Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
by Kelly Link (Editor & Contributor), Gavin J. Grant (Editor)
Fantasy Anthology (1)
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Description
A collection of fourteen fantasy stories by well-known authors, set in the age of steam engines and featuring automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never existed.Tags
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Member Reviews
This very complete collection would have rated another STAR if it had not led off with yet another story needlessly
featuring hideous rabbit animal cruelty. Why this was selected is beyond me.
Fortunately, the rest of the stories veered far off in other directions:
Steam Girl was fun.
Favorite is "Ghost of Cwmlech Manor" - a sweet fairy tale.
And one true romance, "Everything Amiable and Obliging," was quite welcome.
This was my introduction to Steampunk and, while I enjoyed many of the characters,
the plots felt like good and cleverly written standard stories with Time, Gears, Machines, etc. woven in.
featuring hideous rabbit animal cruelty. Why this was selected is beyond me.
Fortunately, the rest of the stories veered far off in other directions:
Steam Girl was fun.
Favorite is "Ghost of Cwmlech Manor" - a sweet fairy tale.
And one true romance, "Everything Amiable and Obliging," was quite welcome.
This was my introduction to Steampunk and, while I enjoyed many of the characters,
the plots felt like good and cleverly written standard stories with Time, Gears, Machines, etc. woven in.
I’m not sure why this anthology is listed as Young Adult, because other than a lot of the characters being young, there is nothing juvenile about it. The stories are varied in setting; some actually step outside of the standard Victorian England setting that steampunk usually is set in- one is even set in ancient Rome. Fourteen well known authors provide us with tales of airships, mechanical men and oracles, time twisting technology, ghosts, geothermal drilling and a lot more. Some, I admit, didn’t really seem like steampunk, but they were very good stories- just not perhaps the stories for this anthology.
Most anthologies are very uneven and I end up being bored by some of the stories and downright hate a couple. This one, though, show more held my interest throughout; there is not one story in it that I disliked. If you have any interest in steampunk literature- or even a love of fantasy- get this book. show less
Most anthologies are very uneven and I end up being bored by some of the stories and downright hate a couple. This one, though, show more held my interest throughout; there is not one story in it that I disliked. If you have any interest in steampunk literature- or even a love of fantasy- get this book. show less
Small Beer Press knocks another one out of the park. I think Kelly Link is dreamy, and I loved this collection. I particularly loved this collection because it wasn't entirely happy endings. There were a couple, but there were also some creepy and menacing endings. (Link's and Clare's in particular).
It was also that fantastic mix anthologies sometimes hit of enough authors I knew and enjoy to hook me, but a handful of new-to-me authors as well that I will now look for.
I would happily recommend this to anyone with even a slight fondness for steampunk. It's nowhere near as played-out as I had previously thought. There's still gold in this particular meme.
It was also that fantastic mix anthologies sometimes hit of enough authors I knew and enjoy to hook me, but a handful of new-to-me authors as well that I will now look for.
I would happily recommend this to anyone with even a slight fondness for steampunk. It's nowhere near as played-out as I had previously thought. There's still gold in this particular meme.
In this compilation of steampunk short stories, you will find fourteen original tales by some of the hottest authors in YA and adult fantasy and science fiction. The editors write in the introduction that "The continuing reinterpretation of the steampunk idea made us ask the writers for stories that explored and expanded their own ideas of what steampunk could be" (ix). As a result, these stories push the boundaries of what you might expect from the genre, including everything from a creepy mystery to a "Clockwork Fagin."
