#coalpunk

A city, choked in smog. Stinking rain pours from the sky, pooling in gutters with swirling patterns of ash. A howling beast of soot-blackened steel crawls into the rail yard, hissing angrily as its weight settles into the tracks. From its belly crawl creatures caked in grime, only discernible as human by their eyes blinking through the clouds of smoke belching from the roaring foundries. Children running through the streets, faces smeared with grime, late to their shift at the foundry. It makes me sick. All of it.

The aristocrats, they pretend not to see us. Their gleaming airships soar above the blankets of soot and ash, brass and fine polished wood, pure white steam gushing through pipes and bursting cheerily from whistles. But from whence does that steam come, I ask?

They toss scraps into the machine that fuels them without a care in the world. Meat, ground into paste. Muscle hardened to the point of snapping. Fingers worked to the bone and beyond.

Monkey Man by M. N. Snow ~a #ScienceFiction novel~ #BookReview by Michael @michael_morar

Cyberpunk? This ain’t it. Steam-punk? Wrong again. This is New-Burn® Coal-punk, set in the present of a slightly altered, not too distant future. Belay that, call it future-punk and be done with it. Global warming fixes have overshot their mark and boomeranged the world into global cooling. With global cooling came the flooding of the lower Great Lakes. Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland,…

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