Dale Mathis creates clockpunk furniture and clocks, made of complex arrays of exposed gears.  Here’s the blurb from his site, which is pretty clockpunk in and of itself:

Surrealism meets mechanicalism. A merging of old and new, industrial and civilized.

This is the world of Dale Mathis.

It is a world where metal, glass, construction bolts and pistons are all simply artistic tools. Where working gears bring movement to masterpieces.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Fringe Lore does lovely clockpunk (she says steampunk, but we know better) jewelry built from antique clock parts.

Each piece is handmade and one-of-a-kind. Get them quick before they’re gone!

Link, via BoingBoing.

Clockwork girl is an adorable graphic novel by Sean O’Reilly, Kevin Hanna and Grant Bond. It’s up as a free download at Wowio, along with hundreds of other great books and comics (for US residents only, unfortunately).

A nameless robot girl has recently been given the gift of life from her creator, while exploring the wonders of an ordinary world she meets an amazing mutant boy and they share a friendship that must overcome their warring families…

Link to issues 1, 2, 3.

 Jack Dann, author of clockpunk novel The Memory Cathedral, has his terrific novella Da Vinci Rising up for free on the Eidolon website.  The story, which describes Leonardo’s invention and development of flying machines, is a prime example of alternate history clockpunk.

One could almost imagine that the great bird was already in flight, hovering in the gauzy morning light like a great, impossible hummingbird. It was a chimerical thing that hung from the high attic ceiling of Leonardo’s workshop in Verrocchio’s bottega: a tapered plank fitted with hand operated cranks, hoops of well-tanned leather, pedals, windlass, oars, and saddle. Great ribbed batlike wings made of cane and fustian and starched taffeta were connected to the broader end of the plank. They were dyed bright red and gold, the colors of the Medici, for it was the Medici who would attend its first flight.

Link

Finisterra, a great story by David Moles, skillfully weaves together space travel, flying balloons, automatons and alternate history. It’s nominated for a Hugo in the Best Novelette category.

When Bianca was a girl, the mosque of Punta Aguila was the most prominent feature in the view from her fourth-floor window, a sixteenth-century structure of tensegrity cables and soaring catenary curves, its spreading white wings vaguely—but only vaguely—recalling the bird that gave the city its name. The automation that controlled the tension of the cables and adjusted the mosque’s wings to match the shifting winds was hidden within the cables themselves, and was very old. Once, after the hurricane in the time of Bianca’s grandfather, it had needed adjusting, and the old men of the ayuntamiento had been forced to send for extrañado technicians, at an expense so great that the jizyah of Bianca’s time was still paying for it.

But Bianca rarely thought of that. Instead she would spend long hours surreptitiously sketching those white wings, calculating the weight of the structure and the tension of the cables, wondering what it would take to make the steel bird fly.

Bianca’s father could probably have told her, but she never dared to ask. Raúl Nazario de Arenas was an aeronautical engineer, like the seven generations before him, and flight was the Nazarios’ fortune; fully a third of the aircraft that plied the skies over the Rio Pícaro were types designed by Raúl or his father or his wife’s father, on contract to the great moro trading and manufacturing families that were Punta Aguila’s truly wealthy.

Because he worked for other men, and because he was a Christian, Raúl Nazario would never be as wealthy as the men who employed him, but his profession was an ancient and honorable one, providing his family with a more than comfortable living. If Raúl Nazario de Arenas thought of the mosque at all, it was only to mutter about the jizyah from time to time—but never loudly, because the Nazarios, like the other Christians of Punta Aguila, however valued, however ancient their roots, knew that they lived there only on sufferance.

Link

Clockwork Creature is a lovely, creepy story by Kyle Strahm.  The 50-page-long first chapter (a free-standing story in its own right) was serialized last year and is online for free.  The art is evocative and the story imaginative, dark and whimsical; definitely worth a read.

Link

Welcome to The Mainspring. If sites had hulls, I’d break a bottle of champagne over this one’s (but as they don’t, I’ll just have to be content with this post).

Watch this space - there’s some cool stuff coming up.