All you need to know about the steampunk subgenre of science fiction is right there on the back cover of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s STEAMPUNK anthology: “Steampunk is Victorian elegance and modern technology.” This spirit of creative anachronism is celebrated in a baker’s dozen of examples within, most of which prove successful.
Team VanderMeer offers a brief overview of steampunk before letting Jess Nevins explore its 19th-century roots in his introduction, which makes a perfect segueway into the first piece of fiction: an excerpt from Michael Moorcock’s 1971 novel THE WARLORD OF THE AIR, with airships aplenty.
Two of the stories deal directly with the production of golems, but are different enough to both emerge as standouts. First, Jay Lake’s “The God-Clown Is Near” examines a gay scientist’s moral struggle when he is approached by two brothers to build them a clown he fears they intend to use for nefarious means. Even better is Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters,” in which a skilled automaton maker is drafted into a cutting-edge project involving a “megafoetus.” It’s hard not to read either without thinking of the current debates surrounding stem cell research and gene manipulation.
Paul Di Filippo gets rather ribald with “Victoria,” in which Queen Victoria has run away, so an impostor needs to take her place on the throne before Londoners realize it. An inventor comes up with a near-perfect solution: a lookalike who eats flies because she is fashioned from a mix of human and salamander parts. He passes off her bloated appearance as a “prolonged menstrual period.”
No stranger to literary exercises in various genres, Michael Chabon weighs in with “The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance,” which I originally read in the MCSWEENEY’S MAMMOTH TREASURY OF THRILLING TALES anthology he edited five years ago. Another giant of the field, Neal Stephenson, is represented by an uncharacteristically short work, “Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast,” in which 22nd-century explorers hold their own in an abandoned shopping mall against a mechanized cavalry charge of “4Wheelers.” It’s directly related to his 1995 novel THE DIAMOND AGE.
Among the remaining stories, Rachel E. Pollack has a shining light in “Reflected Light,” a brief number told as if it were transcripts of wax-cylinder recordings, recounting a factory accident that results in the loss of an appendage, and the discovery of a mechanical hand.
But by far, the best contribution is also the wildest and most fun: Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel.” Shocking and hilarious, it imagines that the hero of H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE has jumped through the ages too many times, disrupting the spacetime continuum, and also leaving him craving blood and with a constant erection, with which he butt-rapes Moorlocks out of boredom. He’s being pursued by a team of good guys who travel inside a 40-foot tin man.
A pair of essays close out the book. First, Rick Klaw surveys instances of steampunk throughout pop culture, from websites to role-playing games to television series (from THE WILD WILD WEST to THE ADVENTURES OF BRISCO COUNTY JR.). Then Bill Baker spotlights the best steampunk comics, including Alan Moore’s TOM STRONG and Matt Fraction’s FIVE FISTS OF SCIENCE. These make the anthology more special than it would be otherwise, because editorial perspective is everything in such genre-defining overviews. —Rod Lott
“After waiting for a while, the Dark Rider became bored. He took hold of one of the apes and threw him on the ground and pulled his britches down. He took out his dong again and ass fucked the beast. It wasn’t very pleasant, and he grew angry at himself for resorting to such entertainment, but he went ahead and did it anyway. Consummated, he snapped the animal’s neck and gave him to the others as a gift. Some of the ape men fucked the corpse, but pretty soon they were eating it. The dog just hadn’t been enough.”
OTHER BOOKGASM INTERVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• Q&A with STEAMPUNK’s Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF MICHAEL CHABON:
• GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD by Michael Chabon
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF ANN AND JEFF VANDERMEER:
• THE NEW WEIRD edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
