Steam Press is very pleased to announce that its New Zealand
steampunk anthology Angels and Automatons is now live on
Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stephenminchin/angels-and-automatons-a-shared-world-steampunk-ant
This book will be a shared-world anthology set on New
Zealand's rugged West Coast in the 1860s. The team of authors contributing to
the project includes established names as well as those at the early stages of
their careers, with folks from New Zealand and around the world. They will all
be collaborating on the creation of a shared world in which their
interconnected stories will be set – all of the authors will play an equal
role, and the world will be unique to this anthology. The resulting book will
tell a thrilling and distinctly New Zealand tale of exploration, invention, and
destruction.
The anthology’s story will begin in the winter of 1862, when
Swedish explorer Alvar Larsen was walking up a valley in the Southern Alps and
found an enormous gold nugget that was shaped uncannily like an angel with
outstretched wings. He purchased the land and reported his find in Hokitika,
thirty miles away on the coast. Within eighteen months a town by the name of
Angelston had been established and had grown to 12,000 souls, thanks to the
area’s significant deposits of gold.
The town flourished, but the hottest rumours of the summer
of 1864 were not of new strikes, huge nuggets being unearthed, or, indeed, of
gold at all – the town was overrun with gossip about a new arrival. For the
past year there had been a constant stream of men into the town but this
arrival was different. A fleet of six carriages rattled up the muddy and rutted
track from Hokitika, and an inventor was on board, they said. When the inventor
disembarked it was revealed that this man of science was, in fact, a woman.
This inventor, one Elsie Muller, quickly set to work on the
most significant project of her career – the creation of a clockwork and steam
powered policeman that could protect the world’s less fortunate from those who
would take advantage of them. She toiled night and day, and was making
significant progress when disaster (and, some claim, villainous saboteurs)
struck. The automatons went berserk, with devastating and deadly consequences.
The story that follows will be told by a collection of
authors each writing from a different perspective, creating an anthology of
interlocking and interdependent stories which together illuminate the terrible
story of Angelston’s growth and eventual destruction.
To find out more, please check out the project at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stephenminchin/angels-and-automatons-a-shared-world-steampunk-ant
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