Steam City Pirates
Like Alice’s rabbit, a strange “mechanical-like man” leads 1869 New York Detective Pat O’Malley down into the world of steam power. A group from the future calling itself the World Scientific Advancement Society for Progress is living secretly beneath Central Park. These pirates are inventors whose only goal is to keep the Earth in the Steam Age in order to save it from a future nuclear holocaust. Five alien assassins from other universes are ordered to kill O’Malley and his group, and each alien has a unique ability to do the job. As the Steam City Pirates build a steam-powered amusement park on Coney Island, O’Malley and his group are hunted down in the streets of New York City. The future of the world is at stake in this mystery and adventure featuring a twisting plot, steampunk time travel, steam men duels, crafty inventions, and monsters from other planets.
The Story Behind This Book
Steam City Pirates is a novel for steampunk fans. If any other readers wish to hop aboard, then so be it, but I wrote it for the psyche of the people who adore to revel in the world of genteel drama and science fiction. They enjoy this activity so much, in fact, that an entire cottage industry has sprouted up across America. Am I becoming a whore to this new phenomena? Yes, indeed I am! What attracted me to this world was its understanding that the “outside” world should play by the rules of the Victorian Era. People must behave as if all things were possible and that the coming generations of industrialized “progress and greed” were a mistake. This is the world I attempted to create in Steam City Pirates. These pirate inventors are not evil because they want to keep America frozen in the “Steam Power Era.” They are perhaps “acting out” in evil ways, as O’Malley discovers right away, but he is pulled down into their world to be seduced by their leader, a steam-powered “computer man” from way in the future (2344 to be exact), who says his main goal is to prevent a future nuclear holocaust, which, he says, has already occurred! The only hope of Earth is to keep the technology in the steam age and to prevent any technology which remotely resembles computers to develop. Is there an absurd irony here? Oh, yes! Master Inquisitor Abraham Toky Manette, our Steam City Pirates leader, is a human computer—you did hear that—and O’Malley heard that.