Coming soon from Microcosm Publishing, CATS: Cycling Across Time and Space, now on Kickstarter and already 2/5 funded on day one!
I have a story in this book, set in my Fog and Brass universe; the main (human) character is a minor character in the first book of the F&B duology. Audrey is a seamstress and a suffragette in the steampunky/gaslamp fantasy city of Camlon; she has a cat named Grimalkin, and Grimalkin really wants to go on a bicycle ride….
The various female-dominated political movements of the late nineteenth century (the Fog and Brass world is an alternate history version of the 1890s) were actually intertwined with the politics of bicycling. Women in possession of improved prospects for mobility could imagine taking part in public life, after all, and that was dangerous to the status quo. The clothes suitable to riding a bicycle – split skirts and the like – loop into the rational dress movement and other sorts of clothing modernization and reform. The moral conformist sorts got all wound up about it – scandalized by the idea that a woman might have a machine between her legs and all, putting out articles about the terrible risks of “bicycle face” ruining a woman’s beauty.
None of this bothers Audrey at all, with her bicycle commute and her activist friends.
And of course Grimalkin does not actually care about politics. Grimalkin has other needs…
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