Five Dieselpunk Stories In A Very Short Time
The ruptured piston belched in Applejack’s face as she riveted a steel band around it. She hitched the Tin Mare to the artillery. If yet another pipe, piston or valve burst, the Second Tank Brigade would have no fire support on their retreat.
She flicked the ignition. Life entered the Tin Mare’s glassy lenses as its engines roared, before a fatal pop echoed and a rusted connecting arm burst out as scrap.
“Bucket of fucks,” Applejack swore. If the fort hadn’t been shelled to pieces, she could find a replacement in the stock room. She only needed a piece of metal long enough to reconnect the leg. She didn’t need it to be perfect, only to work. Any piece of metal would do.
Perhaps, even, the steel frames in her corset.
Well, there was no one left to be modest around. She dressed down and stripped apart the fabric, riveting the corset’s four waist rods into a single rigid piece.
No time for prayers. She trusted her work. Applejack kicked the Tin Mare and its engine roared, dragging the twelve-incher to the fortress’ vista. Trailing behind it, Applejack rolled an 80-pound shell. The first of many, she hoped.
Rarity covered her bruises with her sleeve as pampered, parfum-scented wives filed into her tea room and the auto-butler sputtered. She had skipped maintenance hoping an accident would end their perfunctory gathering early. Fortunately, the day’s conversation was aimed only at the Furan occupation of Porapov.
Some vented worries. New draft papers called on all men, regardless of financials. The Senate needed bodies, not funds. Of course, bribes still worked, and half the assembly of women believed their husbands’ pockets deep enough to void their papers. They counted Rarity among their lucky cohort.
When they asked who Micah had spoken to about this draft, Rarity laughed. “It’s so hard to keep track of his associates.” When they inquired how much a doctor’s letter cost, she feigned ignorance of the details. “He earns, I spend,” she said in jest.
They pressed, but when the auto-butler stalled Rarity excused herself to fetch the oil, knowing it would do little and repairs would take all day. Elise would reschedule, but with the war, their calendars were uncertain. And all those innocent wives whose husbands never beat them would leave without knowing why Rarity had burned Micah’s bribes and appeal letters.
Fluttershy’s shaky hands clutched the suture needle. Blood from the wound made it difficult to keep a grip.
“Done!” she shouted a minute later, and the soldier was carried off. She had no sooner looked back at her table than another soldier had lain down on it. She called for more blood plasma, and poppy seed extract, dosing his transfusion as she sutured his leg.
One after the other, she and the other nurses fought against time as the soldiers fought the Furans, stabilizing the wounded just enough to move them down the trenches to the rear line. But even a thousand nurses couldn’t have made a dent in the growing wounded lines.
But she didn’t stop to think about the numbers, she didn’t let it urge her. There was only time to think about one more life. Just one more.
All the haste in the world was useless if she was too erratic. Slow was smooth, and smooth was fast. The next soldier placed on her table had no legs—direct hit by Furan artillery. Fluttershy breathed deep under her mask, picked up her needle, and started again.
Twilight had gotten disgracefully drunk at a party of scientists and engineers. She didn’t drink much because she was petite, but she wasn’t yet drunk enough for the General’s taste.
She needed his attention. Her new bomber would outclass Yukovan defenses and save countless Furan lives and bring a quick end to the war—perhaps even before her brother’s regiment was redeployed.
He was very drunk himself, celebrating the victory at Porapov. Twilight took the seat beside the General and loosened another button from her shirt.
“It was hardly decisive. Casualties were equal.”
“Eh? And you are?”
One engineer did the favor of introducing her. “Dr Twilight Sparkle,” he said.
The general eyed her chest. “Doctor?”
“Of explosives engineering,” she extended a hand in greeting. “I wanted to discuss the war. Maybe over a drink?” She leaned in, certain she had drunk enough for the General to smell the whiskey from where he sat.
“It would be a terribly long and dreary discussion, I’m afraid,” he said.
Twilight pushed her hair back. “We have the night. I’m sure we can find ways to keep it interesting.”
The general smiled. “I’m of an open mind. And any contribution to the war is welcomed.”
Twilight took the fifty-something year-old’s hand, walking groggily as she recited her pitch in her head, hoping she would remember it by morning.
Getting shot wasn’t so bad.
The idea of being out of the fight hurt Rainbow Dash the most. But the girls helped. Furan girls were something else. The nurses who changed her bandages and gave her antibiotics had soft, pale hands and ruddy cheeks. They were polite and quiet, and blushed at everything Rainbow Dash said.
Every day an officer came to her with coffee or steak or imported Astean cigars, and always with questions. But women did not even vote in Fura, so the officers never imagined Rainbow had any information they could use.
When they announced a ceasefire, Rainbow made sure to collect the names and addresses of every nurse she met. No treaty was signed, but it felt like a new era. She would find one of those pretty girls and tell them about life in Yukova.