This was the perfect collection to dip in and out of during my vacation week, because I could read one story at a time or, since one was so incredibly different from the next, read three straight in a row. I was able to show more read authors that I already enjoy, such as Cassandra Clare and Ysabeau Wilce, and be introduced to authors that I know want to investigate more, such as Delia Sherman and Dylan Horrocks. I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite, but looking back now the stories "Clockwork Fagin" by Cory Doctorow and "Steam Girl" by Dylan Horrocks stand out the most in my mind. I highly recommend giving this collection a try. show less
This was the perfect collection to dip in and out of during my vacation week, because I could read one story at a time or, since one was so incredibly different from the next, read three straight in a row. I was able to show more read authors that I already enjoy, such as Cassandra Clare and Ysabeau Wilce, and be introduced to authors that I know want to investigate more, such as Delia Sherman and Dylan Horrocks. I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite, but looking back now the stories "Clockwork Fagin" by Cory Doctorow and "Steam Girl" by Dylan Horrocks stand out the most in my mind. I highly recommend giving this collection a try. show less
Summary: The term "steampunk" conjures up visions of gaslit foggy London alleyways, but the stories in Steampunk! set out to prove that image wrong. They all take the trappings of steampunk and move them out of London, out of the Victorian era, and into times and places that steampunk's never been before.
Individual Reviews: - "Some Fortunate Future Day" by Cassandra Clare involves a girl left alone in a house with only her clockwork dolls for company. I liked this one a lot, although it ended right at a critical point, making me anxious to know what happened next.
- "The Last Ride of the Glory Girls" by Libba Bray is a western, with a team of outlaw girls that use a clockwork time device to commit their train robberies. One of my show more favorites in the collection: girl-power western, train heist, and a substantial steampunk feeling without the fog.
- "Clockwork Fagin" by Cory Doctorow is a tale of an orphanage taken over by the orphans after the cruel master dies. This was also a great story, although a take on Dickens is not necessarily the best way to take steampunk to new locations, even if the orphanage was technically in Canada, not London.
- "Seven Days Beset by Demons" by Shawn Cheng is a comic involving a young maker of clockwork scenes who falls for a young lady.
- "Hand in Glove" by Ysabeau S. Wilce. A detective has to solve a series of murders, strangulations of random people in the street with no witnesses. While I'm not sure how well all of the various elements in this story fit into a steampunk framework, I definitely enjoyed the mystery.
- "The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor" by Delia Sherman. When a young lord returns to the run-down and haunted Cwmlech Manor with clockwork servants and a plan. I don't know that I would have predicted it, but it turns out that ghost stories and steampunk go together surprisingly well.
- "Gethsemane" by Elizabeth Knox is set in a Caribbean colony, on the brink of a volcano eruption. Not my favorite, felt like more of a zombie story, that was only really "steampunk" because there was an airship tossed in.
- "The Summer People" by Kelly Link also didn't feel super-steampunk. It involves a young girl who is stuck in her small town, as a caretaker to a mysterious house filled with even more mysterious things. The only steampunk element was some clockwork toys the summer people leave behind, but it was such a good, creepy fairy story that I didn't care.
- "Peace in Our Time" by Garth Nix involves a master artificer in retirement, and a surprise visitor who wants him to remember things in his past that he'd rather forget. An interesting story, although I had a decent idea of how it was going to play out.
- "Nowhere Fast" by Christopher Rowe is a near-future post-apocalyptic, in which peak oil is a thing of the past, and a man who arrives in town in a personal car is an object of suspicion. The pacing in this story felt strange, and I didn't really get steampunk feeling from it.
- "Finishing School" by Kathleen Jennings is another comic, this time of two young girls in colonial Australia, who have their own reasons for resisting the curriculum of glorifying the airships that patrol the continent.
- "Steam Girl" by Dylan Horrocks is a story of the new girl in school, who doesn't fit in, but has a fantastic imagination, wherein she tells the tales of Steam Girl and her adventures across the solar system.
- "Everything Amiable and Obliging" by Holly Black is a story of robot servants and a young girl who falls in love with her robot dancing instructor, as he falls for her. It had a Ray-Bradbury-esque feel to it, and I'm always a sucker for a good romance, so I was sold.
