'punks, so if you've been following my recent series of articles, then you know that I've been yadda yadda all about my recently published novel The Troubleshooter: New Haven Blues. Looking for a shot of noir, a dash of dieselpunk and sci fi shaken well and poured over a dystopian future? You got it.

"So what?" you say. "Self-published books are a dime a dozen. Why should I be…

This is a tribute to HP Lovecraft. The story is about a strange trip of a group of students from the Miskatonic University to a dark and magical region in the deep of the Grancolombia. Dark places, strangest technologies and magical characters are everywhere.

The book is published only in Spanish (I…

And speaking of red...

Here is the cover for the novel "Red-Eyed Killer", by Bard Constantine. "Red-Eyed Killer" is a prequel to "The Troubleshooter- New Haven Blues": http://micktrubble.jimdo.com/  Those who haven't read this…

By now you may have heard that Dallas-based Twit Publishing, purveyor of a popular Pulp Quarterly, is putting out a Dieselpunk short story anthology called, well, Dieselpunk: an Anthology.  It's the first of its kind that I am aware of.  What you might not know is that advance reviews are now available for its eight stories!

Twit…

When writing The Troubleshooter, I had to come up with the types of firearms that would exist in the retro-futuristic world of New Haven. Mick Trubble carries two main guns. His first choice is the Mean Ol' Broad, a heavy duty piece that fires explosive tipped slugs. I had a mental picture in mind when I wrote it: the pistol that Harrison Ford packed in the classic sci fi film Blade Runner. Recently I…

The cover of a novel has to be special. The image has to catch the eye, fire the imagination, impel the potential reader to pluck it off the shelf  -or in this modern world, click on it with their mouse. The font has to be readable and attractive. And it all has to look good in thumbnail size so that book browsers can see it online. Because that whole thing about not judging a book by its cover?

A lie.

I’m not an artist, photographer, or graphic designer. Creating a cover is…

With the release of The Troubleshooter: New Haven Blues, I thought I'd share a short story featuring the protagonist Mick Trubble...

I heard the staccato of her heels down the hall…

Smoggy days, rainy nights.  The windshield weeps under the glow of tacky neon lights.

The good thing about being depressed in New Haven is that you can always…

Dieselpunk doesn't really exist as a genre in Japan. There are some anime that suit the genre aesthetics (I'll write about them some other time) but the historical period itself is a fascinating and singular one in the nation's history.

The Taisho period…

"The Troubleshooter is a blend of old and new genres that Bard Constantine coined 'dystopian noir'.  Part of the developing Badlands universe, it introduces Mick Trubble, a character Bard describes as "a blend of noir detective and hard boiled antihero, blended with a generous amount of…

Hello, folks! A small disclaimer on this review: English isn't my native language, and since I really don't have much opportunities to keep up with it, it may get a little rusty or plain weird -- although, talking about Dieselpunk, "rusty" and plain "weird" may fit...

I have just finished reading Dieselpunk - Arquivos confidenciais de uma bela época (Dieselpunk – Confidential files from a belle epoque), by Draco press, 2011. It's a tales selection on the…

Sunny summer Monday. A perfect day to remember a great illustrator who was equally good at dangerous air missions and criminal investigations.

A man who wanted to study art not for the sake of art and not for pleasure but as a means to pull himself out of poverty. Yeah, this fine cover artist was practically self-educated. Belarski's first assignment in the world of pulp was in the genre of air stories, immensely popular in early 1930s, echoing the Great War. Today one of…

Chapter 11: The Great Collapse

"But when we contrast the state of man in the opening of the twentieth century with the condition of any previous period in his history, then perhaps we may begin to understand something of that blind confidence. It was not so much a reasoned confidence as the inevitable consequence of sustained good fortune. By such standards as they possessed, things HAD gone amazingly well for them. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for the first time…

Chapter 11: The Great Collapse

"And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, and dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war."

Buy HG Wells' War in the Air from the Dieselpunks Shop > http://astore.amazon.com/dieselpunks-20/detail/0141441305

Download a free eBook version of HG Wells' War in the Air > …

Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"Much of this artillery was still unmounted, and nearly all of it was unprotected when the German air-fleet reached New York. And down in the crowded streets, when that occurred, the readers of the New York papers were regaling themselves with wonderful and wonderfully illustrated accounts of such matters as:--

THE SECRET OF THE THUNDERBOLT

AGED SCIENTIST PERFECTS ELECTRIC GUN

TO ELECTROCUTE AIRSHIP CREWS BY UPWARD…

Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt perhaps even more certainly than the English had done that war in their own land was an impossible thing. In that they shared the delusion of all North America. They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked their money…

Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"It was the peculiar shape of Manhattan Island, pressed in by arms of the sea on either side, and incapable of comfortable expansion, except along a narrow northward belt, that first gave the New York architects their bias for extreme vertical dimensions. Every need was lavishly supplied them--money, material, labour; only space was restricted. To begin, therefore, they built high perforce. But to do so was to discover a whole new world of…

Content is nothing. Looks are everything. We've seen great works of art created to advertise cheap soap or mediocre movies.

With books, looks are often inferior to content, but sometimes the opposite is true. Even a statistics handbook can become a work of art, provided with appropriate cover. That's what Lyubov Popova has done for the Russian Postage & Telegraph Statistics, 1921 (above):…

Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"The City of New York was in the year of the German attack the largest, richest, in many respects the most splendid, and in some, the wickedest city the world had ever seen. She was the supreme type of the City of the Scientific Commercial Age; she displayed its greatness, its power, its ruthless anarchic enterprise, and its social disorganisation most strikingly and completely. She had long ousted London from her pride of place as the modern…