In five years, they would marry and buy a condominium in the city with her veteran’s pension. In ten, she’ll have saved up enough to buy a house, and they’d settle somewhere quiet in Herrulrichsburg. Maybe by then a treaty will have been signed.
Rainbow Dash wanted to come back as a tourist.
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- Mockingbirb · 1.3k words · 35 3 · 787 views
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Intriguing! Dieselpunk is so underappreciated.
Wow, that was awesome. 200 words is so little, and yet in each sub-chapter you've put an entire story fit to its subject. Well done!
(I say steampunk or any other genre can be written as 'less optimistic,' but maybe that's mostly me.)
That said, this is a good micro-anthology and I recommend it (especially the last four of the five)!
👍
11640767
Steampunk can be, but the broader trend of that subgenre is the romanticization of antique technology and new discoveries. The Victorian England aesthetic is also prominent in many steampunk worlds, distinct from the influence of art deco and brutalist architecture that emerged in the 1900s to 1950s.
Lovely little collection of interrelated stories for five of the six.
I imagine that Pinkie is the cause of the war, playing both sides.
11640891
For the sake of my sanity, I did not, in fact, try to write 6 short stories in 1000 words. That said, swapping Twilight out with Pinkie was one of my ideas. The gist of the story would have been Pinkie leaving her family's quarry, which supplies raw material for the Yukovan military, to serve meals at a volunteer shelter for those displaced from the war. She misses home and questions the value of her work, but feels rewarded for every full belly she cooks for.
So, yeah, the idea existed for a brief moment.
11640953
I thought so; it would've been too much for some, so makes sense.
Maybe the sequel is Pinkie exclusive and she is the mastermind behind their issues.
11640812
The thing about steampunk is that everyone forgets how dirty Victorian London was: Asthma was common, wide swathes of the city regularly acquired a layer of soot, and if you left your laundry hanging to dry too long, it would become impregnated with smoke and would never be clean again. By the end of the Victorian era in 1901, the UK was burning just shy of 160,000,000 tonnes of coal per year. More than half a million people worked in coal mines, never mind the millions more who worked their fingers off (sometimes literally) in the factories that made certain the sun never set on the British Empire. When the "steampunk aesthetic" is showcased, it's always the aesthetic of the gentry or even the nobility.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, though; it's very easy to romanticize steampunk because of the examples we regularly see of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and styles. The same thing happens with atompunk, particularly with the predominant architype of how it looks being Levittown; clean and orderly, with electricity being so cheap and available that it's a wonder why there would ever be problems at all (of course, it's also easy to overlook the backdrop of the Cold War, internal strife over civil rights, and the societal rot brought on by a sudden abundance of free time and nowhere to direct it towards). Dieselpunk, by contrast, is bookended by mass industrialization at the front and the Second World War at the back. Technology advances faster than people can keep up, but it's the brutal, dehumanizing technology of efficiency and war; the Tin Mare is the perfect example. All it needs is a little fuel and some lubrication, and it'll haul artillery pieces up and down the field without complaint, day or night, never slowing, never stopping. But at some point, the driver needs to stop, and the Tin Mare won't wait for them; how long before someone realizes the best partner for the Tin Mare is the Tin Man?
I think I stumbled into a pattern; steampunk highlights the wonders of technology and breeds hope for the future, until the industrialization of the soul falls down into the cynical mania of dieselpunk; cynical mania that drifts skyward with the splitting of the atom and ushers in the bright hope of atompunk; bright hope that becomes digitized and dims to the nihilistic paranoia of cyberpunk.
11641011
Have you heard of solarpunk?
DieselPunk
isn't that what Mad Max is ?
edit: also
all different tip of Punk
11641011
do you mind sharing this here !
all different tip of Punk
11642950
Mad Max has elements, but is generally not considered dieselpunk.
11641011
Atom punk as a genre deals with Cold War Era issues and the threat of nuclear annihilation. I think the appearance of cleanliness and order, and the advent of funky machines, is often used to highlight hubris, and not as the thematic centerpiece.
While dieslepunk is linked to the troubles of wartime, atompunk grapples with post-war peace, nuclear and national paranoia (ie, Red Scares) and issues of government and society rather than military and victory. But not always, these are only generalizations.
11641011
Then there's post-cyberpunk
11640434
Agreed
any setting where an artillerymare can repair her piece with pieces from her corset is a great one to me
that is a good doctorate to have!
yes Rainbow Dash is very cool
Rainbow Dash W, and a high note to end it on. thank you for writing!
The fact that someone getting heavy ordinance to the front is wearing a corset says volumes about this society. (I also missed that this is a humanized AU at first, which led to some very strange mental images.)
This certainly does give a good overview of the genre. My issue is that it has at best a thin veneer of pony. Switch out five names and you could publish it elsewhere without Hasbro raising an eyebrow, especially when Eileen, Micah, and all the place names are already good to go in that respect. You did a good job with the fiction. It’s the “fan” where it’s a bit wanting.
Pinkie is there too, in all stories. She is the impermanent chaos of life personified
Love the darker undertones here