On March 26, 2019, Utah-based publisher Immortal Works released its third volume of Mormon steampunk short fiction: Press Forward, Saints. Editor D.J. (Dave) Butler, who won the 2018 AML Novel Award last week for Witchy Winter, discusses the origin of the series in his introduction to this volume.
In 2011, I wrote a novel called City of the Saints. To my knowledge, it remains the Mormon Steampunk novel, in that the novel is thoroughly Mormon, an adventure tale set in the Kingdom of Deseret, and thoroughly Steampunk, full of mad scientists, exaggerated modes of travels, scientific dead ends revivified, and a society in upheaval.
The experience of writing City of the Saints convinced me that Mormons and Steampunk have an enormous amount of common ground, and since that time, I have been planning to publish a Mormon Steampunk anthology to explore that proposition. Now, thanks to Immortal Works (Jason King and Holli Anderson), and my fellow editors James Wymore and John M. Olsen, my mad scheme of revenge. . . er, my plan. . . comes to fruition.
In putting out a call for submissions, we said that stories should meet essentially only two criteria: they should be in some sense Steampunk, and in some sense Mormon. The idea was to cast a wide net, in (almost) all possible senses, and see what came up. As we had hoped, we have pulled in a very colorful school of fish. The stories range from hard-to-tell-from-science-fiction at one end to hard-to-tell-from-fantasy at the other. There are stories of invention, industry, social change, adventure, revenge, political revolt, travel, coming of age, treasure-seeking, spiritual crisis, and genealogy. There are stories set in the ancient past and stories set in the far future. There are puns. There are heroes who are outlaws and heroes who are lawmen and at least one hero who is an assistant midwife.
In our writers, too, there is great variety. There are veterans here, and you may recognize some of their names. There are also writers who have published academic and professional works, but whose very first published fiction is in this volume. We have writers here who have never published anything before. We have writers young and old, female and male, Gentile and Mormon.
I love it. I think you will, too.
D.J. Butler
Press Forward, Saints is currently available in ebook only, but the paperback release is anticipated imminently. Submissions are open until April 23, 2019, for a fourth volume in the series, as described here. Submissions should be sent to hollia@immortal-works.com.