So here’s the big announcement: last week, I signed a contract with University of Alabama Press to publish my non-fiction book on 19th-century fiction and technology.  It will likely be out in 2018.

Its tentative title is Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America

It will be part of Alabama’s American Literary Realism and Naturalism series. True, some of the proto-science fiction novels I cover are neither realist or naturalist, but they dramatically influenced writers such as Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Pauline Hopkins.  The series has published some excellent work on Twain and C19 literature, including

• Hal Bush’s Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of his Age
• Philip Ashley Fanning’s Orion Clemens and Mark Twain: Brothers, Partners, Strangers
• Eric Carl Link’s A Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century
• Jeffrey Alan Melton’s Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism

I’m really honored to have my book selected by a press that’s done this kind of fine work.

The audience for my book includes C19 Americanists, science fiction scholars, and Mark Twain aficionados.  Ideally, anyone interested in American fiction about fantastic technology and travel—literary scholars, SF fans, and beyond—should be able to enjoy the book.