A few nights back I was talking about dieselpunk with a friend.
Now, I’m getting rather tired of the -punk subgenres – which are certainly effective commercially, but often are just new names for well-established fare.
And dieselpunk is in this sense a heavy offender, as basically an awful lot (if not all) dieselpunk is just pulp adventure with the number plates changed.

Anyway, we were discussing dieselpunk, and one thing led to another, and talk turned to baroque esthetics, brass fittings, engines as objecct d’art, 1940s style pinups, black scary uniforms and Soviet architechture, and a lot of other stuff, all of which, to me, is not indispensable in defining dieselpunk as literature – it might define dieselpunk as an aesthetics, but not as a narrative genre.

So, what does?
Even better, what, in the dieselpunk subgenre, allows me to write stories I could not write in any other subgenre? Continue reading →