Happy New Year Steampunk Writers

Happy New Year.
It’s 60 degrees outside and there is rain in the forecast.
Why would I be happy about rain? Well, it doesn’t get cold enough, well very often, to freeze the rain, and we haven’t have a good rain yet and the rainy season is half over.
Without serious amounts of rain we will be back in drought conditions soon.

What does this have to do about Steampunk writing? Well, I can not read a monthly science fiction magazine without running into an end-of-the-world ecological based story.

Where’s the Steampunk story about a London with an unusually warm winter. With the water level in the river Thames lower than it has every been. Ships are having trouble navigating the river. With shifting sand bars that have never given trouble and are now grounding ships. The water in the Thames is getting too salty to drink from seawater intrusion.

In this world there are newspaper articles about autonomous coal mining machines that work 24 hours a day and are causing the price of coal to drop. Inventors are churning out steam/coal powered labor saving device after device that are that are out striping the newly enlarged supply of coal.

There is unrest with many miners and others out of work, replaced by the autonomous machines.

A minor, little known inventor says using all the coal is causing the problems with the weather and the river level, and it’s the use of coal that causing the problem not the autonomous machines. But he gets in trouble when he says that they will have to stop using the autonomous machines. The inventor disappears. Did the mine owners do him in? Did foreign agents from countries that need the coal do him in? Did the makers of the autonomous machines do him in?

I got the makings of a good mystery here.

Stay strong, write on. Guess who done it.

Professor Hyram Voltage.