Cirrus@Austlit

'The novel Heart Fire addresses steampunk’s darker side from the perspective of rebellious commoners battling a demon-haunted scientist and deadly automatons.

In the city of Forsham, all people are born with magic of varying degrees. The upper classes have been bred to have potentially destructive heart-magic, while the lower classes are supposedly left with weak and manageable skin-magic. Disaster strikes when factory owner, Sir Mathias Grindle – a mage without power – consorts with demons and attempts to elevate his position by eliminating all heart-magic.

Ju Weatherton is a commoner with too much magic who vows to overthrow the mages who suppress her. She joins forces with an outcast shapeshifter and a misfit dandy when another shapeshifter turned to stone in a human woman’s womb tricks her into facing Sir Mathias’s demons. Meanwhile Sir Mathias’s soul-stealing automatons terrorize Forsham’s skies, tearing out people’s heart-magic to transplant it into machines to provide them with perpetual motion.

The novel explores class oppression, Otherness, the use and misuse of technology in a pseudo-Victorian otherworld alongside the themes of friendship, trust, love, loss, grief and betrayal.'

Source: Author's Blurb

'With reference to James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone, this exegesis explores the writing of Heart Fire as a steampunk text from the perspective of a writer in the genre of fantasy. It argues that steampunk is not limited to texts representing steamdriven machinery, but also includes fantastical texts that rely on pseudo-Victorianism often set in imaginary worlds characterized by anachronism, pseudoscience, technofantasy, magic, hybridity and imagined events inspired by science fictional history as well as real history.'

Source : Author's Abstract