A Letter from Harry Ransom

Written by Felix Gilman

[We are pleased to announce that the writings of the famous Harry Ransom – some might say notorious – have now been collected and published as The Rise of Ransom City. This letter was found too late to be included. Besides, the fellow who says he found it was asking too much money for it, and for all we know it is a forgery. The handwriting is atrocious. – The Editors.]

Dear May,
   or Jess,
     or Elmer,
       or whoever comes across this,

That’s that then. A stack of papers. Some of the pages got wet when we crossed this river or that on our way out west – who can remember all the rivers. Sometimes the typewriter broke or leaked ink. It was a good typewriter for all its faults and it is a miracle it got me this far, especially after the bullet it took. They made things to last back in Jasper City. Anyhow the thing is done. This stack of papers is the life of your humble correspondent, Harry Ransom; the story of my birth, the incident of the electric-cure, the tragedy of the Damaris, and the showdown with the murderer Mr. Knoll; and the days at the Ormolu Theater, and Mr. Carver, and Mr. Baxter, and Adela. My rise and fall and how come I am out here heading west . . .

I am having a devil of a time letting it go. I have been writing for so long now that if I fall silent I am half-scared of what will happen. Maybe all the words that used to come pouring out of the typewriter will build up in my head until it explodes. Something similar has happened with the Ransom Lightbringing Apparatus once or twice – in Kenauk, in White Rock, and in Jasper. But if you have read my letters then you know about those incidents, and you know that they were mostly not my fault.

Maybe you have by now and maybe you haven’t. Who knows if any of this will make it back east to you. I have been typing in triplicate and sending parts back as we go. Whenever anyone deserts (and we have had a few deserters) I say, no hard feelings, utopia isn’t for everyone, but will you please take back a letter? Only once have I been refused. Mr. Cantor hit me in the face and said I was a fraud and a lunatic. But his wife was sick with a fever and I do not blame him for losing hope. Mr. Belbo took back a hundred pages or so, and Miss Luria took fifty. . . But there are a lot of dangers on the road, between here and a post-office, in these terrible times.

The typewriter is finally broken for good, and I am writing this by hand, as you can see. Fortunately it so happened that one of the Beck brothers brought a pen with him when we set off for the uncharted west. It is very fine indeed, but the initials engraved on it are not his. I guess it is too late to worry about that sort of thing now. When we get to where we’re going and build our city we will start with a clean slate. Perhaps we’ll abolish property altogether – I haven’t decided.

I write on a rock by the shore of a lake, sunlit and silvery, whispering, nameless and unmapped, at least so far as I know. It bars our way west. We are considering the construction of boats. Thomas and Carlo and Lillian are turning back. So be it. Everyone is free to come or go to Ransom City as they please, otherwise how would we be better than anywhere else? They’ll take the last of my letters (but this one I’ll keep back, just in case). Thomas is checking his rifle, again and again. We are out on the wild edge of things and we have seen the tracks and heard the roar of big cats at night – I think they are cats. Good luck, Thomas, and shoot straight!

As for those of us who are going on – well, I have generally had bad luck with boats. I will fold this letter, and leave it under the typewriter. If in some distant future anyone should chance by this place, and observe the rusted hulk of my typewriter on a rock, and be curious enough to investigate, they will know–if nothing else, if none of my other writings survive — that at least I tried to set the story straight. I did.

Yours,
  Harry Ransom

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From the Tor/Forge December newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the December Tor/Forge newsletter:

• The Toughest Part of Writing Cold City by F. Paul Wilson
• Crying Bully by J. A. Souders
• What if? Two little words that created the world of S. J. Day’s Eve of Darkness
• Big Fat Books for the Holidays Sweepstakes

Goodreads First Reads: The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman

Enter for a chance to win a copy on Goodreads!

About The Rise of Ransom City: This is the story Harry Ransom. If you know his name it’s most likely as the inventor of the Ransom Process, a stroke of genius that changed the world.

Or you may have read about how he lost the battle of Jasper City, or won it, depending on where you stand in matters of politics.

Friends called him Hal or Harry, or by one of a half-dozen aliases, of which he had more than any honest man should. He often went by Professor Harry Ransom, and though he never had anything you might call a formal education, he definitely earned it.

If you’re reading this in the future, Ransom City must be a great and glittering metropolis by now, with a big bronze statue of Harry Ransom in a park somewhere. You might be standing on its sidewalk and not wonder in the least of how it grew to its current glory. Well, here is its story, full of adventure and intrigue. And it all starts with the day that old Harry Ransom crossed paths with Liv Alverhyusen and John Creedmoor, two fugitives running from the Line, amidst a war with no end.

Enter for a chance to win here!

(Ends November 27)

Also, don’t forget to check out our other sweepstakes!

