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46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An effective overview of the genre, May 26, 2008
For those who aren't familiar with steampunk, it's sort of hard to define. I would loosely describe it as people running around a retro-futuristic, usually Victorian society employing improbable weapons and machinery powered by steam and clockwork. The back cover claims "Steampunk is Victorian elegance and modern technology: steam-driven robots, souped-up stagecoaches, and space-faring dirigibles fueled by gaslight romance, mad scientists, and very trim waistcoats," which does give a pretty good idea of the sort of things you're likely to find in the anthology. To break it down:
Introduction: The 19th Century Roots of Steampunk (Jess Nevins) - This essay covered a lot of things regarding steampunk's relationship with and reaction against dime novels that I hadn't heard before, making several of the stories in the anthology make a lot more sense. I think most of Nevins's arguments primarily apply to steampunk literature and don't necessarily cover its other aspects, but it's very interesting and useful information.
Benediction: Excerpt from The Warlord of the Air (Michael Moorcock) - I don't really approve of including excerpts from novels in an anthology, using the reasoning that if I've just bought a book, I would rather have an entire story than an extended advertisement for another book. This is a good introduction to the steampunk feel, though, as it's basically one extended airship battle.
Lord Kelvin's Machine (James P. Blaylock) - This is one of those that is helped by the explanations in Nevins's essay; it's heavily based on the dime novel tradition, although with a wink and a nod. An inventor must use his ingenuity to save the world both from a villain and from his well-meaning but foolish compatriots in the face of a deadly comet.
The Giving Mouth (Ian R. MacLeod) - While this story really didn't even try to make sense by the end, the world it's set in is fascinating - I've never heard of medieval steampunk before, but I absolutely adore it.
A Sun in the Attic (Mary Gentle) - A woman's husband (or one of them, anyway, as the story takes place in a polyandrous society) uncovers something that some feel the world may not need to know; the story questions the positive and negative aspects of scientific discovery and humanity's reactions to it.
The God-Clown is Near (Jay Lake) - A strange story about an inventor who is asked by a shady organization to build a "moral clown", an automaton that will pass judgment on their society. I think the world it's set in is part of a series by the author, and I'm tempted to track down one of his books; I liked the story well enough, but it seems to lack the context that would ground it a little and give it some weight.
The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel (Joe R. Lansdale) - I have to say, this story goes against pretty much all of my personal preferences. The idea isn't bad - that the Time Traveler from H.G. Wells's The Time Machine accidentally damaged the space-time continuum, causing Very Bad Things to happen - but the violence is extremely graphic, and I can't reconcile Wells's Time Traveler with the one in this story at all.
The Selene Gardening Society (Molly Brown) - This one is based on Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, which I haven't read, but it's still a cute story even without the background knowledge. In an attempt to distract her husband from tearing up her garden, a society wife begins planning a garden on the moon.
Seventy-Two Letters (Ted Chiang) - Again, the world in which this story is set is what makes it interesting; here certain names, when impressed on inorganic objects (and even, they find, organic ones), will give them movement and even life. As the science progresses, the scientists working on the naming project must deal with the ethical implications of playing God.
The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance (Michael Chabon) - A historical revision, featuring the struggles of two brothers in a world where a Declaration of Reunion has brought America back under British control and the Civil War has turned into a second Revolutionary War. This feels like the prologue to a larger narrative, although as far as I know, this is all there is.
Victoria (Paul Di Filippo) - A burlesque comedy in which a very young Queen Victoria has run away, and a scientist must track her down (while donating his creation, a half-newt prostitute that bears an odd resemblance to Victoria, to temporarily take her place in Buckingham Palace). Utterly ridiculous, but goofy and fun, and with several unexpectedly funny in-jokes for people who read too much Victorian lit.
Reflected Light (Rachel E. Pollack) - A series of wax cylinder diary entries by a factory worker. Extremely short, but surprisingly interesting.
Minutes of the Last Meeting (Stepan Chapman) - A declining Russia in a nuclear era. I'm not sure I would consider this story particularly steampunk, and it's a bit too dark for my taste.
Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast (Neal Stephenson) - Again, this is more cyberpunk than steampunk if you ask me, but it stands moderately well as a short story in its own right, if you don't mind accepting that two sides are duking it out over the distribution of information without really understanding what they're going on about.
The Steam-Driven Time Machine: A Pop Culture Survey (Rick Klaw) - A chronological rundown of major steampunk movies, games, etc. It reads mostly like a guy reminiscing about his hobby - which is basically what it is, come to think of it.
The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium (Bill Baker) - Same as above, only with graphic novels.
It's hard to really give a final opinion on an anthology; there are always going to be good stories and lousy stories (really, I'd give it 3.5 stars if I could). Still, I enjoyed this, and even the bad stories tended to be at least interesting in the sheer variety of settings and technology employed.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Many misses and few hits..., July 24, 2008
Every anthology tends to offer some hits and misses in terms of story selection, and `Steampunk' is no different. Along with three essays on the genre, the book provides 13 tales dealing with "Victorian elegance and modern technology". With the exception of an excerpt from Michael Moorcock's "The Warlord of the Air", all entries have previously appeared in print within the past 25 years.
Reviewer `Redon' gives a good overview of the book's contents. I'll just add my thoughts on some of the material:
For the essays, Jess Nevins provides a concise history of steampunk in literature, focusing on the role of the "Edisonade" genre of 19th century dime novels in setting the major themes and tropes of the genre. Rick Klaw's essay deals with steampunk in television and film, and Bill Baker provides a history of steampunk comics and graphic novels.
My selections for the best stories in the book, with capsule summaries:
"The Giving Mouth" by Ian R. McLeod: more steam-fantasy than steampunk, McLeod's story takes a page from Michael Swanwick's seminal novel the "Iron Dragon's Daughter" and juxtaposes slag heaps, industrial decay, and magic in a coming -of-age tale with a melancholy, but effective, tone.
"The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider" by Joe R. Lansdale: mixing steampunk with splatterpunk, Lansdale relates a violent encounter between the steam-driven robot from the popular 19th century boy's novels, and H. G. Wells's time traveler, made mutated and vampiric by too much travel in the 4th dimension. Readers will be laughing out loud at one paragraph, and squirming at the next. Having a Lansdale story in this collection is bit like bringing along your cousin Bubba from Mississippi - the one who likes NASCAR, squirrel hunting, and making politically incorrect remarks about People of Color, militant lesbian feminists, and ponytailed men who do yoga - to a soiree hosted by the staff of The Nation magazine. But there's no getting away from the fact that Lansdale delivers a great story, howevermuch it sits uneasily with the other entries. [The succeeding tale, "The Selene Gardening Society", which is meant to be a light-hearted parody of a Victorian drawing-room comedy, seems like even thinner gruel than it actually is, coming as it does after a Lansdale adventure. Not a good placement of story order in the anthology by the editors !]
"Seventy-two Letters" by Ted Chiang: a well-written novelette dealing with an alternative Victorian England where Kabbalistic magic gives rise to homunculi and androids, which power a counterpart of our own Industrial Age. Much of the story's plot hinges on the concept of `preformationism', which dominated scientific thought regarding sexual reproduction until supplanted by modern embryology in the late 19th century. Unfortunately, Chiang fails to provide any exposition on the topic in the course of unfolding his narrative; thus readers not familiar with this rather obscure theory may find themselves a bit lost.
"Minutes of the Last Meeting" by Stepan Chapman: a strange, overly worked mélange of steampunk, cyberpunk, and comic fantasy. The story starts on a traditional alt-history adventure note involving the Tsar, his entourage, and Revolutionary Russia, but then get weirder as it goes on, with the author throwing one SF trope after another into the mix. The mix never quite gels, but the narrative has enough crazed energy to keep the reader engaged all the way to the bitter end.
The remaining stories are, in my opinion, disappointments. Some are underdeveloped and needed more work before seeing print ("The God-Clown is Near", "Reflected Light"). Others are rather pedestrian re-hashes of familiar themes, but have some `progressive' element that the editors deemed stylish enough for inclusion ("A Sun in the Attic"). A contribution by current Fiction Darling Michael Chabon ("The Martian Agent") is over-written and plodding. Other stories are pleasant, somewhat droll satires of Victorian social mores ("The Selene Gardening Society", "Victoria"); but in lacking the dystopian, edgy character of steampunk per se, their inclusion in this anthology is a mystery.
