Steampunk
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Book Reviews of Steampunk
Book Review: An effective overview of the genre
Summary: 4 Stars
For those who aren't familiar with steampunk, it's sort of hard to define. I would loosely describe it as people running around a retro-futuristic, usually Victorian society employing improbable weapons and machinery powered by steam and clockwork. The back cover claims "Steampunk is Victorian elegance and modern technology: steam-driven robots, souped-up stagecoaches, and space-faring dirigibles fueled by gaslight romance, mad scientists, and very trim waistcoats," which does give a pretty good idea of the sort of things you're likely to find in the anthology. To break it down:
Introduction: The 19th Century Roots of Steampunk (Jess Nevins) - This essay covered a lot of things regarding steampunk's relationship with and reaction against dime novels that I hadn't heard before, making several of the stories in the anthology make a lot more sense. I think most of Nevins's arguments primarily apply to steampunk literature and don't necessarily cover its other aspects, but it's very interesting and useful information.
Benediction: Excerpt from The Warlord of the Air (Michael Moorcock) - I don't really approve of including excerpts from novels in an anthology, using the reasoning that if I've just bought a book, I would rather have an entire story than an extended advertisement for another book. This is a good introduction to the steampunk feel, though, as it's basically one extended airship battle.
Lord Kelvin's Machine (James P. Blaylock) - This is one of those that is helped by the explanations in Nevins's essay; it's heavily based on the dime novel tradition, although with a wink and a nod. An inventor must use his ingenuity to save the world both from a villain and from his well-meaning but foolish compatriots in the face of a deadly comet.
The Giving Mouth (Ian R. MacLeod) - While this story really didn't even try to make sense by the end, the world it's set in is fascinating - I've never heard of medieval steampunk before, but I absolutely adore it.
A Sun in the Attic (Mary Gentle) - A woman's husband (or one of them, anyway, as the story takes place in a polyandrous society) uncovers something that some feel the world may not need to know; the story questions the positive and negative aspects of scientific discovery and humanity's reactions to it.
The God-Clown is Near (Jay Lake) - A strange story about an inventor who is asked by a shady organization to build a "moral clown", an automaton that will pass judgment on their society. I think the world it's set in is part of a series by the author, and I'm tempted to track down one of his books; I liked the story well enough, but it seems to lack the context that would ground it a little and give it some weight.
The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel (Joe R. Lansdale) - I have to say, this story goes against pretty much all of my personal preferences. The idea isn't bad - that the Time Traveler from H.G. Wells's The Time Machine accidentally damaged the space-time continuum, causing Very Bad Things to happen - but the violence is extremely graphic, and I can't reconcile Wells's Time Traveler with the one in this story at all.
The Selene Gardening Society (Molly Brown) - This one is based on Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, which I haven't read, but it's still a cute story even without the background knowledge. In an attempt to distract her husband from tearing up her garden, a society wife begins planning a garden on the moon.
Seventy-Two Letters (Ted Chiang) - Again, the world in which this story is set is what makes it interesting; here certain names, when impressed on inorganic objects (and even, they find, organic ones), will give them movement and even life. As the science progresses, the scientists working on the naming project must deal with the ethical implications of playing God.
The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance (Michael Chabon) - A historical revision, featuring the struggles of two brothers in a world where a Declaration of Reunion has brought America back under British control and the Civil War has turned into a second Revolutionary War. This feels like the prologue to a larger narrative, although as far as I know, this is all there is.
Victoria (Paul Di Filippo) - A burlesque comedy in which a very young Queen Victoria has run away, and a scientist must track her down (while donating his creation, a half-newt prostitute that bears an odd resemblance to Victoria, to temporarily take her place in Buckingham Palace). Utterly ridiculous, but goofy and fun, and with several unexpectedly funny in-jokes for people who read too much Victorian lit.
Reflected Light (Rachel E. Pollack) - A series of wax cylinder diary entries by a factory worker. Extremely short, but surprisingly interesting.
Minutes of the Last Meeting (Stepan Chapman) - A declining Russia in a nuclear era. I'm not sure I would consider this story particularly steampunk, and it's a bit too dark for my taste.
Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast (Neal Stephenson) - Again, this is more cyberpunk than steampunk if you ask me, but it stands moderately well as a short story in its own right, if you don't mind accepting that two sides are duking it out over the distribution of information without really understanding what they're going on about.
The Steam-Driven Time Machine: A Pop Culture Survey (Rick Klaw) - A chronological rundown of major steampunk movies, games, etc. It reads mostly like a guy reminiscing about his hobby - which is basically what it is, come to think of it.
The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium (Bill Baker) - Same as above, only with graphic novels.
It's hard to really give a final opinion on an anthology; there are always going to be good stories and lousy stories (really, I'd give it 3.5 stars if I could). Still, I enjoyed this, and even the bad stories tended to be at least interesting in the sheer variety of settings and technology employed.
Book Review: Many misses and few hits...
Summary: 2 Stars
Every anthology tends to offer some hits and misses in terms of story selection, and `Steampunk' is no different. Along with three essays on the genre, the book provides 13 tales dealing with "Victorian elegance and modern technology". With the exception of an excerpt from Michael Moorcock's "The Warlord of the Air", all entries have previously appeared in print within the past 25 years.