The Week in Review

Welcome to the week in review! Every Friday, we comb through the links and images we found and shared this week, and pull the very best for this post. Consider it concentrated genre goodness from all around the web. Happy Friday the 13th, everyone!

• Are you at San Diego Comic-Con? Check out what Tor has going on! (Image by John Scalzi.)
• USA Today tackles the steampunk trend and talks to author Lev AC Rosen.
• The New York Times profiles John Scalzi!
• Tor.com has wallpaper from Winter’s Heart available for download.
• Tor Books is proud to present the third Halo novel by Greg Bear, Halo: Silentium.
• io9 has a wonderful list of great opening sentences from classic fantasy novels.
• A ring that belonged to Jane Austen recently sold at auction for 150,000 pounds. That kind of dedicated Austen fan might enjoy checking out Mary Robinette Kowal‘s books too!

The Tor/Forge newsletter went out this week! Check out these fascinating articles from our authors:

• How to Keep Smiling After the End of the World as We Know It by David Brin
• Haunted Mansions and Eclipses by Marta Acosta
• It’s Not All A Beautiful Mind by Dan Wells
• Johnny Hiro: Half Asian, All Hero Sneak Peek, written and illustrated by Fred Chao
• Finding Research Treasure by D. B. Jackson

And, just to make Friday that much sweeter, here’s a list of sweepstakes and sales we have going on!

• Not at San Diego Comic-Con Sweepstakes (Ends 7/16)
• Kitty’s Big Trouble by Carrie Vaughn (Ends 7/17)
• Johnny Hiro: Half Asian, All Hero written and illustrated by Fred Chao (Ends 7/18)
• The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan (Ends 7/27)
• Kitty Steals the Show by Carrie Vaughn (Ends 7/31)
• The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Ends 8/10)
• Urban Fantasy Sweepstakes (Ends 8/3)

Steampunk Sweepstakes

Sign up for the Tor/Forge Newsletter for a chance to win the following prize pack:

About our newsletter: every issue of Tor’s monthly email newsletter features original writing by, and interviews with, Tor authors and editors about upcoming new titles from all Tor and Forge imprints. In addition, we occasionally send out “special edition” newsletters to highlight particularly exciting new projects, programs, or events.

If you’re already a newsletter subscriber, you can enter too. We do not automatically enter subscribers into sweepstakes. We promise we won’t send you duplicate copies of the newsletter if you sign up for the newsletter more than once.

Sign up for your chance to win today!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins October 3, 2011 at 12 a.m. ET. and ends November 9, 2011, 11:59 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. For Official Rules and to enter, go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

More giveaways:

• The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson (Ends 10/7)
• The Dark at the End by F. Paul Wilson (Ends 10/12)
• Cold Gory by B. Kent Anderson (Ends 10/12)
• Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham (Ends 10/14)
• Repairman Jack Sweepstakes (Ends 10/16)
• Steel by Richard Matheson (Ends 10/19)

New Releases: 9/27/2011

See upcoming releases.

#TorChat September 2011 Sweepstakes

Did you participate in today’s #TorChat?  We hope you enjoyed it and look forward to your participation in next month’s chat on October 19th.

In the meantime, here’s your chance to win some books. One lucky winner will receive an bundle of  books from today’s special #TorChat guests. Leave a comment below to enter.

And again we’d like to thank Marie Brennan, Lev AC Rosen, and George Mann for joining us on Twitter today.

Sweepstakes closes to new entries on September, 26th. That’s the day before the release of All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen!

Keep your eye on our Facebook and Twitter where we will announce next month’s theme and our special guests. We’ll see you all next month!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins September 21, 2011 at 5 p.m. ET. and ends September 26, 2011, 12:00 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Goodreads Giveaway: The Rise of the Iron Moon

Enter for a chance to win a copy on Goodreads!

About The Rise of the Iron Moon: Born into captivity as a product of the Royal Breeding House, friendless orphan Purity Drake suddenly finds herself on the run with a foreign vagrant after accidentally killing one of her guards.

Her strange rescuer claims he is on the run himself from terrible forces who mean to enslave the Kingdom of Jackals much as they conquered his own nation. Purity doubts his story until reports of the terrible Army of Shadows, marching across the continent and sweeping all before them.

Purity has felt little love for her country but realizes that the bad acts of a government gone wrong aren’t enough to condemn an entire people.

There’s more to Purity than meets the eye. As Jackals girds itself for war against an army of near-unkillable beasts serving an ancient evil, it becomes clear that the country’s only hope is a strange little royalist girl and the last, desperate plan of an escaped slave.

Enter for a chance to win here!

(Ends May 1) Open to US and Canada only.