In summary, `Steampunk' has too many Misses to make up for the sparse selection of Hits. The `definitive' Steampunk anthology still awaits print......
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not Free SF Reader, July 7, 2008
Another interesting retrospective anthology from the VanderMeer marital team, from the same publisher in Tachyon, too. This one I think with a cooler and more appropriate cover.
The difference here is that neither of the editors are as heavily invested in the subject from a personal writing point of view as with The New Weird. So, there is a Team VanderMeer intro, but then they hand over the non-fictional reins to others more knowledgeable.
For early genre fiction of this ilk, if there is anyone more knowledgeable than Jess Nevins it would be surprising - and they certainly haven't written all the cool stuff on the internet that he has - go and check out his website, it is a marvel. So, pretty much anything he writes on this sort of topic will be worth looking at - and here he gives the early history of work that leads to 'Steampunk'. From before Verne and Wells, to the American explorer-scientist 'Edisonades' as he points out these have been termed, right up to the first 'story 'included here, Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable excerpt.
He does talk about the 'punk' element here, and even first and second wave steampunk, and who the first wave authors were - Blaylock, Jeter, etc. Nevins concentrates on prose.
Rick Klaw talks about Steampunk in popular culture in a wide variety of media, film, anime, etc.
Bill Baker gives an overview of Steampunk in graphic format - and there are lots, and gives a reasonable looking bibliography as such, including the awesome Warren Ellis and John Cassaday Planetary and Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that are must reads, for those that like this sort of thing.
On the whole, reasonably well done, although a couple more lists from Nevins and Klaw wouldn't have gone astray, even though work is mentioned. Such things are good for asking librarians 'here, check these out on Interlibrary Loan for me would you please'?
There is a wide range of stories from the very fluffy-light Molly Brown story through madcap Blaylock, to the, to quote my spousal unit, who read this before me 'the really twisted' Joe Lansdale. The final story is a bit different, nanopunk if you like - from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age setting. A nice score to get a story from him though, and it, too, is cool.
There are no bad stories here, although the footnote ending of Pollack's is weak, and Chabon's is annoying to read with all the em-dash line beginnings that make it like your eyes are trying to herd ants to follow it.
The publisher shouldn't be shy about making use of spare pages to advertise other anthologies they have done or possible books of interest to those of us that buy these things. I don't think many of us mind that, within reason, if you have the space.
Overall, I'd put it a bit under 4.5, but certainly good enough to round up to there.
Steampunk : Benediction: Warlord of the Air - Michael Moorcock
Steampunk : Lord Kelvins Machine - James Blaylock
Steampunk : The Giving Mouth - Ian MacLeod
Steampunk : A Sun in the Attic - Mary Gentle
Steampunk : The God-Clown Is Near - Jay Lake
Steampunk : The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down - Joe Lansdale
Steampunk : The Selene Gardening Society - Molly Brown
Steampunk : Seventy-Two Letters - Ted Chiang
Steampunk : The Martian Agent: An Interplanetary Romance - Michael Chabon
Steampunk : Victoria - Paul Di Filippo
Steampunk : Reflected Light - Rachel E. Pollack
Steampunk : Minutes of the Last Meeting - Stepan Chapman
Steampunk : Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of the Tribes of the Pacific Coast - Neal Stephenson
Fleet going down.
3.5 out of 5
Magnetic field massacre mouse save snakes into mad scientist volcano shootout showdown.
4 out of 5
Eater machined.
3 out of 5
Archival barbarian reports.
3.5 out of 5
Really getting their goat.
4 out of 5
The Time Traveler vampire show is a rip of a ride.
4.5 out of 5
The Moon? What a load of rubbish.
3.5 out of 5
Foetal experiment orders named.
3.5 out of 5
Airship hopes.
3 out of 5
Newt but a Queen.
4 out of 5
Less handy rebels.
3 out of 5
Tsar Nukeallofus.
3.5 out of 5
Nano Protoctol crossbow source defense samurai chainsword rescue.
3.5 out of 5
4.5 out of 5
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