- "The Oracle Engine" by M. T. Anderson is set in the time of the Roman Empire, and involves a young man who builds a calculating machine that can take the place of the oracles in predicting the will of the gods and the courses of battles. From a story level, this wasn't my favorite (not bad by any means, but pretty heavily focused on military strategy), but I thought it did the best job of any story in the collection at creating a world that used no traditional steampunk elements but felt thoroughly steampunky nonetheless.
Recommendation: Not as uniformly excellent as some of the other themed anthologies I've read, but it's a fun idea, and the good stories area really, really good. If you're a fan of steampunk, or if you haven't read much of it but are curious to see what it can do as a genre, this collection provides a good sampling. 4 out of 5 stars. show less
Individual Reviews: - "Some Fortunate Future Day" by Cassandra Clare involves a girl left alone in a house with only her clockwork dolls for company. I liked this one a lot, although it ended right at a critical point, making me anxious to know what happened next.
- "The Last Ride of the Glory Girls" by Libba Bray is a western, with a team of outlaw girls that use a clockwork time device to commit their train robberies. One of my show more favorites in the collection: girl-power western, train heist, and a substantial steampunk feeling without the fog.
- "Clockwork Fagin" by Cory Doctorow is a tale of an orphanage taken over by the orphans after the cruel master dies. This was also a great story, although a take on Dickens is not necessarily the best way to take steampunk to new locations, even if the orphanage was technically in Canada, not London.
- "Seven Days Beset by Demons" by Shawn Cheng is a comic involving a young maker of clockwork scenes who falls for a young lady.
- "Hand in Glove" by Ysabeau S. Wilce. A detective has to solve a series of murders, strangulations of random people in the street with no witnesses. While I'm not sure how well all of the various elements in this story fit into a steampunk framework, I definitely enjoyed the mystery.
- "The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor" by Delia Sherman. When a young lord returns to the run-down and haunted Cwmlech Manor with clockwork servants and a plan. I don't know that I would have predicted it, but it turns out that ghost stories and steampunk go together surprisingly well.
- "Gethsemane" by Elizabeth Knox is set in a Caribbean colony, on the brink of a volcano eruption. Not my favorite, felt like more of a zombie story, that was only really "steampunk" because there was an airship tossed in.
- "The Summer People" by Kelly Link also didn't feel super-steampunk. It involves a young girl who is stuck in her small town, as a caretaker to a mysterious house filled with even more mysterious things. The only steampunk element was some clockwork toys the summer people leave behind, but it was such a good, creepy fairy story that I didn't care.
- "Peace in Our Time" by Garth Nix involves a master artificer in retirement, and a surprise visitor who wants him to remember things in his past that he'd rather forget. An interesting story, although I had a decent idea of how it was going to play out.
- "Nowhere Fast" by Christopher Rowe is a near-future post-apocalyptic, in which peak oil is a thing of the past, and a man who arrives in town in a personal car is an object of suspicion. The pacing in this story felt strange, and I didn't really get steampunk feeling from it.
- "Finishing School" by Kathleen Jennings is another comic, this time of two young girls in colonial Australia, who have their own reasons for resisting the curriculum of glorifying the airships that patrol the continent.
- "Steam Girl" by Dylan Horrocks is a story of the new girl in school, who doesn't fit in, but has a fantastic imagination, wherein she tells the tales of Steam Girl and her adventures across the solar system.
- "Everything Amiable and Obliging" by Holly Black is a story of robot servants and a young girl who falls in love with her robot dancing instructor, as he falls for her. It had a Ray-Bradbury-esque feel to it, and I'm always a sucker for a good romance, so I was sold.
- "The Oracle Engine" by M. T. Anderson is set in the time of the Roman Empire, and involves a young man who builds a calculating machine that can take the place of the oracles in predicting the will of the gods and the courses of battles. From a story level, this wasn't my favorite (not bad by any means, but pretty heavily focused on military strategy), but I thought it did the best job of any story in the collection at creating a world that used no traditional steampunk elements but felt thoroughly steampunky nonetheless.
