The Mammoth Book of Steampunk

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

www.constablerobinson.com

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

Fixing Hanover

by Jeff VanderMeer

The Steam Dancer (1896)

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Icebreaker

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

Clockwork Fairies

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

The Effluent Engine

by N. K. Jemisin

The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi

by Peter M. Ball

The Armature of Flight

by Sharon Mock

The Anachronist’s Cookbook

by Catherynne M. Valente

Numismatics in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

Zeppelin City

by Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick

The People’s Machine

by Tobias S. Buckell

The Hands That Feed

by Matthew Kressel

Machine Maid

by Margo Lanagan

To Follow the Waves

by Amal El-Mohtar

Clockmaker’s Requiem

by Barth Anderson

Dr Lash Remembers

by Jeffrey Ford

Lady Witherspoon’s Solution

by James Morrow

Reluctance

by Cherie Priest

A Serpent in the Gears

by Margaret Ronald

The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois

by Megan Arkenberg

Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes” by Benjamin Rosenbaum

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Clockwork Chickadee

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Cinderella Suicide

by Samantha Henderson

Arbeitskraft

by Nick Mamatas

To Seek Her Fortune

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

The Ballad of the Last Human

by Lavie Tidhar

About the Contributors

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.