An introduction to the tribute, its object, and my feelings and hopes as I undertake the project.
iron seas
II
Meljean Brooks' Iron Seas series is the subject of this fansite, and accordingly a little space needs to be carved out to explain roughly what that is. Note, of course, that much more will be said on this count; but though I want to present the novels as I experience them, requiring the meta-contextualization I attempt in this section, you do need to know something about the damn books first.
Both steampunk and romance are genres with associated problems. Part of why I love this series so is I take this author to have written with an ear to addressing certain concerns; I indicate them here.
Beyond problems, any genre involves tropes, where a trope is simply a recognizable feature of some stories. (If that's news to you, acquaint yourself with TV-Tropes. Life changing!) That recognizability means that tropes can be addressed, inverted, employed with irony or brought into a story with a breath of life.
A brief description of steampunk and its cousin genre, cyberpunk. Note the shared -punk suffix. That means different things to different folks.
Perhaps the least relevant section of all, but nonetheless something on my mind. I've recently completed a reading and film group based around Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, where he describes seven films that he takes to definitively form a genre termed the Hollywood comedy of remarriage. I disagree deeply with Dr. Cavell on some counts, but there are certain particularly helpful things he brings to bear on what it it means to read ‘too much into’ something. Quotes ahoy!
who is this for?
VII
This is a site about sex, race, colonialism, and the nature of consent. It's made of spoilers. Both these books and my understanding of those features will be discussed explicitly ... but I would feel remiss without admitting that I am a white American woman with no experience of sexual trauma. I am going to try to put on my philosopher hat and make my claims confidently from here on out, but I want to acknowledge that these claims might be missing a lot of things I haven't experienced.