Recommendation: Not as uniformly excellent as some of the other themed anthologies I've read, but it's a fun idea, and the good stories area really, really good. If you're a fan of steampunk, or if you haven't read much of it but are curious to see what it can do as a genre, this collection provides a good sampling. 4 out of 5 stars. show less
My town is preparing for its very first steampunk festival hootenanny this weekend, the Brass Screw Confederacy, so when I saw this was available at the Great Library of teh Intarwebs, I thought it opportune to check it out and download it to my target-funded reader surveillance device.
It's uneven—what anthology isn't?—but when it's good, it's very good, and very good fun. I know almost nothing of these authors nor of the genre, so I'm going strictly by the stories in this book.
Some fortunate future day / Cassandra Clare: Nicely told, with a fairly realistic girl heroine whose emerging personality takes precedence over the technology.
The last ride of the Glory Girls / Libba Bray: A good twist on Old West outlaw adventures.
Clockwork show more Fagin / Cory Doctorow: Not at the Dickens level its title implies, but an engaging and satisfying rags-to-riches tale.
Seven days beset by demons / Shawn Cheng: A simple graphic tale, well-enough told.
Hand in glove / Ysabeau Wilce: The first real disappointment, a flatly told and contrived detective tale.
The ghost of Cwmlech Manor / Delia Sherman: I'm much more prepared to accept sentient mechanisms than ghosts, but this was a pretty good tale of the servant-girl/dissolute-nobleman genre. "Reader, I became his engineer."
Gethsemane / Elizabeth Knox: Some very complex characters, a bit ill-served by the adventure leanings of the plot which take over the story; it could work just fine without any steampunk trappings at all.
The summer people / Kelly Link: Really more of a fantasy story, but gorgeously written, with an engaging protagonist.
Peace in our time / Garth Nix: Disappointingly programmatic.
Nowhere fast / Christopher Rowe: (No, he's not related, far as I know.) OK; an unusual setting but simplistic plot and fairly transparent moralizing.
Finishing school / Kathleen Jennings: Ugh, didn't like this graphic piece at all: flat and simplistic.
Steam girl / Dylan Horrocks: Wow, this was great! First love among the socially awkward (i.e. those who enjoy steampunk tales).
Everything amiable and obliging / Holly Black: A tale of upper-class romance, where the unwelcome suitor is mechanical; otherwise follows the genre rules.
The oracle engine / M. T. Anderson: Surprisingly satisfying version of Roman history, with calculating engines and flying machines added. show less
It's uneven—what anthology isn't?—but when it's good, it's very good, and very good fun. I know almost nothing of these authors nor of the genre, so I'm going strictly by the stories in this book.
Some fortunate future day / Cassandra Clare: Nicely told, with a fairly realistic girl heroine whose emerging personality takes precedence over the technology.
The last ride of the Glory Girls / Libba Bray: A good twist on Old West outlaw adventures.
Clockwork show more Fagin / Cory Doctorow: Not at the Dickens level its title implies, but an engaging and satisfying rags-to-riches tale.
Seven days beset by demons / Shawn Cheng: A simple graphic tale, well-enough told.
Hand in glove / Ysabeau Wilce: The first real disappointment, a flatly told and contrived detective tale.
The ghost of Cwmlech Manor / Delia Sherman: I'm much more prepared to accept sentient mechanisms than ghosts, but this was a pretty good tale of the servant-girl/dissolute-nobleman genre. "Reader, I became his engineer."
Gethsemane / Elizabeth Knox: Some very complex characters, a bit ill-served by the adventure leanings of the plot which take over the story; it could work just fine without any steampunk trappings at all.
The summer people / Kelly Link: Really more of a fantasy story, but gorgeously written, with an engaging protagonist.
Peace in our time / Garth Nix: Disappointingly programmatic.
Nowhere fast / Christopher Rowe: (No, he's not related, far as I know.) OK; an unusual setting but simplistic plot and fairly transparent moralizing.
