Thomas L. Black (b. 1870), author of the acclaimed steampunk saga The Velvet Conspiracy, is one of the most enigmatic literary figures residing in the fog-drenched sprawl of Imperial San Francisco. At fifty-five years of age, Black has come to embody the contradictions of his city: wounded yet radiant, decadent yet industrious, a living palimpsest of survival after cataclysm.
Born to Irish immigrants who kept a small brass-fitting workshop near the collapsed Mission District, Black grew up amid soot, fractured timbers, and the ever-present hum of airships circling the Bay. The 1906 quake left the city forever half-ruined, never fully rebuilt after the Axis victory carved the Pacific Coast into protectorates. Yet San Francisco, with its status as a semi-autonomous pleasure-port of the Japanese Empire of the Sun, developed a peculiar identity: a haven of smoky cabarets, mechanical curiosities, and philosophical salons where English, Japanese, and German mingle freely with the clang of gears and steam whistles.
Career
Black began his career as a pamphleteer and dockside journalist, chronicling the black-market circuits of contraband automata and the excesses of Imperial officers on leave. His sharp wit and refusal to bow entirely to censorship drew both suspicion and admiration. By the 1920s he had turned to fiction, creating an intricate alternate history within his novels—though critics note that his imagined conspiracies too closely mirror the city’s shadow politics of occupation, resistance, and decadent survival.
The Velvet Conspiracy, his most celebrated work, threads together espionage, forbidden romance, and mechanical intrigue set in a San Francisco not unlike the one he inhabits: a place where pleasure palaces are powered by subterranean furnaces, and whispers of rebellion are carried along pneumatic tubes. The heroine—rumored to be inspired by one of Black’s former companions, a cabaret chanteuse turned informant—moves between smoky opium lounges and Imperial ballrooms, much as Black himself does.
In The Velvet Conspiracy, Thomas L. Black shifts his gaze from fog-wrapped San Francisco to the soot-stained boulevards of Berlin, where opulent cabarets and shadowed ministries conceal a labyrinth of espionage. At the heart of it all is Isla, a flame-haired spy whose allure is matched only by her cunning. Black renders Berlin not as a city of stone, but as a living machine—steam valves hissing behind velvet curtains, pneumatic secrets traded between lovers, and the ever-present hum of surveillance. With prose as intoxicating as absinthe and as sharp as a stiletto heel, The Velvet Conspiracy secures Black’s place as the master chronicler of decadent intrigue in an age where every whispered promise may conceal a plot.
Now a fixture of North Beach cafés and Nob Hill salons, Black is often seen in his trademark velvet waistcoat, silver-topped cane, and smoked lenses that guard against both fog and scrutiny. He lives alone in a crumbling townhouse overlooking the harbor, its parlor filled with cluttered brass instruments, unfinished manuscripts, and an experimental automaton that he insists serves only as a “listening ear.” Known to be desired by many of his female readers but remains single, supposedly as his heart belongs to just one woman, said to be of fiery both of hair and of heart.
Despite constant surveillance by Imperial censors, Thomas L. Black remains San Francisco’s most celebrated—and subversive—voice, chronicling a time where the ruins of yesterday fuel the decadent imaginings of tomorrow.
Read the whole story in the novel “The Velvet Conspiracy” available now on Amazon.
