In a Bright Glass

by Virginia Marybury

Overview

In an alternative nineteenth century, of a frozen and depopulated northern Europe, an Anglo-Welsh boy is crippled by a steam tractor, and goes into indenture in Italy to earn a mechanical leg.

Seven years later, Llewellyn-Gareth sells himself into a second apprenticeship, to learn the secrets of light-focussing lenses and bring an inheritance of Mediterranean warmth home to wintry England and Wales.

When his master's rat-like son tries to buy his way out of disgrace by offering the lenses to a powerful patron, Llewellyn-Gareth faces losing everything he has worked for: here in Italy, he is nothing but a crippled, infidel Protestant.

Yet when an offer of help does come, it seems the cost may be his inheritance at home, too.

(NB - This work has not been tagged "adult" because there is little or no sex contained within. However, it does contain a bit of effing, and some decidedly secular ideas. Also a bit of sectarian argy-bargy.)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940153006680
Publisher:	Virginia Marybury
Publication date:	09/29/2016
Series:	Steampunk from the Little Ice Age
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	250 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Virginia Marybury read Russian and French at university, and wrote her M.A. dissertation on late Soviet corruption, so you may imagine the sort of people she writes about!

In a Bright Glass is the first of an alternative history series, a history of climate cooling, which came out of a short sequence about the Little Ice Age in Andrew Marr's History of the World series for the BBC. Following chance encounters with articles (in both the Guardian and Telegraph) about Rjukan, Norway, where a mountainside heliostat now brings sunlight into a gloomy valley in winter; suddenly there was a picturesquely wintry setting for smuggling and greed for technology.

The Electric Gingerbread House, an "Easter Egg" short story in this ice-age steampunk world, appeared in Steampunk Fairytales, Volume II, in October 2016.

Another novella, interlocking with In a Bright Glass, is in progress, and expected in 2018.

Separately, in another universe, "Iron Curtain," was published in the Tau Press anthology The Faraday Cage, in May 2016.