Reviews
The VanderMeers have assembled a fine anthology. It surveys the steampunk world through multiple approaches, genres, and voices. Short stories work through alternate history, American tall tale, mad science satire, Victorian labor politics, detective story, and New Weird, ranging tonally from whimsy to melancholy and horror. Let me note a few standouts. Mary Gentle's "A Sun in the Attic" offers splendidly economical world-building without sacrificing characterization and story arc. It sets up an intriguingly alternative gender politics, then upends its semi-medieval setting with a lunge towards technology critique... all in under 19 pages. James Blaylock's "Lord Kelvin's Machine" takes me back to the 1980s, when I first encountered this writer and his friends, Tim Powers and KW Jeter, the latter who coined the steampunk term. "Machine" has all the signature Blaylock traits: gentle whimsy, a love of food, improbable science, and an ambling plot. Rachel Pollock's "Reflected Light" casts itself as a historical document, transcribed wax cylinder recordings of a worker talking about her friend and activists. It's fragmentary, allusive, and nearly heartbreaking. Joe Lansdale's "Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider" is a crazed remix of The Time Machine, 19th-century steam robot stories, the American tall tale tradition, flying saucers, Dracula, and a looping space shuttle plot. It's quite disgusting and funny. Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters" offers a welcome steampunk turn to labor, using golems to get at a left politics all too often absent from this subgenre. Paul Di Filippo's "Victoria" is a slightly insane riff on the steampunk monarch, working in newts (a la Capek), sex obsessions, and mad science. Stepan Chapman's "Minutes of the Last Meeting" takes us away from the English-speaking world, imagining an alternative Russian empire. Michael Chabon’s “The Martian Agent” is a full-tilt adventure, a boy's own ripping yarn set in an alternate, British dominated (former) America. Huge sentences string together leaps of time and description, always thundering forward. Naturally it leaves us wanting more. So why steampunk? This collection gives us some clues. First, it's a playground for alternate history. Like Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine, these stories often assume a nineteenth-century past tweaked or otherwise strongly marked by scientific and technological advances. Like alternative WWIIs, steampunk provides the prebuilt concept, which authors can dive into. Second, the Victorian period is at a fine remove. It's far away enough that mocking or using it risks offending nobody, but close enough that the cultural resonances still work. Third, building on the second, Steampunk's authors can poke at contemporary issues through that not-so-distant mirror. Unlike other steampunk works, this collection doesn't obsess over style. We get enough description of goggles, brass, long dresses, dirigibles, etc. to make the point, but without taking over tales. The anthology complements steampunk clothes makers. Also different is the way these authors don't seem to be fleeing from their present. Their imagined alt.pasts are not refuges from the past couple of decades. I haven't mentioned the collection's nonfiction essays, which are generally serviceable. (Kudos for celebrating Luther Awkwright) One useful thought comes from Jess Nevin's introduction: The Edisonade is American. Steampunk, though written by writers of many nationalities, is English. (9) I'm enjoying rethinking steampunk through that lens. Overall, a solid collection for the topic, well worth reading for anyone with a steampunk interest.
