This anthology of fantastic stories set in Bristol is a collaboration between Wizard’s Tower Press and the BristolCon Foundation which organizes a science-fiction convention in that city. The noble aim of the editors was to provide a platform for new writing and many of the stories are by previously unpublished authors. The book is divided into three sections. ‘Less Than Men?’ deals with slavery and emancipation. ‘Lost Souls’ is more fantasy and horror and ‘Travelling Light’ focuses on adventure. The overall theme is meant to be Steampunk but some of the stories stretch that definition quite a lot. I’ll split them into the above categories here to give the review some kind of order.

LESS THAN MEN

‘Case of the Vapours’ by Ken Shinn is a detective story which starts in a classic way with a beautiful woman hiring the hero. The body of a Vapour has been snatched. Vapours are black slaves enhanced with clockwork and steam-powered - a sort of steampunk cyborg. The story is set in Bristol and there were no slaves in Bristol. Apart from that, I enjoyed it very much.

‘Brassworth’ by Christine Morgan is a Jeeves and Wooster spoof. When rich, amiable but useless Reggie Wilmott does a favour for his old chum Cyril Moglington his reward is Brassworth, a mechanical manservant of surprising competence in all things. This was great fun and I kept imagining a mechanical Stephen Fry as Brassworth, though I usually avoid Wodehouse on television. It doesn’t work. Read the books.

In ‘The Lesser Men Have No Language’ by Deborah Walker, which is set in 1885 the following line appears. ‘Anna’s skin was dark, a not uncommon sight in Bristol with its legacy of slavery.’ This is wrong. Dark skin was a very uncommon sight in Bristol because the slaves didn’t come here. They went to the West Indies or America. In general this yarn about a fern that had some human DNA in it (How?!) It’s far fetched even as fantasy and as science-fiction, it’s just plain impossible. It was well written and had good characters but my disbelief in the main premise meant I couldn’t really enjoy it.

‘Brass and Stone’ by Joanne Hall begins when lovelorn Angela Porter jumps off Bristol’s suspension bridge. As in one famous case, her skirts billowed out and she was saved from death. However, she was seriously broken up. ‘We can rebuild you,’ says the doctor. ‘We have the technology.’ They do in their steampunk way. She muses about the ships ‘carrying sugar and slaves and rum to and from the port.’ Wrong again. Slaves didn’t come into Bristol. Also, Angela gets her treatment at Frenchay hospital which didn’t open until 1921 which seems a bit late for Steampunk. It was a pretty neat story though and the errors can be overlooked.


LOST SOULS

Aetherics are a specially selected group of people sensitive to fluctuations in the aether, which was all the rage in Victorian science. Inspector Fidelity ‘Del‘ Blackamoor is one of their number and in ‘The Girl with Red Hair’ by Myfanwy Rodman she sees a vision of said wench down by the harbour. Investigations lead her to the posh area of Clifton. This was a well-constructed detective yarn with a rich background that could be used as the foundation for many more. The unlikely ethnicity of the heroine in Victorian Bristol, for reasons mentioned above, is a slight drawback.

An architects assistant encounters a mysterious being in the attic of Bristol cathedral in ‘Artifice Perdu’ by Pete Sutton. It was alright but a bit predictable. ‘Miss Butler and the Handlander Process’ by John Hawkes-Reed had entertaining moments but I found some of the terminology confusing. Perhaps I had better brush up on Victorian engineering.

‘Something in the Water’ by Cheryl Morgan is a first-person narration taken ‘from the personal records of Miss Amelia Edwards, dated June 1877.’ Mr Thomas Guppy, engineer, is attempting to build a barrage across the Severn estuary but strange things are happening. This is more Lovecraftian horror than anything else but nicely done. The story concludes with notes on the historical figures who appear in it. Sadly, Cheryl Morgan is under the impression that there was an immigrant community in Saint Pauls, Bristol during Victorian times. Not so. It was a favourite location for wealthy slave-trading merchants a bit earlier than that but not for slaves. The West Indians came over in the 1950s as part of the so-called Windrush generation.

A similar narrative technique to that used by Cheryl Morgan is used by Scott Lewis for ‘The Chronicles of Montague and Dalton: The Hunt for Alleyway Agnes’. The story is taken ‘from the memoirs of Doctor William Nathaniel Dalton, esq., 23rd July 1913. First-person narration was all the rage back then as it lent a sort of authenticity to the more far fetched stories. Like Doctor Watson, the most famous exemplar, Doctor Dalton is assistant to a most brilliant man, in this case Professor Cornelius S. Montague, scientist, adventurer, philanthropist and scholar. Together they help the Bristol constabulary solve the baffling case of Alleyway Agnes. They are aided by Katherine McClure, a beautiful, fiery, Irish archaeologist as they chase a creature from the realm of Faerie that is causing trouble in our world. Conan Doyle believed in Faeries so this is a clever link. An entertaining ripping yarn of the old fashioned kind.


