Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The VanderMeers’s anthologies seem to be establishing a new landmark for the oughts with their mixture of fiction and non-fiction pieces. After not only publishing articles in The New Weird, they also published (for the first time in an SF anthology, as far as I know) a web discussion list thread in order to get their readers more acquainted with their experiences during its compilation.

The same applies to their new and much-awaited anthology, Steampunk. The anthology begins and ends with short articles on steampunk arcana. The introduction, written by Jess Nevins, explains “The Nineteeth Century Roots of Steampunk,” a real treat, for it offers very extensive research on the origins of steam-driven fiction, focusing on the Edisonade, which he explains, is:

a story in which a young American male invents a form of transportation and uses it to travel to uncivilized parts of the American frontier of the world, enrich himself, and punish the enemies of the United States, whether domestic (Native Americans) or foreign.

Nevins establishes the mark of the Edisonade as being Edward S. Ellis’s The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies, published in 1868. This story influenced generations of writers and is even well represented in the anthology (more on that later). An important aspect for readers who still don’t know what the dickens steampunk is (or maybe I should have written “what the Wells”) is how Nevins establishes the difference between the all-American Edisonade and British Steampunk, clarifying things at the beginning of the journey.

In “The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium,” Bill Baker practically covers all the sequential art bases, from Bryan Talbot’s magnum opus, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, to Alan Moore’s Tom Strong stories and his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with a complete bibliography at the end.

The fiction section begins with an excerpt from Benediction: The Warlord of the Air, a novel from 1971, where Michael Moorcock describes the massive aerial forces of an alternate British Empire at war with the world. One of his recurrent characters, Oswald Bastable, makes a quick appearance here, but the mainstay of this fragment is its short but nonetheless impressive description of an aerial battle between an allied air fleet of five nations (Japan, Russia, France, America, and Britain) and the forces of Imperial China. The battle, though short, is intense, an outline of things to come; it’s a very strong appetizer for the following stories.

The second story, James P. Blaylock’s “Lord Kelvin’s Machine,” conducts us in quite an elegant fashion to an explanation of the coming end of the world and asks what can be done to avoid it—from using the power of volcanoes to shift the Earth in its orbit to building a device to reverse the polarity of the planet—all while presenting us with a scenario reminiscent of the Great Game. This reminded me strongly of Thomas Pynchon’s “Under the Rose,” a story which would have fit nicely in this anthology.

Ian MacLeod’s “The Giving Mouth” is more unorthodox, since it applies the tropes of steampunk to a medieval setting. A king tells of the days when he was young, a son of a noble who dreamed to be in Castleiron, a city advanced by the power of steam and metal. He soon gets his wish, for he and his father are invited to a feast in the halls of Queen Gormal, a cunning shrew who is a mix of Shakespearean characters a la Lear’s Goneril and Lady Macbeth. His father is obliged to do as she commands and is sent on a quest to slay the Blight, from which he returns a very changed man. The narrator, thus, must tend to his needs and also assume his rightful place as successor to his father—which means he will also try to slay the strange, never described creature that is the Blight (until the end of the story, that is). The weirdness of this story consists in the amount of (for us) out-of-place elements, such as cigarettes and steam-powered trains.

“A Sun in the Attic” by Mary Gentle also takes place in an age farther from when we expect to find a steampunk setting, since it is narrated by a kind of Borgesian Archivist from 1796: we are conducted through the sinuous ways of political intrigue when Roslin Mathury and one of her husbands, Gilvaris, must go after the other one, Del Mathury, a renowned scientist who suddenly disappears without a trace. In their search for him, they find out many things about the world they never suspected, nor even of other worlds, things that Del discovered in his research and that the people who rule the world of Asaria don’t want to be spread; it is a story of change and of resistance to it.

Jay Lake’s “The God-Clown is Near” is another of his Dark Town stories and the most frightening of the anthology. Repeating his feat in The New Weird with “The Lizard of Ooze,” Lake concocts what is one of the two best stories in Steampunk. Here, weird, twisted people, like the twin brothers Rêve and Traum Sueno (all these names meaning “dream” in English), abound in Lake’s surreal, dreamlike universe. The story begins when they ask Doctor Cosimo Ferrante, “the finest flesh sculptor” in Triune Town, to build them a clown. But not any clown: a “moral clown,” “judge and executioner of unparalleled power and soul-searing aspect.” Ferrante resists, for he knows that the twins intend no good with this moral clown, who will probably be sent on a destructive spree all over the city. Nevertheless, he starts building the clown while he buys time with the help of his friend/lover Jack.

