Deadline: July 31st, 2012
Payment: .03 a word and 3 complementary contributor copies

The age of steam meets the age of Cthulhu, in a past where technology unbound warps Victorian Britain and the world at large into a dark Steampunk reality.

In Steampunk Cthulhu (yes that’s only a working title) we are looking for stories set in a world where futuristic visions of technology, advanced machines undreamt of in the Victorian era, are powered by steam, or sometimes the inscrutable minds of dark, god-like beings.

Undreamt of yes, and maybe a nightmare here, think of what would happen if HG Wells had sent his Time Machine to a past when the Elder Things ruled the globe, or Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo was an evil acolyte of Cthulhu? Of course we don’t want you to limit yourselves to fictional characters of the genre, but you can use these, historical personages and your own protagonists and cultists of Cthulhu.

Space travel, journeys to the center of the earth and 20,000 leagues under R’lyeh, we want to see Victorian globetrotting adventurers and wild technologies in the Wild West. Think zeppelins crossed with tomes of forbidden knowledge, steam powered automatons battling indescribable beasts from beyond time and space, fanciful high-tech gadgets and blood drenched arcane artifacts, the wonders of tomorrow meting the horror of inescapable doom, and if you can put your own unique spin on both the steampunk setting and the Cthulhu Mythos, so much the better.

Authors should be well versed in both the stempunk setting and Lovecraftian horror as a good blending of both is what we’re after. If you’re looking for info on steampunk, check the Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk) for a brief overview and a small selection of authors and books to get you started. If you need to bone up on your Cthulhu Mythos you can read all of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories online for free here: http://www.hplovecraft.com/ or just look around your local bookstore – if you’re still luckily enough to have a local bookstore – as the Cthulhu Mythos has never been hotter.

This book will be published by Chaosium. Authors will receive .03 a word and 3 complementary contributor copies, with the option to purchase more at a 50% discount.

8000k word limit. Contact the editors if your work is both longer and outstanding. The deadline for submissions is July 31. Please send submissions as .rtf files to both editors below. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Brian M. Sammons [email protected]
Glynn Owen Barrass [email protected]

[via: Stranger Aeons.]