Jenny Schwartz and her Bustlepunk Chronicles

Hi Bec! Thanks for letting me visit and share one of my favourite aspects of Steampunk: the fact it takes reality and twists!

Museum of WA I love that it started life as a library

All too often history gets things wrong. Civilisations collapse when they should have shot to the moon. Women don't win suffrage till the twentieth century. Inventions that ought to work, inexplicably fail to do so — like free energy devices 😉

Steampunk is everyone's chance to correct history's errors and explore “What if …?”

That said, writing Steampunk is a whole heap easier when you can visualise the setting. So with my Bustlepunk Chronicles, I cheated. I used my hometown of Perth as the setting. I've walked these streets, driven them, too. And in some fundamental ways, they haven't changed at all from a century ago. In Perth, you can touch its history. It doesn't hurt, either, that I studied Australian social history at uni years ago and did some research for an honours thesis that never got off the ground. All of that informs my Steampunk writing.

London Court Everyone loves the clock with its knights on chargers

I thought I'd scatter some photos of Perth's old buildings through this post to give a sense of how we live with history — Steampunk just lets us do so with excitement and style 🙂

Although this final photo of an old railway pub shows the dangers of treating history as cosmetic. Facadism run rampant!

Facadism.

Jenny Schwartz is the author of The Bustlepunk Chronicles which begin with Wanted: One Scoundrel. Courting Trouble releases 1 October from Carina Press.