. . . Come one, come all, to bask in the sepia-tone sunshine reflecting off the emerald-green waters of the Perpetual City’s most relaxing and refreshing pleasure-Edge, to dig your toes into the milksands of the Thousand Shores of New Bridlington!  Cast off the myriad weary cares of your daily life and luxuriate in the endless warmth of an infinite array of beaches, bedecked with hundreds of the most fantastically accommodating resorts, as well as sports clubs, restaurants, nightclubs, arenas, theaters and dance halls! Come; feast your eyes on the merry crowds that throng the streets of New Bridlington’s numerous shopping and entertainment districts, shadowed only by the leaves of palm trees and the thrill of passing etherships. Frolic with a hundred companions in the sparkling surf, and feast on the native delicacies of our teeming waters through nights lit by stars and perfumed by exotic blooms!   . . . [more]

 . . . Lesley balanced a motley collection of drinks, at least two of which sported colorful umbrellas and only one of which wasn’t obviously an intoxicant, as he lead Felix from the rear of the club to one of a long chain of tiki huts that looked down over the beach.  Lesley dumped the tray on the small table and flopped into a rocking chair pointed toward the water. Two other figures similarly reclined near the table. One was a whip-cord thin man in loose-flowing garments held tight to his body by a belted dressing-robe. His skin was tanned nearly black and his face twitched with a tic that made him difficult to regard. The other was a giant, thin-haired and red-faced, with a massive belly and breasts that strained against the buttons of a regulation uniform. Felix couldn’t tell whether her ochre skin reflected genetics or jaundice, but suspected the latter. Her biological right arm ended just below the elbow with the remainder made of chrome and Bakelite. Its fingers were clamped tight around an insulated flask. With her left hand she reached for the cup of tea – strangely innocent amongst its harder companions . . . [more]

Our holiday card tells the tale of a pair of very unusual crows and their quest for a perch during the brief span every year when the statues of the Perpetual City come to life. Some of those statues pursue old vendettas, other seek out love. But a few, like the griffeh who perches atop the column in front of the Cathedral of Saint Graham the Transfixed, take those few hours to catch up on much needed rest. Thank you all so much for supporting our vision this year. The magic of the City wouldn't be half so great if we couldn't share it. Please enjoy this card as a token of our appreciation - feel free to download and print out as many as you'd like.

. . . her garments were afterthoughts, pinned together out of the same mists she’d assembled her body from, but made without the same care and unthinking certainty. Here a cuff and collar detailed of threads woven as fine and fanciful as a grey dame’s dreams of her first ballgown; but there a length of skirt so ill-considered and obviously arcane that its edges were as intangible and invisible as a thousand chilly mornings of pale hands tucked into woolen folds. That she had bothered to cover herself at all was, I think, nothing more than a nod to my own modesty. I wonder, now, how much she struggled to weave the skeins of memory and fashion into anything less than a nightmarish patch-work, burdened as she was with such shreds and patches—a lover’s familiar hem here, a mother’s knotted kerchief from centuries prior. How maddening, how exhausting, it must become to keep the dear, familiar things of a hundred lifetimes sorted?  I have seen it in the aged, how they struggle with the looks and words of the youth, hopeless not for lack of wit or knowledge, but because their memories betray them, throw up a dozen different responses, each legitimate within its frame, but aphasic out. They wade through the possibilities, slowed or even paralyzed, and ultimately they still select wrongly, revealing themselves as creatures trapped in a fractured sea of other time. How much harder, despite greater faculties, for a creature that remembered all the more acutely, and so terribly much more?. . . [more]

