Blaylockmania

   So I like swords & sorcery a whole bunch.  I'm always on the hunt for new writers to discover and old paperbacks to build up my collection.  These days it seems the vast bulk of what I read is S&S.   Not that that's a bad thing.
   There are, however, authors I will drop everything else for, Tim Powers and Glen Cook for example.  James Blaylock is the other.
   The other day Black Gate posted about an e-book sale by Subterranean Press.  Checking it out I discovered Blaylock's seminal steampunk stories about "Langdon St. Ives" were there for $2.99.  So I bought them.  All of them; "The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives", "The Ebb Tide" and "The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs".  I always liked steampunk in the past.  It seemed written as much from a love of Dickens and Stevenson as from as of  clockwork technology and secret societies.  The little bit of contemporary steampunk I've encountered reads like mimeographs of the progenitive works of Jeter, Powers and Blaylock.  This stuff's the real deal (and funny as all get out).
   The next day I Paul DiFillipo reviewed a brand new (sort of) Blaylock YA novel called "Zeuglodon".  I remembered reading about that on Jonathan Strahan's site ages ago and how it wasn't finding a buyer and being depressed at the very thought of that.  It's a sequel to one of his earliest books, "The Digging Leviathan" and the first thing I ever read by him.  Well, eight years later it's in my hands and I'm a quarter way into it and it's great.  According to Strahan there's already a sequel in existence.   And looking at Amazon there's a full Langdon St. Ives novel at year's end.  Woo, boy!