The author of a new book titled Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel will be the Artist Guest of Honor at the first annual Steamcon today in SeaTac.

Boilerplate originated as a website (you can still find it here) where Guinan would insert a steam-powered robot (named Boilerplate) into photographs from the turn of the century. He's kind of Zelig with the mouth of a trombone, befriending Teddy Roosevelt and other major figures of the day and getting into all kinds of time-specific adventures (exploring Alaska, meeting L. Frank Baum, etc.). Here's the book trailer:

Now, of course, the question with any website-turned-book is: Does it justify the transition to print? And with Boilerplate, the answer is not as easy to discern as some other blog-books. Boilerplate is a lot of fun to flip through; the Photoshop work is really exceptional, and it's fun to admire the meticulously period-accurate illustrations. It's a clever little sci-fi fantasy.

But the narrative of the book, written to mimic a Time-Life sort of historical encyclopedia, with sidebars and tiny chunks of text with titles like "Voyage to the Bottom of the World," "Up the Golden Staircase," and "Around the World by Battleship", doesn't quite work. Or maybe it does work...too well...at mimicking the text of those sorts of picture books about history. In short: The writing is incredibly boring. Like, super-boring. It perhaps would have been more enjoyable to just publish Boilerplate as an art book, rather than working this hard to create an artifact from an alternate universe where robots run free. Unless you are especially interested in turn-of-the-century 1900s America's role in the world, you'll find yourself glossing over the text to instead marvel at the fine work Guinan did in working Boilerplate into, say, a woman's suffrage march. Visually, it's quite a charming book, but the narrative is way too dry to be enjoyable.