Finishing school / Kathleen Jennings: Ugh, didn't like this graphic piece at all: flat and simplistic.
Steam girl / Dylan Horrocks: Wow, this was great! First love among the socially awkward (i.e. those who enjoy steampunk tales).
Everything amiable and obliging / Holly Black: A tale of upper-class romance, where the unwelcome suitor is mechanical; otherwise follows the genre rules.
The oracle engine / M. T. Anderson: Surprisingly satisfying version of Roman history, with calculating engines and flying machines added. show less
This is a really delightful collection of stories. Some of them were so-so, but several of them were really beautiful and left me with a lot to think about.
My hands-down favorites were Nowhere Fast, by Christopher Rowe and Steam Girl, by Dylan Horrocks. In Nowhere Fast, Rowe shows us a picture of a future in which we have learned our lesson about the dangers of using non-renewable resources and disregarding our effect on our planet. But was in the right lesson? And what lesson are the people of this new age passing on to their children? The questions I was left to ponder after this story were frightening, but so very interesting that I couldn't dislike the story for its rather negative bent.
Steam Girl paints a picture of a life I feel show more like I lived myself, in high school, though its edges were more sharply defined. I envied the Steam Girl her talents of tale-weaving and drawing even as I saw myself in her. And I simply adore the way the story lets you decide its interpretation for yourself.
Also of note were Gethsemane, by Elizabeth Knox, which had a pleasantly Pompeii-flavored flare to it and waited to the very end to draw all the characters together, and - speaking of Rome - the delightfully Roman-flavored steampunk of The Oracle Engine, by M.T. Anderson. Romans with flying legions? Yes please!
It was also fun to have the several graphic shorts sprinkled in the collection. I've never delved much into the world of graphic fiction, and I'm not sure how I'd do with the long-form stuff, but the shorts were fun. Like taking coffee breaks.
Overall, I'd definitely recommend this to lovers of steam punk or even short fiction in general. show less
My hands-down favorites were Nowhere Fast, by Christopher Rowe and Steam Girl, by Dylan Horrocks. In Nowhere Fast, Rowe shows us a picture of a future in which we have learned our lesson about the dangers of using non-renewable resources and disregarding our effect on our planet. But was in the right lesson? And what lesson are the people of this new age passing on to their children? The questions I was left to ponder after this story were frightening, but so very interesting that I couldn't dislike the story for its rather negative bent.
Steam Girl paints a picture of a life I feel show more like I lived myself, in high school, though its edges were more sharply defined. I envied the Steam Girl her talents of tale-weaving and drawing even as I saw myself in her. And I simply adore the way the story lets you decide its interpretation for yourself.
Also of note were Gethsemane, by Elizabeth Knox, which had a pleasantly Pompeii-flavored flare to it and waited to the very end to draw all the characters together, and - speaking of Rome - the delightfully Roman-flavored steampunk of The Oracle Engine, by M.T. Anderson. Romans with flying legions? Yes please!
It was also fun to have the several graphic shorts sprinkled in the collection. I've never delved much into the world of graphic fiction, and I'm not sure how I'd do with the long-form stuff, but the shorts were fun. Like taking coffee breaks.
Overall, I'd definitely recommend this to lovers of steam punk or even short fiction in general. show less
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Author Information
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Get in Trouble, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies. (Bowker Author Biography)
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
- Alternate titles
- Steampunk!
- Original publication date
- 2011-10-11
- Dedication
- For Ursula
- First words
- (For Some Fortunate Future Day pages 1-16)
Time is many things, her father told her.
(For The Last Ride of the Glory Girls pages 17-53)
I were riding with the Glory Girls, and we had an appointment with the 4:10 coming through the Kelly Pass.
(For Clockwork Fagin pages 54-92)
Monty Goldfarb walked into Saint Agatha's like he owned the place, a superior look on the half of his face that was still intact, a spring in his step despite his steel left leg... (show all).
