It’s my great pleasure to feature the first guest writer on this blog: Sarah Zama. I met Sarah through dieselpunk circles, as she is an author with a passion for the fast-growing culture. I wrote a piece a while back on what dieselpunk means to me, but Sarah will expound on that topic, as well as provide an in-depth study of film noir, another major influence on both her upcoming novel and my own Troubleshooter series.

Without further ado: Shadow Against Light: the Soul of Noir by Sarah Zama.

It is no secret: Dieselpunk is such a young genre that many readers don’t even know what it is (surely my Word spellchecker doesn’t). There is a complex explanation to what Dieselpunk is, but today I’ll go for the simpler one. It’s a speculative genre, with very definite aesthetic characteristics inspired by the ‘diesel’ era, which stretches from the late…