TRAVELLING LIGHT

There is a long history of tales told in gentlemen‘s clubs to which may be added ‘The Sound of Gyroscopes’ by Jonathan L. Howard. The pace is unhurried for this adventure story of a gyroscope chase up the Avon gorge but that’s not a drawback. The pleasure lies in the language rather than the plot. There are a couple of neat similes and an amusing bit of repartee about a standard Victorian storytelling habit. Along with ‘Brassworth’, this was probably my favourite in the book.

In ‘Flight of Daedalus’ by Piotr Swietlik an astronaut wakes up in a hospital room attached to complex machinery. His surroundings seem wrong somehow. He is rescued by Lieutenant Ezra Stubbings and told that the world has changed greatly since he went into space. Quite enjoyable but it seems to be the first chapter of a novel rather than a complete short story.

‘The Traveller’s Apprentice’ by Ian Millsted was a confusing time travel story. A man in Bristol is inventing things before Thomas Edison can get around to it. A waif scrounger girl finds his gold cigarette case buried. It has his name on it. He employs her and another fellow follows her back to his house and attacks them. Time machines are mentioned. I didn’t get the ending at all.

‘Lord Craddock: Ascension’ by Stephen Blake is a story of the fight against slavery in Bristol. It’s a fast-moving adventure yarn full of people with 21st-century attitudes to ethnic minorities, women, the disabled, liberty and everything else. ‘The Lanterns of Death Affair’ by Andy Bigwood was also a fast-moving adventure yarn with airships. Obviously it was anti-slavery and had a bold, modern capable heroine to the fore. Since it focused more on the adventure than the moral lesson, I preferred it. It’s the last story in the book. Coincidentally, while reading this anthology I also happened to peruse a short biography of Ramsay Macdonald, the first Labour Prime Minister (of England) and came across a mention of airships. His friend Lord Thomson was killed when the Airship R 101 crashed en route to India. The flight was meant to inaugurate an empire spanning airship service but the whole plan was cancelled after this accident. That, Steampunks, is the moment in history when reality let you down. There are, apparently, giant airship sheds at Cardington in England.

Beginning authors have a tendency to be preachy or to set out to obviously the ‘message’ of their story. Slavery and racism are bad, no doubt, but nearly everyone thinks so nowadays anyway. John Prescott used to say that New Labour was about ‘traditional values in a modern setting.‘ Most of these stories are about modern values in a traditional setting. To an extent, the editors asked for this as part of their remit was to explore ‘the dark side of Victoriana’. Obviously they picked the stories they liked with an emphasis on ethnic issues and feminism. Hey ho. I can’t help wondering what stories were rejected.

The theme is okay but the main problem in its execution is the notion that Bristol was teeming with Africans and even that the immigrant population of the Saint Paul’s area of the city was African. This is not true. The ships went from Bristol to Africa to pick up slaves who were then taken on the infamous ’middle passage’ to the Caribbean or the southern United States and sold. The ships then bought sugar, rum or tobacco back to the home port. At no point did slaves come to Bristol. There was a brief period when it was trendy for the gentry to have a slave as a valet or such - like the famous Pero - but they were few. The ethnic minority population of Saint Paul’s is from the West Indies and consists of people who came over since the fifties and their descendants. If one takes the view that this is all set in alternate timelines where slaves were bought into Bristol - economic madness though that would be - I suppose we can let the authors get away with it.

Overall it was an enjoyable anthology and worth a look, especially for Bristolians. There’s a certain frisson in reading about fantastic events taking place in surroundings with which you are familiar. For the denizens of the world’s great cities, this happens all the time as films and books are often set in New York, London or Paris. For we simple folk in the west country to be extended that privilege is a rare treat. Despite my concerns about historical inaccuracies, I am grateful to the editors and publishers for organizing the whole thing and to the worthy authors for coming up with the goods.

Eamonn Murphy
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A collection of consistently good short steampunky tales set in and around Brunel’s own stomping ground or as Gareth Powell says of the city in the intro

“ Take a walk around Bristol, and history seeps from the walls. The city can claim more than its fair share of firsts, including the first iron-hulled steamship, the first female doctor, the first chocolate bar and the first use of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic, ..”

Which means it’s a perfect and eclectic setting for a nicely varied set of stories: from social injustices to the gleefully mechanic, from darkly gothic and haunting tales to crime capers and madcap races. Love and revenge, secret societies and dark things lurking. Of course as an anthology not all tales were to my taste but there was nothing I disliked and it’s a fair bet that there is something here for everyone. In fact it’s hard picking favourites. I was very taken with mechanical elephants and soul stealing in a story by John Hawkes-Reed, a tale that not only had great characters but also the best opening line I was hiding inside my father’s test elephant when they came looking for me . I chuckled (a bit too heartedly) at Johnathan L. Howard’s Victorian tale of gyroscope racing that gently digs at the genre whilst I thought Myfanwy Rodman’s tale of ghosts and Aetherics wonderfully atmospheric and I loved the idea of the dystopian horror of a tawdry fake Steampunk in a futuristic England in a story by Piotr Świetlik.

All in all recommended to genre fans, even detractors of steampunk I suspect will find something here.

*Caveat: I know one of the authors very well so in the interest of impartiality I am just going to omit their story from the review! Although I think it’s a wonderful, evocative and creepy tale, that gives a short sharp shock and spices the collection with a delicious slice of darkness. ( )