More giveaways:

• Hitman: The Untold Story of Johnny Martorano: Whitey Bulger’s Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld by Howie Carr (Ends 4/18)
• Under Fire by Margaret McLean (Ends 5/10)
• Chicks Kick Butt edited by Rachael Caine and Kerrie L. Hughes (5/10)
• The First Days by Rhiannon Frater (5/10)

The Accidental Steampunk

by Stephen Hunt

I have a tale to tell, a tale in the form of an embarrassing confession. It is my Mea Culpa to you dear reader, as we blunder into 2011. Here goes…

When I set out to write my first novel, The Court of the Air, I was embarking on writing a fantasy novel. After much sweat and labor, when I set aside my pen, I was even fairly sure I had actually finished a fantasy novel. Ditto, my sequels in the Jackelian series to date: The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, The Rise of the Iron Moon, Secrets of the Fire Sea, and Jack Cloudie.

At a push, I mused, they’re a fantasy/SF blend… in much the same way as Burroughs’ ‘Barsoom’ series, say, or Moorcock’s ‘Nomad of the Time Streams’. That was what I was aiming for, anyway. You know the pack-drill: pistols, sabres, high adventure, evil monsters, swashes to be buckled. After all, my books are set many millions of years in the future, after ice ages and various catastrophes—natural and manmade—have reset the clock and scrubbed almost all vestiges of our current civilization from the memories of mankind and its evolutionary offshoots and genetically engineered follies (and let’s not leave out a few alien species imported during humanity’s zenith).

So after the glaciers retreated, the clock on my world was reset to the baseline, and that baseline was steam at the low end. The Jackelian Kingdom is fixed so far in the future that a spatial evolution in the fine-structure constant has rendered electrical current too variable to be reliably utilized as anything other than a spectacular weapon of war, so it’s nano-mechanical systems & genetic engineering at the high end. Hence my self-evolving robot race of the Steammen, or the slavocracy of Cassarabia in the far south (built on very nasty genetic engineering).

It seemed such a casual, easy thing to do. If you’re doing steam, and the period of history you’re most familiar with is Victorian, you might as well stick in airships and u-boats and clockwork driven pistols and poorhouses and orphans, right? It would be damn rude not to. After that, strange things began to happen. When the Berlinale, Europe’s largest film festival, selected ‘The Court of the Air’ as one of their ten books that should be made into a movie, their elevator pitch was ‘Bladerunner meets Charles Dickens.’ WTF! Finally, the truth began to dawn even on me, when the Jackelian series garnered a Wiki mention as one of the driving forces behind the new wave of steampunk.

I always thought to be steampunk, you had to fix your world in real Victoriana, and have walk-on parts for Captain Nemo and Abraham Lincoln and Sherlock Holmes…. Had I unwittingly committed to steampunk? What, even with the alien races and robots and stuff?

The only reason I had gone off-piste in the first place was that I had wanted to avoid Swordpunk. You know, faux-medieval, furry pants, anywhere from Bronze Age to late Renaissance. The rest of the genre is doing that. J.R.R. Tolkien isn’t, of course—he’s dead. No more Swordpunk from him. But lots of others are still at it like rabbits. Terry Pratchett: Comedy Swordpunk. Joe Abercrombie: Hard-edged brutally realistic sardonic Swordpunk. George R.R. Martin: Non-formulaic multi-layered dynastic Swordpunk. Brandon Sanderson: Epic Swordpunk.

All that effort avoiding Swordpunk, and I end up as The Accidental Steampunk. Well, my wife warned me I should be writing Zombiepunk or Vampirepunk. Hmmm, now there’s an idea….

The Rise of the Iron Moon (978-0-7653-2766-6; $26.99) is available from Tor this March. Stephen Hunt can be found at www.sfcrowsnest.com.

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From the March issue of Tor’s Steampunk newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the Steampunk issue:

• Why I am still waiting on my personal zeppelin by Claire Eddy
• Domed Penny Buttons by Jen Hill

Why I am still waiting for my personal zeppelin

When The Court of Air first published in the US, we ran a piece in this newsletter written by the editor, Claire Eddy.  In writing about why she bought the book and how much she loved The Court of Air,  the piece does a wonderful job of articulating the essence of the Jackelian series that we fans have come to love.  Action. Adventure. Each installment of the Jackelian series takes us on one wild ride after another through this world that Stephen Hunt has fashioned for his readers.

So here it is again, reprinted for you all in this newsletter in anticipation of The Rise of the Iron Moon, publishing March 15, 2011.

Why I am still waiting for my personal zeppelin

By Claire Eddy, Senior Editor

Most girls my age grew up wanting a dream Barbie playhouse.

I wanted a Van de Graaff generator.

Most girls I knew wanted to go to the prom.

I wanted to go to the Center of the Earth.

I wanted a zeppelin and I wanted to go to the moon. Jules Verne and the Hardy Boys were my pals. Why couldn’t I be the nineteenth century explorer who battled giant squids and had fabulous adventures in long-lost dinosaur lands?

