June 14 is International Steampunk Day, and because it falls on a Friday this year, it’s an extra-special day to celebrate the culture and genre we all love.
The day offers a great excuse to throw a party, or even better, to go out on the town with your steampunk friends and see the reactions from puzzled onlookers.
If you’d like to celebrate on your own, consider reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to music.
As we’ve reported previously, the date has no particular historical significance. The tribute originated in 2008 in Hawaii, when a college student named Drew Mierzejewski decided to throw a steampunk party. “The day was chosen mostly because it was the end of the semester and it was earliest that my friend group could meet,” he told us.
He formalized it the following year by launching the International Steampunk Day Facebook group and the rest was history.
U.K. author Keith Dickinson is celebrating the day by releasing The Hammersmyth Tales, a collection of five short stories featuring characters from his steampunk mystery novels Dexter & Sinister: Detecting Agents and The Dragonfly Delivery Company.
Those would be “Dexter the mechanical cat, Nomko the Engineer, and everyone’s favourite muscle for hire Agnes Goodenough,” he tells us, “as well as two new characters in Inspector Lassiter and her right-hand man Constable O-Hara.”
He’s releasing the collection as a free e-book to introduce readers to the series. It’s also “a chance to learn more about the characters we know and love for those who are familiar with the previous tales,” he says.
You can get it from Smashwords or Amazon. Smashwords has it listed for free, and he tells us he’s trying to make it free on Amazon as well, “but it is taking a little longer, so for now it is just £0.77 (which is the cheapest I can make it),” he says.
