Read The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Online
Authors: Sean Wallace
Sean Wallace
is the founder and editor of Prime Books, which won a World Fantasy Award in 2006. In the past he was co-editor of
Fantasy Magazine
as well as Hugo Award-winning and two-time World Fantasy nominee
Clarkesworld Magazine
; the editor of the following anthologies:
Best New Fantasy
,
Fantasy
,
Horror: The Best of the Year
,
Jabberwocky
,
Japanese Dreams
and
The Mammoth Book of Steampunk
; and co-editor of
Bandersnatch
,
Fantasy Annual
,
Phantom
and
Weird Tales: The 21st Century
. He lives in Rockville MD with his wife, Jennifer, and their twin daughters, Cordelia and Natalie.
Edited by Sean Wallace
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Sean Wallace, 2012 (unless otherwise stated)
The right of Sean Wallace to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-736-7 (paperback)
UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-135-5 (ebook)
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First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4468-7
US Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930509
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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
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Printed and bound in the UK
Steampunk: Looking to the Future Through the Lens of the Past
by Ekaterina Sedia
by Jeff VanderMeer
by Caitlín R. Kiernan
by E. Catherine Tobler
Tom Edison and His Amazing Telegraphic Harpoon
by Jay Lake
The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball
by Genevieve Valentine
by Cat Rambo
The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jala-ud-din Muhammad Akbar
by Shweta Narayan
Prayers of Forges and Furnaces
by Aliette de Bodard
by N. K. Jemisin
The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi
by Peter M. Ball
by Sharon Mock
by Catherynne M. Valente
Numismatics in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
by Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick
by Tobias S. Buckell
by Matthew Kressel
by Margo Lanagan
by Amal El-Mohtar
by Barth Anderson
by Jeffrey Ford
by James Morrow
by Cherie Priest
by Margaret Ronald
The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois
by Megan Arkenberg
by Benjamin Rosenbaum
by Mary Robinette Kowal
by Samantha Henderson
by Nick Mamatas
by Nicole Kornher-Stace
by Lavie Tidhar
With the recent release of
The Steampunk Bible
(ed. Jeff VanderMeer and SJ Chambers), it seems that steampunk as a genre finally came into its own and has grown enough to demand its own compendium, summarizing various parts of this remarkably protean movement, and pointing out interesting things happening in its DIY culture, cosplay, film, literature and music. The fact that the steampunk esthetic penetrates all aspects and art forms indicates that it is remarkably malleable and yet recognizable. We often see steampunk as gears and goggles glued to top hats, but this impression is of course superficial, and there is much more complexity to the fashion and maker aspects of it – just take a look at the Steampunk Workshop website by Jake Von Slatt if you don’t believe me! And yet, much like pornography, all of these expressions conform to a common pattern – difficult to describe beyond the superficial, but one just knows it when one sees it.
And of course the literary component of the genre has complexity beyond what is visible to a casual reader. Some will think of early steampunk, as envisioned by Powers, Baylock and Jeter; others will recall the retrofuturism of Wells and Verne; yet others will shrug and deride faux Victoriana with its grafted-on machinery. The beauty of steampunk is that none would be wrong – much like trying to determine the shape of an elephant by feel, summarizing literary steampunk is daunting, and it is tempting to grab a trunk and call it an elephant. It is tempting to say that in order to be properly steampunk, a story needs to be an alternate history, or to be set in Victorian England, or at least have an airship or two. And surely there cannot be steampunk without steam engines?
Instead, I think, it is more constructive to avoid trope-based definitions altogether, and focus instead on the operational – that is, what do these stories do? And this is where we see that time and time again, great steampunk stories confront an uneasy past with its history of oppression and science that serves to promote dominance, where women are chattel and where other races are deemed subhuman and therefore fit to exploit, where we can take things because we feel like it, where the code of moral conduct does not apply to treatment of lower classes. Industrial revolution came with a heavy price, and now as its inheritors we cannot help but look back and ask, is this really progress? And if it is, can we have progress without the horror that accompanies it? What would happen if, for example, Galton’s eugenics and Spencer’s Social Darwinism were dismissed while John Stuart Mill’s
The Subjection of Women
became a mainstream success, influencing policies and laws?
The answer will of course differ from one writer to the next. But this examining and interrogation of the past, the search for alternative turns, imagining what would happen if technology were used to uplift rather than oppress: this is the “punk” element, the rejection of calcified norms and either examining them or appropriating them for the use these norms had previously shunned. Challenging the centrality of Western civilization or the common perception of men as movers of history as women stand quietly by the side, the invisibility of genders other than binary, sexualities other than hetero – all of these issues are currently receiving attention. We as a society are struggling for acceptance and tolerance, and we are recognizing the importance of talking about these issues. Websites such as Beyond Victoriana and Silver Goggles question the Eurocentric narrative of what we perceive as the history of civilization, while fiction writers are busily reworking our histories to let the voices omitted from the mainstream (and actively suppressed) be heard and to tell their stories.