When The Court of the Air showed up on my desk, I looked at the cover (the book was first published in Britain) and read the cover copy and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

Flying spy balloons? A 19th century steampunky alternate England with clockwork monsters and saints, with mysterious men in airships who work for hidden government agencies determined to protect the Empire? Dueling magicians who use modern technology and ancient arts to fight an age-old war?

And mushroom people! (Did I mention the mushroom people?)

And in the midst of all of this we have the story of two young orphans, Molly Templar and Oliver Brooks, who are thrown together because of a shared fate.

I closed my door and settled down to read the book, thinking it couldn’t be as good as advertised. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. I fell into the book and was right there with Molly as she survived one adventure after another; was right there with Oliver as he evaded the bad guys and worked to thwart dastardly plots that might destroy the Empire. People knocked on my door to ask me mundane publishing questions and I got annoyed. I was twelve again and I was off on an adventure—why wouldn’t people leave me alone? I was working, wasn’t I?

I finished the book and came out of my cave and couldn’t stop babbling to people about it. I guess I convinced enough folks that it was terrific because we’re publishing The Court of the Air this June and we’ve bought the rights to Stephen’s second book set in this universe, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves.

You don’t have to be twelve to love The Court of the Air. But I think it will remind you of a time when you thought you could do anything and that there were wondrous discoveries waiting just around the corner.

Or between the pages of a book.

I still don’t have my zeppelin, but this is pretty close…

The Rise of the Iron Moon (978-0-7653-2766-6; $26.99) is available from Tor this March. Stephen Hunt can be found at www.sfcrowsnest.com.

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From the March issue of Tor’s Steampunk newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the Steampunk issue:

• The Accidental Steampunk by Stephen Hunt
• Domed Penny Buttons by Jen Hill

Winding the Mainspring

Antikythera mechanism fragment via Marsyas from Wikipedia

By Jay Lake

Mainspring dropped into my lap fully formed. At least in a sense. Book ninjas did not deliver the manuscript to my desk all complete and nicely formatted, of course. Doing that is the work of any novelist. But the idea, now there is another story.

I’ve always been fascinated by clockwork, machines, lost technology. The Antikythera mechanism is one of the coolest things I’d ever heard of. The orreries of the eighteenth century are marvels of design and execution.

Such hubris, to render the universe in a handful of gears and bright brass balls. Forward in time we have the Babbage engine and the complex world of fine watchmaking. Like many people, I feel a magpie attraction to things which fit together, slide round one another, the tiny gears and giant cogs of life.

Grand orrery in Putnam Gallery via Ragesoss from Wikipedia

These days, all that has gone from a metaphor of precision to a metaphor for the supposed unrelenting drudgery of modern times. Charlie Chaplin said it best, perhaps.

So here I have gears in my head, and a sense of them in the world at large. And here I am at the Oregon Coast Professional Writers’ Workshop, an irregular series of very intense programs put on by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, with an assist from Loren Coleman and a rotating cast of peripatetic industry pros. Kris and Dean spent a day hammering book proposals into our heads, then told us to produce two proposals overnight, for discussion and review.

Being me, I produced six. Wrote each of them in a different way, too. Mainspring was one of those six. All the gears in my head, and two millennia of mechanical history, coalesced as one forty-five minute stretch of writing out of an evening’s fevered work.

It was all there right at the beginning—Hethor, the Wall, the gears of heaven. Making it work was another issue entirely. When it came time to write the novel, I read books on the history of clockmaking, timekeeping, calendars. From them I salted the names of minor characters with the great timekeepers and horologists of history. I consulted with an aerospace engineer as to how best to arrange the heavens. His response was mind-bogglingly complex, albeit gorgeous. Then I threw his advice away because reality is no excuse, especially when writing science fantasy. I bought a desktop miniglobe so I could trace Hethor’s journey and know which hand the African coast was on at any moment.

In other words, like any novel, the writing process was almost as epic as the story itself. But the idea was always there. What if Creation were real, the Renaissance conception of God the Watchmaker in place and to hand? Yet He Himself was absent? That would be the opposite of our world, where faith is a matter of, well, faith, and God is for the most part seen only by those looking for him. In my world, there are no atheists, only dissenters. And everything runs like the clockwork of proverbial wit.

Still, it all rises from the overread and overfed imagination of the child I was and the man I became. And that all came to me one night in a flash. Which I am convinced is how the best ideas work.

Mainspring (978-0-7653-5636-9, $7.99) is the first book in the Clockwork Earth series. The series continues with Escapement (978-0-7653-5637-6, $7.99) and Pinion (978-0-7653-2186-2, $7.99). Jay Lake can be found online at jaylake.com.

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From the December issue of Tor’s Steampunk newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from this newsletter issue:

• Steampunk Gift Guide