"Rossamund Bookchild is finally becoming a lamplighter. Sworn into the Emperors service, his duty is to light the lamps along the Emperor's highways, and protect all travellers from the ferocious bogles that live in the wild. But he's found it no easier to fit in with the lamplighters than he ever has - always too small and too meek, his loneliness continues no matter how hard he tries to succeed. But when a haughty young girl, a member of a suspiciously-regarded society of all women teratologists is forced upon the lamplighters for training, Rossamund might no longer be the most despised soul around." (Source: Series website)
'Rossamund has exchanged Winstermill and the dangerous life of a lamplighter for Brandenbrass and an even more dangerous life as factotum to the aristocratic monsterslayer, Europe. Fear and self-doubt must wait, however, as he plunges headlong into the fulgar's day-to-day life of political manoeuvring, high-society parties and well-paid monsterhunting. But whispers and rumours about her new factotum place Europe herself in danger, and now Rossamund and the Branden Rose will face the ultimate battle against their enemies, the black-hearted schemers who would destroy them both.' (Trove record)
'Bunting Faukes has a debt and no way to repay it - times are tough for grave robbers. But a way out is presented in the person of Atticus Wells, a sleuth with strange eyes that see into everything. Virtue Bland is alone in the world. Packed off to Brandenbrass to serve the household of her late father's employer, she has only her old pa's olfactologue to remember him by. But with it she can smell monsters.' (Publication abstract)
'The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of debates about what the genre is, what it does, and, more significantly for this paper, what it fails to do. Drawing on a range of steampunk works set in Australia, we explore the extent to which steampunk is able to grapple with coloniality, both in the Victorian period from which it draws and in the colonial present in which it is set. Is steampunk condemned to limit itself to a western-technocratic teleology or is it capable of critiquing or even circumventing colonial pasts? After setting out steampunk’s adherence to the problem-spaces of Euro-modernity, we focus closely on works by D.M. Cornish, Meljean Brook, and Dave Freer to highlight three ways in which authors writing Australian steampunk highlight non-hegemonic subjectivities and settings: secondary worlds and their historical distance, the mediated spaces of alternate histories, and the foregrounding of colonial brutalities in a traditional steampunk setting.'
Source: Abstract.
'The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of debates about what the genre is, what it does, and, more significantly for this paper, what it fails to do. Drawing on a range of steampunk works set in Australia, we explore the extent to which steampunk is able to grapple with coloniality, both in the Victorian period from which it draws and in the colonial present in which it is set. Is steampunk condemned to limit itself to a western-technocratic teleology or is it capable of critiquing or even circumventing colonial pasts? After setting out steampunk’s adherence to the problem-spaces of Euro-modernity, we focus closely on works by D.M. Cornish, Meljean Brook, and Dave Freer to highlight three ways in which authors writing Australian steampunk highlight non-hegemonic subjectivities and settings: secondary worlds and their historical distance, the mediated spaces of alternate histories, and the foregrounding of colonial brutalities in a traditional steampunk setting.'
Source: Abstract.