WELCOME TO THE RETRO FUTURE
When I started the Dieselpunks website years ago, the word “dieselpunk” was still a curiosity. Sure, it was loaded with familiar tropes like Pulp Adventure, Film Noir, and Weird Horror, but the artists were mashing these concepts together with something different, something a little more contemporary. At that time, the steampunks were just starting to climb their way from the underground and gain traction as a legitimate style, but there was something to be said about this little-known corner of dieselpunk, or "low-brow pop surrealism" as it was known back then.
Like the French film scholars who codified Film Noir as a genre years after the movies were in the theaters, I could see a similar thread binding the dieselpunk work together. Whether they realized it or not, these artists were creating work with eerily similar concepts. They were creating a future fueled by the spirit of the Jazz Age. In their world, they wanted to see if old Sam Spade could work in an era of smartphones, or if Dillinger could make a clean getaway in a cherry red hovercar. These artists were writing cyberpunk stories from inside The Great Gatsby’s mansion, and they invited everyone to the party.
What was missing at the time was a sense of community. We had fashion designers, musicians, architects, directors, sculptors, mechanics, authors… almost every artistic discipline was represented, but there was no single place they called home. That’s when the Dieselpunks website started. It was created as a research site for these budding world-builders, someplace to find the weird and wacky (but mostly true) things that happened between World War I and World War II. In short time though, the community turned our quiet library into a raucous speakeasy and it’s been growing ever since.
What you’re about to read is a collection of short stories assembled from the best authors the dieselpunk community has to offer. Each tale will showcase a direction dieselpunk can take while still remaining true to the spirit of the genre.
I hope you enjoy these tales. I’ll be seeing you again at last call.
-Tome
Tome Wilson is the owner/operator of Dieselpunks (www.dieselpunks.org), the web’s largest and most active dieselpunk community.
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Dieselpunk ePulp Showcase (Anthology)
ActionDieselpunk Epulp Showcase Includes stories by John Picha, Grant Gardiner, Bard Constantine, Jack Philpott. This action-packed ePulp Anthology unleashes four new noir tales inspired by the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Blazing brawls and gr...