. . . ultimately it’s up to all of us to determine the nature of the worlds envisioned by steampunks. It’s within that landscape of imagination where the battle for Steampunk’s soul will be waged – is being waged; and where our question will ultimately be answered as to whether Steampunk matters. However, we are confident that it at least could matter, because even when appropriated by corporations, Steampunk has the unique potential to allow us to visualize worlds different from our own, but similar enough that we could make them a reality. Even if we believe the people who argue that Steampunk is only an aesthetic, a style, a literary motif – we have to remember that aesthetics have power. There is a reason that tyrants and totalitarian regimes murder or subvert artists and writers. A novel can change the world, because it can reconstruct the spaces inside our heads. Steampunk allows us to imagine change and to build invisible cities that might be. What better place to start building a better tomorrow than in the landscapes of imagination? Where can real world change begin other than in the mind . . . [more]

. . . There isn’t a history. Or rather, there isn’t One History. If you made it past your primary level exams you’ve had to regurgitate that fact. Any past event only becomes “history” after it’s been seen through the fractured prism of an observer’s eye. If Truth can only be seen straight on, then history ruins it through the obliquities of those who record it. But you don’t believe that. History as records, sure, that’s corrupted and plastic . . . but the Events? The Truth? What Actually Happened? You believe in that. Like the huddled wraiths watching the shadows in the dripping dank darkness of Plato’s Cave . . . you believe in One History, living and breathing and thundering about out there in the light of day. It might be inaccessible. But it’s there. Don’t deny it. There’s no shame it – it’s what everyone believes. But trust me. You’re wrong. It doesn’t exist . . . [more]

. . . I'm no fan of science types, they spend so much time with slide-rules that they forget the bloody messes their creations make of men – but I’ll give them this, they’re not stupid. Your average aristocrat? About as smart as a box of hair. Put one into a laboratory and I’ll give you even odds that he’ll have set himself on fire or drunk a vial of quicksilver that he mistook for a fancy Sub-edge cordial in under an hour. Great thinkers, as a breed, they aren’t. But they do have money. Usually they spend it on fancy dress parties, hunting dogs, well-hung house-boys, and the like. But every once in a rare while, thankfully no more frequently, you find a specimen that’s inherited a few spare neurones along with his great big piles of gold. That’s when you need to start getting nervous – and start looking for a job some place far away . . . [more]

. . . diagnosis of the Patient was at first drastically impeded by her refusal, bordering on incapability, of dressing herself in a civilized manner for examination. When finally the assembled staff of esteemed surgeons (among whom I number myself) was able to approach the Patient, we were unable to discern anything the matter with her physiognomy. Her symptoms include a torpid and insatiate listlessness, fatigue, anorexia, headache, and a most profound and (I must say) contagious depression. She complains of neuralgia in her, ah, extremity, which is unreceptive to any treatment: furthermore, I must note that the patient abhors to the point of violence the application of any water whatsoever, beyond the barest minimum amount we have been able to force upon her for the prevention of total desiccation of the piscine appendage . . . [more]

. . . some non-trivial fraction of those deaths are even Governance sanctioned to some extent or another, whether from the suggestive nod of a precinct Sergeant or the heavily gilt seal of some High Functionary, and whether enacted beneath a rain of truncheons in a piss-soaked alley or through the Catalan garrote of a licensed assassin. How to make the distinction between those deaths and the lives taken by the Hangmen? It’s the difference between the bread gummed by wormy children in the City’s tenement blocks, and the loaves sanctified by the chaplains of the Carpenter. Which is to say, it’s still just bread – unless you’re willing to Believe. And if you’re a Believer, then you recognize that when the Hangmen turn the switch it stops being about murder, or at least it stops being just about murder, and becomes a matter of Punishment, even, depending on just how strongly you Believe, a matter of Justice . . . [more]

. . .  is incumbent upon us to look to the past to understand how our present came to be and not simply to long for imagined halcyon days prior to World War I in which the easy, morally-secure life of the Western middle class seemed destined to rule unchallenged forever. We are still living with dangerous legacies of the nineteenth century, creations like joint-stock companies and diabolical factories (albeit now mostly relocated to the developing world).  But looking back in time also allows us to see history’s strengths – a love of decorative culture, novel experiments in democracy fueled by the dying of heritable aristocracies, and the embrace of technological innovation, just to name a few. Steampunk is a large house which certainly welcomes those who may only be interested in escapist fashion anachronism, but which also provides an opportunity to see the present through the lens of the past and thus to imagine a future better than either . . . [more]