Along with Hal Duncan, Jay Lake is one of a handful of authors who knows how to play the game of words. He knows how to make epic speeches that do not sound Tolkienesque, and at the same time, he can state the seemingly obvious without being corny, as in this dialogue at the end:

…we are concealed from the Cities of the Map, living between and within, and sometimes among, them. The College of Clowns, and perhaps a few other stirps, are just as concealed from us.

“They must be strange,” said Ferrante after a moment’s thought.

“Everyone is strange,” said Jack. “But the mirror shows us only the familiar.”

In spite of this, the ending is Frankensteinian (in the James Whale tradition, not Mary Shelley’s) in its sheer horror.

In contrast, the funniest story of the lot, by far, is Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A DIME NOVEL.” Lansdale (who already wrote some good stories of the weird west, as in DC Comics’s Jonah Hex) shows us a very twisted rendition of the Edisonades mixed with some toilet humor, even putting the traveler of Wells’s The Time Machine in the mix. Damage to the space-time continuum turns the mild-mannered traveler into a kind of vampire-ghoulish creature, but one who’s still a genius who can devise a plan to destroy the world. Our last hope is a wild bunch of adventurers who control the Steam Man, a forty-foot-tall and twenty-foot-wide nineteenth century robot-transformer-mechanical man. Together, they engage in battle against the Dark Rider and his very stupid Morlocks. A delightful romp.

“The Selene Gardening Society” is quite a mild, tranquil story after the horror and action-packed adventure of the two previous ones. Molly Brown writes a story in the tradition of Jules Verne in a tale that is a direct follow-up to De la Terre a La Lune. Mrs. Evangelina Maston, wife of a famous if somewhat loony inventor, gathers with the New Park Ladies’ Gardening Society in order to return to the moon to make it inhabitable. Brown takes a funny approach to terraforming through the eyes of those ladies, plus Michel Ardan, one of the protagonists of Verne’s story, creating an atmosphere on the Moon by sending their garbage there. Nonsense, of course, in what could almost be labeled as a nineteenth century Monty Python story.

“Seventy-Two Letters” by Ted Chiang is, like Jay Lake’s story, another variation of the story of the Golem. And also like Lake’s story, it is a very different, creative approach to it. In a Victorian world where Kabbalistic magic and science mix, Robert Stratton studies to become a nomenclator, that is, a developer of names, to create and animate things. Upon graduation, Stratton is hired by Coade Manufactory, one of the leading makers of automata in England. He soon begins to disagree with Master Sculptor First-Degree Harold Willoughby as to the proper functions of an automaton. Stratton wishes to “allow automatous engines to be manufactured inexpensively enough so that most families could purchase one.” This Gandhi-before-its-time approach means well: he wants to end child labor at textile mills. Willoughby, however, strongly disagrees, and his resistance makes Stratton quit his job and pursue his goals—which are a mixture of theology, philosophy, and linguistics—elsewhere and contemplate producing a Von Neumann-like production line of Golems. Chiang’s is the other of the two best stories of this anthology.

Which is not to say that Michael Chabon’s “The Martian Agent: An Interplanetary Romance” isn’t a good story. But it kind of cheats the reader with expectations from its title. The story reads like the first chapter of a novel, featuring the exploits of two young brothers in a Post-Civil War alternate America, fleeing from their father’s enemies. Franklin and Jefferson Drake run, but to no avail; they are taken by the enemy and put in St. Ignatius Boys’ Home, which is a walk in the park compared to their parent’s fate, but it is nonetheless a melancholy situation. They are rescued by their uncle, Captain Thomas Mordden, inventor and aeronaut, who claims that it is possible for men to travel to the moon. But, alas, the story doesn’t go very far beyond this point, and we never learn who that Martian Agent is (just because this has a postmodern ending doesn’t mean I didn’t want the story to continue to its ultimate conclusion).

“Victoria” by Paul di Filippo is an excerpt from his novel, The Steampunk Trilogy. In this story we follow the exploits of Cosmo Cowperthwait, who is hired by no less than the British Prime Minister to find the missing Victoria, who is soon to be crowned. The thing is, Cowperthwait is a scientist who has created a creature extremely similar to the young Victoria. Her looks, Cowperthwait explains patiently to a befuddled Minister, “are a result of an admixture of newt and human growth factors. Fresh cadavers—”

Di Filippo’s story is superb, and to use the jargon of the times, “admixtures” Holmesian, Frankensteinian, and steampunk elements, and also introduces us to the grim, dark backstage of politics, leading us to a surprise ending (or not so surprising, politics being what it is) that really makes us believe that the ends justifies the means. Machiavelli would be proud.

