More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The grey-filled window at my back necessitated the gas bracket's flame, despite the advancing hour of the morning; by its yellow light I turned over a wedge of toast, in the vain hope that the one frugal rasher of bacon had a twin hidden there.
Whatever savagery might have remained in his breast was well concealed under the expensive cut of his clothing.
when you are there, all will be explained." Â Â A petty annoyance welled up in me. "I cannot calculate the number of times that has been said to me. "Everything will be explained." And every time I do what's asked of me, based on that promise, I end up being chased by packs of bloodthirsty maniacs. I find it tiresome in the extreme."
Though I myself have come to this safe harbour � if safety can be found in this life � yet I mourn my former simple days. I have lost my Innocence, in more ways than one. I have seen the gears and furious machinery of the world that lies unreckoned beneath our feet. No longer can I note, as other men do, the passing hours upon the heavens' gilded face, without a vision of a hidden master-spring uncoiling to its final silence. I await the day when all clocks shall stop, including the one that ticks within my breast. Do thou the same, Reader, and profit from my example.
The general gist of proto-Steampunk fictions and even later full-on Steampunk like Infernal Devices or William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine (1990) can be boiled down to a general equation: Mad inventor + invention (steam x airship or metal person/robot) x [pseudo] Victorian setting) + progressive, reactionary, or neutral politics x adventure plot. (The supernatural also plays a part in many such adventures.)
