Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (eds.) - Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

Some Fortunate Future Day
Cassandra Clare

The Last Ride of the Glory Girls
Libba Bray

Clockwork Fagin
Cory Doctorow

Seven Days Beset by Demons
Shawn Cheng

Hand in Glove
Ysabeau S. Wilce

The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor
Delia Sherman

Gethsemane
Elizabeth Knox

The Summer People
Kelly Link

Peace in Our Time
Garth Nix

Nowhere Fast
Christopher Rowe

Finishing School
Kathleen Jennings

Steam Girl
Dylan Horrocks

Everything Amiable and Obliging
Holly Black

The Oracle Engine
M. T. Anderson

Orphans use the puppet of a dead man to take control of their lives. A girl confronts the Grand Technomancer, Most Mighty Mechanician and Highest of the High Artificier Adepts. Another girl, who might be from another universe, stuns everyone when she pulls out her handmade Reality Gun.

Welcome to fourteen steampunk visions of the past, the future, and the not quite today.

Depending on whom you believe, steampunk has been exploding into the world for the last hundred years (thank you, Monsieur Jules Verne) or maybe the last twenty-five (when the term was first used by K. W. Jeter in a letter to Locus magazine). We have had fabulous fun working with this bakers dozen of authors, investigating some of the more fascinating nooks and crannies of the genre.

Youll find the requisite number of gaslit alleys, intrepid urchins, steam-powered machines, and technologies that never were. Those are the basic accoutrements that no self-respecting steampunk anthology could be without, but as we assembled the book (filing down this story here, finding the right solder to put these two ideas together there), we discovered that steampunk has gone far beyond these markers. The two Philips (Reeve and Pullman, respectively) brought moving cities and armored polar bears. Alan Moore and Kevin ONeills The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen brought nineteenth-century London to a halt. Cherie Priest introduced zombies (Boneshaker), Gail Carriger introduced vampires (Soulless), and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer brought it all together in Steampunk and Steampunk II.

Makers and artists have taken the romance and adventure of steampunk and remixed, reinvented, and remade the genre from whole cloth and, yes, brass widgets. Weve spent hours wandering through the online galleries on Etsy and Flickr, marveling at the clockwork insects, corsets, art, hats, gloves, canes, modded computers, and even a steampunk house (want!), and we love the DIY craftiness that keeps inspiring more decadent and more useful machines and toys.

The continuing reinterpretation of the steampunk idea made us ask the writers for stories that explored and expanded their own ideas of what steampunk could be. So we have a book of mad inventors, child mechanics, mysterious murderers, revolutionary motorists, steampunk fairies, and monopoly-breaking schoolgirls, whose stories are set in Canada, New Zealand, Wales, ancient Rome, future Australia, alternate California, and even the postapocalypse everywhere except Victorian London.

When I have seen by Times fell hand defacd
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razd,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen... the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away....

William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV

Time is many things, her father told her. Time is a circle, and time is a great turning gear that cannot be stopped, and time is a river that carries away what you love.

When he said that, he looked at Roses mothers portrait, hanging over their fireplace mantel. He had invented his time device only a few short months after she had died. It had always been one of his greatest regrets in life, though Rose sometimes wondered whether he could have invented it at all without the all-consuming power of grief to drive him. Most of his other inventions did not work nearly as well. The garden robot often digs up flowers instead of weeds. The mechanical cook can make only one kind of soup. And the talking dolls never tell Rose what she wants to hear.

Do you think hes ever coming back? says Ellen. She means Roses father. She is the dark-haired talking doll, the saucy one. She likes to dance around the room, showing her ankles. She arranges the sugar cubes in the tea service to form rude words. Perhaps he has taken to drink. I hear that is common among soldiers.

Shush, says Cordelia. Cordelia is the gentle doll, redheaded and quiet. Ladies should not speak of such things. She turns to Rose. Would you like more tea?

Rose accepts more tea, though it is now more like hot water flavored with a few leaves from the garden than real tea. She ran out of real tea months ago. There had been a time when food and tea and household goods were regularly delivered by the grocers boy from the nearby town. It was weeks after he stopped coming that Rose got up the nerve to put on her bonnet, pick a few coins from the box on the mantel, and walk alone into town.

It was then that she realized why the grocers boy had stopped coming.

The town was flattened. Great zigzagging cracks ran through the streets, steam still pouring out of them. Great sinkholes had opened in the ground, houses half tipped to the side.

She wondered how she hadnt heard the destruction, though her house is more than a mile away. But then, airships flew overhead almost every night, dropping incendiaries into the nearby forest, hoping to flush out spies and deserters. Perhaps she was simply used to it.

She reached the edge of one great pit and stared down into it. She could see the top of the church spire sticking up, nearly reaching the top of the sinkhole. All around was the smell of decay. She wondered if the townsfolk had taken refuge in the church when the Wyrms came shed seen pictures of Wyrm fighters before, enormous, riveted copper tubes covered with incendiary bombs. She decided that her father was right. Towns were dangerous places for young ladies on their own.

Were very happy here, arent we? says Cordelia in her tinny dolls voice.