Steampunk Canada

Paul Marlowe: Gentleman Novelist

My first YA steampunk novel, Sporeville, was about a lad from Kingston moving to a small Nova Scotia town that is being taken over by a Civil War criminal (using somnambulism-inducing mushroom spores). He and Paisley DeLoup, a lass of curiously lupine ancestry, take on the local tyrant.

REVIEW: "Fans of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy will certainly enjoy this novel. In fact, readers who like gothic literature, science fiction, fantasy, and history will all relish this book... I cannot wait for the sequel...It was absolutely the best, most delicious thing I have read in some time." - Resource Links Magazine

The latest, Knights of the Sea, carries the story on to the following year (1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee), when Alexander Graham Bell in Cape Breton is hosting a gathering of parties interested in developing submarine technology, though possibly not for the benevolent purpose they claim...

REVIEW: "The drily hilarious tone continues throughout the novel...reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s lighter works..." -Fantasyliterature.com

Ether Frolics was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best Canadian debut short-story collection.

My short story collection Ether Frolics came out in July 2012. It contains nine tales from the Etheric Explorers Club: the visions of a Russian painter in fin-de-siècle Paris... a terrible weapon that almost no-one has survived... a confession within a confession... a crime from antiquity resurfacing beneath the Thames... a desperate search for a lost sister... a contemporary horror entwined with an ancient manuscript... an experiment gone wrong... a lost world which should have remained lost... and a night of dining, death, and romance.

REVIEWS:  "This collection of nine short stories is a true jaw-dropping jewel of a book..."-Aly Grauer, Doctor Fantastique's Show of Wonders

"...what Marlowe has written is a creation well worth the read, revealing a major Canadian talent." - Chadwick Ginther, The Winnipeg Review

There's a radio play, a Victorian-era ghost story called The Resident Member, on my website that you can download. It's set in the Etheric Explorers Club, which also makes an appearance in a short story in Something Wicked magazine issue №13, a story cryptically entitled "Cotton Avicenna B iv". There's an interview at this link that accompanies the story.

More about my books & stories at www.PaulMarlowe.com