Scott Elliott
The Sparkpunk Series
Historical detective fiction at the edge of Victorian science — and the limits of what the living will do to one another.
What Is Sparkpunk?
You've heard of steampunk — the genre built on brass fittings, coal smoke, and industrial machinery dressed up as adventure. Sparkpunk is something different.
Sparkpunk is grounded in the real history of Victorian electrical science. Not steam engines, not clockwork fantasy — the actual, documented experiments of the 1860s and 1870s, when scientists were genuinely uncertain where electricity ended and life force began. Michael Faraday. The galvanic battery. Arc lamps that burned like captured lightning. Telegraph signals that seemed to carry something more than mere code.
In the Sparkpunk world, that uncertainty is not resolved. The science is real. The applications are not quite what history records. And there are people willing to do very dark things in the space between what is known and what is merely suspected.
The result is historical detective fiction that feels like noir — cynical, atmospheric, morally complex — with an undercurrent of the uncanny that never tips over into outright fantasy. The fog is real. The gas lamps flicker for real reasons. The impossible things that happen have explanations. You might not like them.
The World
The series is set in London — specifically, a London of November 1867, locked to that eight-day window with the precision of a good detective's casebook. The Second Reform Act has just passed. The Fenians are restless. The Manchester Martyrs are weeks from the gallows. The Thames still floods the wrong neighborhoods when the tide is wrong.
It is a city of extreme contrasts: the slums of Whitechapel and Shadwell pressed up against the gas-lit drawing rooms of the West End; river mud and horse manure and the metallic ozone tang of a laboratory that shouldn't exist; link-boys calling through the fog and telegraph signals moving faster than the human mind can follow.
The Sparkpunk series does not romanticize this world. It is cold and grimy and brutal in the way that cities are brutal. The characters who navigate it have scars — literal and otherwise — and the moral calculus of the stories reflects that.
The Books
Book One — Forthcoming
Mortal Current
Thomas Fenwick — disgraced ex-detective, private inquiry agent — investigates a string of bodies on the Thames, each bearing the same galvanic burn, each connected to a secret society experimenting at the frontier of what galvanic science should be able to do.
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Book Two — In Development
Untitled
The investigation continues beyond London's fog. Details to follow.