(For Seven Days Beset by Demons pages 93-107)
Monday
(For Hand in Glove pages 108-141)
Like bees to honey, they cluster around him, Anibal Aguille y Wilkins, the golden boy of the Califa Police Department, thrice decorated, always decorative.
(For Ghost of Cwmlech Manor pages 142-176)
There was a ghost at Cwmlech Manor.
(For Gethsemane pages 177-211)
A woman and a girl.
(For The Summer People pages 212-252)
Fran's daddy woke her up wielding a plant mister.
(For Peace in Our Time pages 253-266)
The old man who had once been the Grand Technomancer, Most Mighty Mechanician, and Highest of the High Artificier Adepts was cutting his roses when he heard the unmistakable... (show all) ticktock-tocktock of a clockwerk velocipede coming down the road.
(For Nowhere Fast pages 267-290)
Luz could see the future, or at least her future.
(For Finishing School pages 291-307)
"So you want to know how an orthodontist met the legendary Gwendoline Byrne….
(For Steam Girl pages 308-352)
The first time I see her, she's standing alone behind the library, looking at the ground.
(For Everything Amiable and Obliging pages 353-375)
Sofia looked out the window of her aunt's London town house, and the chimney-sweep spiders clattering along the slate rooftops, their glass abdomens full of as... (show all)h.
(For Oracle Engine pages 376-414)
Translated from Mendacius's
True Histories of the Roman Inventors
The lizard of the wasteland, so dazzling to the eye, so rapid to flee or to strike, may grow to it... (show all)s full maturity only in the most brutal of deserts, where no dew falls to drink and where the sun is relenting. - Quotations
- (For Some Fortunate Future Day Pages 1-16)
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz'd
And brass eternal slave ... (show all)to mortal rage;
When I have seen . . . the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increased store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate-
That Time will come and take my love away….
--William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Some Fortunate Future Day Pages 1-16)
Leaving a trail of blood behind him, he begins the long and painful crawl toward her garden, where she will find him again.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For The Last Ride of the Glory Girls pages 17-53)
I flicked the coin with my thumb and watched it spiral into the sudden rain.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Clockwork Fagin pages 54-92)
Though I believe I may be learning a little about them, too.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Seven Days Beset by Demons pages 93-107)
Sloth
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Hand in Glove pages 108-141)
Etreyo puts her truncheon and helmet away, tucks the bottle of Mint-o in her locker, and walks down the hall to the ready room.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Ghost of Cwmlech Manor pages 142-176)
Last summer, we went to London, and Sir Arthur presented us to Queen Victoria, who shook our hands and said she has never spoken to a ghost before, or a female engineer, and that she was delightfully amused.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Gethsemane pages 177-211)
Finally he said softly, wistfully, "The window was facing the wrong way," then, "I wish I'd seen it."
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For The Summer People pages 212-252)
She tells herself that one day soon she will go home again.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Peace in Our Time pages 253-266)
In the meantime, she began to whistle an old, old song.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Nowhere Fast pages 267-290)
"I know where we can get some parts," she said.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Finishing School pages 291-307)
That was the beginning….
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Steam Girl pages 308-352)
"Come on, then, Rocket Boy," she says, and holds out her hand.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Everything Amiable and Obliging pages 353-375)
"Yes," she said, and proving that a threat to her family was not the only way to provoke her, she kissed him.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)(For Oracle Engine pages 376-414)
The serving women came with almonds, King Hyrodes clapped, the actor Jason pranced upon the stage, and behind him, the chorus boys, dressed as women, moving their arms in delicate dance, sang of the gods, of their generosity, and of their love for all mankind. - Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.087627
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Teen, Science Fiction, Young Adult
- DDC/MDS
- 813.087627 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Speculative fiction Science fiction Steampunk
- LCC
- PZ5 .S798 — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Juvenile belles lettres
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 759
- Popularity
- 36,930
- Reviews
- 26
- Rating
- (3.59)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 18
- ASINs
- 5