. . .  for now they fought a losing battle just to check the deterioration and to prepare the subject for his next surgery.  Even with the ruinously expensive assistance of the corpuscular machines, the man would have already have expired . . . had it not been for a single, steady hand that had carved a garland of wards around the tank, festooned the swags of tubing with dangling seals and mummified relics. The arcane sigils wept blood and pus as they suffered organ failure and putrefaction in the patient’s stead. They too would one day require a mighty price, just not one so easily paid.  As they worked their endless watches and rotations, the medical attendants regarded these invocations with poorly-concealed distaste, but no one dared remove or even touch . . . [more]

. . . come inside my humble cathedral and let me sing you a song of histories unmade, of tomorrows without number, and of loss that has no end. It is a song of wastelands of loose-packed soil over which eternal footmen dance with dreadful glee. The only light is from the shadows etched in fair Hecate’s visage and the notes are taken from the whispers of inevitable autumn hidden in the susurrus of August leaves. Savor the bitter copper taste upon your tongue, it is the sustenance of blood destined to be spilt and it is the only antidote to the endless muttering of insistent gloom. “Don’t be late,” the Darkness warns, “Don’t be late. You can’t afford to be late . . . [more]

. . . stumbled, dropping his torch as he grabbed at a dusty surface to steady himself. His arm wiped away a thick layer of accreted filth and exposed the bare glass beneath. Under that protective screen, wrapped tight in ancient linens in a sick mockery of a babe’s bunting, was a long dead Sleeper. Though its arms were crossed gently across its slender form in an approximation of comfortable repose, its mouth was cranked wipe open in the mummy’s universal rictus of desiccated skin and contracted tendons. Tube and lines of various calibers snaked beneath the cerements, whatever nutrients and effluviums they once carried now lost to centuries of . . . [more]

. . . those few who heard the echoing percussions between the machine-vassals of Giberon and the warriors of Parliament & Wake knew that it was no conflict meant for them. Children whimpered in their troubled sleep. Normally vocal animals crouched, cowed, in whatever dark spaces they could find. One man tried to pretend that he yet slept to disguise a cowardice that none would have faulted him for. Another rose and took a single halting step toward the primitive weapon he kept nearby should his pathetic homestead ever be invaded by some imagined (and unlikely) drug-addled burglar. His wife, made wise by the length of her suffering, urged him to ignore the cacophony and come back to bed. She would have been better off if she’d let him wander out in search of the violence – he almost certainly would not have returned . . . [more]

Frustrated that links from our Facebook wall and Twitter feed were falling below the fold, and not wanting to plug the same sites again and again, we decided to create a more robust permanent collection of links here on ParliamentandWake.com. We hope you enjoy this collection and that you let us know about new sites and stories we can feature.

. . . surely she was as lifeless as the rest of this moribund palace? Her skin was the gray-white of marble and her body was almost totally obscured by the interlaced wrappings of the royal dead. In one hand she held the glittering (somehow despite the heavy patina of dust) bronze blade of which he’d read, the Talon of Nekhebet, an icon of office of the Nomarch of this blighted vessel. In her other, still held with ritual grace and precision, was a single sunflower. The sap still ran in its thick stem: it seemed hours at most from having been plucked. Upon her bandaged neck and powerful shoulders sat another ritual garment – a ruff of feathers to blur the distinction between this vulture warship and its lord and mistress. But above that? What trailed from her skull but braid upon braid of machine-wire and logic conduit? The very objects that Hesiod had been burrowing through metal and plugging into portable cogitation engines dangled from this poor woman like yet more horrific plumage. Their gruesome attachment was what must have finally killed this once-champion in some brutal cultic sacrifice of her intellect to the mutating mind of the ship, the delirious ramblings of which Hesiod was still . . . [more]