Reviewer `Redon' gives a good overview of the book's contents. I'll just add my thoughts on some of the material:
For the essays, Jess Nevins provides a concise history of steampunk in literature, focusing on the role of the "Edisonade" genre of 19th century dime novels in setting the major themes and tropes of the genre. Rick Klaw's essay deals with steampunk in television and film, and Bill Baker provides a history of steampunk comics and graphic novels.
My selections for the best stories in the book, with capsule summaries:
"The Giving Mouth" by Ian R. McLeod: more steam-fantasy than steampunk, McLeod's story takes a page from Michael Swanwick's seminal novel the "Iron Dragon's Daughter" and juxtaposes slag heaps, industrial decay, and magic in a coming -of-age tale with a melancholy, but effective, tone.
"The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider" by Joe R. Lansdale: mixing steampunk with splatterpunk, Lansdale relates a violent encounter between the steam-driven robot from the popular 19th century boy's novels, and H. G. Wells's time traveler, made mutated and vampiric by too much travel in the 4th dimension. Readers will be laughing out loud at one paragraph, and squirming at the next. Having a Lansdale story in this collection is bit like bringing along your cousin Bubba from Mississippi - the one who likes NASCAR, squirrel hunting, and making politically incorrect remarks about People of Color, militant lesbian feminists, and ponytailed men who do yoga - to a soiree hosted by the staff of The Nation magazine. But there's no getting away from the fact that Lansdale delivers a great story, howevermuch it sits uneasily with the other entries. [The succeeding tale, "The Selene Gardening Society", which is meant to be a light-hearted parody of a Victorian drawing-room comedy, seems like even thinner gruel than it actually is, coming as it does after a Lansdale adventure. Not a good placement of story order in the anthology by the editors !]
"Seventy-two Letters" by Ted Chiang: a well-written novelette dealing with an alternative Victorian England where Kabbalistic magic gives rise to homunculi and androids, which power a counterpart of our own Industrial Age. Much of the story's plot hinges on the concept of `preformationism', which dominated scientific thought regarding sexual reproduction until supplanted by modern embryology in the late 19th century. Unfortunately, Chiang fails to provide any exposition on the topic in the course of unfolding his narrative; thus readers not familiar with this rather obscure theory may find themselves a bit lost.
"Minutes of the Last Meeting" by Stepan Chapman: a strange, overly worked mélange of steampunk, cyberpunk, and comic fantasy. The story starts on a traditional alt-history adventure note involving the Tsar, his entourage, and Revolutionary Russia, but then get weirder as it goes on, with the author throwing one SF trope after another into the mix. The mix never quite gels, but the narrative has enough crazed energy to keep the reader engaged all the way to the bitter end.
The remaining stories are, in my opinion, disappointments. Some are underdeveloped and needed more work before seeing print ("The God-Clown is Near", "Reflected Light"). Others are rather pedestrian re-hashes of familiar themes, but have some `progressive' element that the editors deemed stylish enough for inclusion ("A Sun in the Attic"). A contribution by current Fiction Darling Michael Chabon ("The Martian Agent") is over-written and plodding. Other stories are pleasant, somewhat droll satires of Victorian social mores ("The Selene Gardening Society", "Victoria"); but in lacking the dystopian, edgy character of steampunk per se, their inclusion in this anthology is a mystery.
In summary, `Steampunk' has too many Misses to make up for the sparse selection of Hits. The `definitive' Steampunk anthology still awaits print......
Book Review: A decent selection of differing tales
Summary: 3 Stars
After being somewhat disappointed from my first foray into the steampunk genre, I was unsure what to expect from the stories in this tome. In that I had read two of them previously - the ones by Di Filippo, which I disliked, and by Lansdale, which I liked immensely - I wasn't sure if the rest would fall into my reading tastes.
There were quite a few quality stories in this collection, notably the ones by Blaylock, Chaing and Chapman. I particularly enjoyed the metaphysical aspects of Chaing's story, which dealt less with the technological side of steampunk vice its possible spiritual.
The remaining stories were well written but didn't hold my interest very well, with the exception of "The Giving Mouth" by MacLeod which was just too damned weird for its own good - with so many differences between the world described to our own, it had pretty firmly crossed the line from 'steampunk' to just 'odd fantasy.'
Book Review: Steampunk Sampler
Summary: 4 Stars
Steampunk is a neat niche subgenre, a melding of Jules Verne-esque, Victorian era scifi with some modern sensibilities and other anachronisms. This anthology is a nice intro to the field.
Among my favorites here are the excerpt from Michael Moorcock's novel, WARLORD OF THE AIR, and the short stories "Lord Kelvin's Machine" by James P. Blaylock and "The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel" by Joe R. Lansdale (the latter an extremely graphic and nasty deconstruction, but unarguably unforgettable.)
The stories are pretty representative of the field. I didn't like all of them, but that's pretty commonplace for any reader when you're reading an anthology of stories by many different authors. If you're at all curious about steampunk, this primer is a good starting point.
Book Review: good survey of bad writing
Summary: 2 Stars
I can recommend it to people like me, with an interest but not much knowledge of steampunk. The stories are well chosen to give an idea of the range of ideas and styles.
They weren't much fun to read, though. Mostly unimaginative, implausible, sometimes self-parodying pulp fiction with poorly-researched Victorian trappings. Perhaps I'm missing the point, and that's what makes it punk. Even so, it will be of interest either to the committed or the perplexed, but not to people looking for good writing.
"The Steam Man of the Prairie" is intentionally so bad as to be good, however, and "Seventy-Two Letters" is a gem: elegant, provocative, worth reading twice or more until you slap your head and smile.