Rachel Pollock’s “Reflected Light” is a reprint from SteamPunk Magazine. As with “A Sun in the Attic,” it is also an ex post facto narrative, opened by an archivist’s note and told in a kind of epistolary mode, through wax cylinders (the same kind, I reckon, used by Dr. Seward in Dracula). Pollock’s story, however, is not a horror story but a political one; leatherworker Vick Flinders tells of the disappearance of her co-worker, Della Dicely, who after an accident (provoked inadvertently by Flinders) has a finger cut off. Sometime after that, Flinders’s husband takes home with him a thing that changes Vick’s world: a mechanical hand.

She dubs it “a piece of godwork,” and it is then that we get to know (apparently) that humans are being dominated by a people called the Nonnahee (it never becomes clear if they are aliens or something else), and that their engineers forbid humans to create abstractly. So the couple strive to make this mechanical hand work so she can search for Della and offer it to her in order to atone for her sins, so to speak. But, alas, the cylinder diary ends just at that point, and the archivist hints at the return of Della Dicely and a coup to overthrow Nonnahee domination. So short a story and yet so much still to be told. Pollock got me by the neck all right. I definitely wanted to read more about this world.

Can you imagine a Russian tzarist pulp-cum-steampunk story? Well, you don’t have to, because Stepan Chapman has already done it for us. In his “Minutes of the Last Meeting,” Chapman tells an alternative version of the escape from Russia of Tzar Nicholas II and his family in a train, in which the royal doctor uses nanobots to try to save the sickly heart of the Tzar’s son, Alexius, while, in a cavern under Petrograd, a cybernetic intelligence watches everything that unfolds on the train (including the secret affair between tsarina Alexandra and the doctor). But even the artificial steam-powered brain doesn’t know that the Germans, having studied the strange radioactive meteor crater at Tunguska, have developed a trans-uranium device that can cause a great implosion and destroy their enemies once and for all. The astonishing ending is deceptively simple, so simple one wouldn’t even think of using it today, but Chapman does, and it really, really surprised me. Keep an eye out for very special cameos by Bakunin and Baba Yaga!

The “Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast” by Neal Stephenson takes place in the same universe as The Diamond Age, which is, in itself, a sort of tribute/satire to steampunk (as Snow Crash was to the cyberpunk subgenre). It reveals to us the kind of future we could have if we had followed the steampunk line of technological evolution to the 22nd century. Since The Diamond Age is a sequel of sorts to Snow Crash, its steampunkish setting could be seen as artificial if compared to what came to be established as one of the main tropes of steampunk: the early development of high technology.

Stephenson holds our attention in this short story better than in some of his novels. Seriously, who doesn’t want to fight an enemy whose alias is Phyre Phox? And nanotech plus samurai swords? Post-steampunk (can we label this story as such?) doesn’t get much better than that.

To put the cherry on the top of the cake, as we say in Brazil, Rick Klaw presents his list in “My Favorite Steampunk Books and Movies,” covering books and movies. The book section is okay, featuring Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices, Bob Shaw’s The Ragged Astronauts, and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula but surprisingly doesn’t include The Difference Engine. The movie section, however, seems to be of a very particular preference, since it pushes the envelope a bit too far, including a very good anime work, Spirited Away, but non-steampunk as far as I can see. But it also includes the excellent The City of Lost Children by Jeunet and Caro, and The Time Machine (the original one, of course).

Bill Baker closes the book’s offerings with “Further Sequential Steampunk Reading,” covering titles from the fundamental Batman: Gotham by Gaslight by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola to Joe Kelly’s Steampunk, including Warren Ellis’s Planetary, which features some excellent steampunk stories along its story arcs full of “pulp-und-drang.”

All in all, Steampunk is a very comprehensive anthology. As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer remind us in the preface, they meant to provide the reader with a blend of the traditional and the idiosyncratic. Blimey, guv’nor! Mission accomplished!

Publisher: Tachyon Publications (May, 2008)
Price: $10.17
Paperback: 400 pages
ISBN: 1892391759