Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
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When RAMONA SZCZERBA (a.k.a. Winona Cookie) is not being a psychologist in private practice in San Diego, she’s busy making art, something she has done for as long as she can remember. She enjoys creating whimsical children’s illustrations in watercolor, but also loves working with collage and assemblage. She favors the darkest faeries, legendary women, arcane subject matter, and inventors who never were. She is currently obsessed with the steampunk genre and is trying to keep up with the torrent of characters who insist on being depicted and having their stories told. She has illustrated several coloring books, published two calendars, and written a feature article that appeared in Somerset Studios. About her collages combined with short stories, she writes: “For many years I tried to come up with charming and whimsical children’s stories so that I might illustrate them, and hopefully, realize large profits. The stumbling block seemed to be plot—I couldn’t think of any. Great characters materialized and meandered about, doing absolutely nothing. When I started creating these collages, something different began to happen: stories come to me as I work on them, usually beginning with the character’s name and evolving from there. It’s as though their stories really happened, and if they didn’t, they should have.”
Contributors to “A Secret History of Steampunk”
MATTHEW (ALCOTT) CHENEY (“Mimeographed 1976 Bulletin of New Hampshire Folklore & Miscellany, Mecha-Oliphaunt”) lives in the town in New Hampshire where Nathaniel Hawthorne died. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a wide variety of venues, including One Story, Las Vegas Weekly, English Journal, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. He is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy and is a columnist for Strange Horizons. Of his steampunk researches, Cheney says, “New Hampshire has given the world many things, including one of the all-time worst presidents (Franklin Pierce), the first famous American serial killer (H. H. Holmes), a lurid bestselling novel (Peyton Place), one of the most powerful conservative media outlets before the rise of Fox News (the Manchester Union Leader newspaper), and refuge for the late J. D. Salinger. Naturally, such a great state has made its share of contributions to the reality and fiction of steampunk. One must simply know under which slab of granite to look.”
RIKKI DUCORNET is one of the preeminent surrealists/fantasists of the past three decades, with classic books that include The Complete Butcher’s Tales, Phosphor in Dreamland, and Gazelle. The excerpt from her work used in “A Secret History” is from a short story in her collection The Word “Desire”.
FÁBIO FERNANDES is a writer living in São Paulo, Brazil. Fernandes is the author of A Construção do Imaginário Cyber (2006), Os Dias da Peste (2009), and Os Anos de Silício (2010). Also a journalist and translator, he is responsible for the Brazilian translations of several prominent SF novels, including Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and A Clockwork Orange. His short stories have been published in Brazil, Portugal, Romania, UK, New Zealand, and USA. In 2008, he created the SFF review blog Post-Weird Thoughts. Fernandes contributed an excerpt from “The Arrival of the Cogsmiths,” in the context of inspiring the character XY to complete his mechanical ostrich. The story was “written in the same universe of The Boulton-Watt-Frankenstein Company, both of which were published originally in Everyday Weirdness in 2009. The idea was: What if Victor Frankenstein had decided that machines would work better because they would most probably do their master’s bidding? The entire story was conceived to be a kind of tableux vivant in which I would present the Cogsmiths, apprentices of Frankenstein.”
FELIX GILMAN (“An Ode, On Encountering the Mecha-Ostrich”) is the author of the novels Thunderer and Gears of the City. His new novel, The Half-Made World, is forthcoming from Tor in September 2010. For better or worse, it doesn’t have any mecha-ostriches. He lives in New York, and his website is www.felixgilman.com. “The spark for the story was that Jeff e-mailed me and said ‘would you like to write a few words about seeing a mecha-ostrich in a 19th century inventor’s yard I need it by Friday please’ and I said ‘ok why not.’ That’s not a very good story I’m afraid but it’s how it was.”
L. L. HANNETT (“Notes & Queries” and “Excerpts from Shelley Vaughn’s journal”) lives in Adelaide, South Australia—city of churches, bizarre murders, and pie floaters. She has sold over a dozen stories to venues that include Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, and Electric Velocipede. Her story “On the Lot and in the Air” was on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2009. She is a graduate of the Clarion South Writers Workshop, and hopes to complete her PhD in medieval Icelandic literature before she grows older than her subject matter. She writes of her collaboration with Angela Slatter, “Notes & Queries,” which riffs off Jeffrey Ford’s “Dr. Lash Remembers” in the Stories section of this anthology: “When Slatter and I were planning our piece, I found myself mentioning the word ‘serendipity’ way more frequently than is probably acceptable—but I couldn’t help it. This was one of those mythical occasions when the universe was out to help us put this mad thing together. Angela had recently been reading some of Ford’s other works (and she seems to remember every single line she has ever read in her life), so she quickly came up with really inventive ways to incorporate them into her ‘Prisoner Queen’ and ‘Air Ferry Disaster’ sections, thus earning herself the title Queen of Intertextual References. I have always wanted an excuse to write something in a ‘N. & Q.’ style, and since I’ve been reading a lot of 19th-century literature lately, the tone and approach we took seemed the natural way to go. We both wanted to play with the ideas in Ford’s story without directly translating them into our piece, so we decided to take a couple of concepts that really jumped out at us and mess with them: I was dying to get my hands on ‘Dr. Lash’ and the mysterious spores, and Angela was instantly attracted to the idea of transforming Millicent and the Prisoner Queen. Our writing styles are different, but complementary, so it’s always fun working together. After a few drafts, passing the piece back and forth, it became hard to tell where one Brain ended and the other began—which is just how it should be. All we need now is a Cerebral Exchange Compressor and we’ll be set.”
MECHA-OSTRICH. The Mecha-Ostrich’s fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Black Clock, Tor.com, and many year’s best anthologies. After writing the frame story for “A Secret History of Steampunk,” the Mecha-Ostrich is a very tired bird.
EKATERINA SEDIA (“Two pages from The Russian Book of the Improbable”) resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone, were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as the Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com. As for her contribution, she writes that she has been “working on Russian steampunk for a while now—my agent is currently shopping an alternative history novel in which Russia abolishes serfdom in 1825 instead of 1861, becoming an industrial rather than agrarian power. This setup of course offers itself to all sorts of fun alternative history twists and insane technological developments—and what better place to test airships than Siberia?”
ANGELA SLATTER (“Notes & Queries” and “Mary Lewis’ letter to Eudamien Fontenrose”) is a Brisbane-based writer of speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared in such anthologies as Dreaming Again (Jack Dann, ed.), Tartarus Press’ Strange Tales II and III, the Twelfth Planet Press’s 2012, and in such journals as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, and On Spec. Three of her stories have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Award in the Best Fantasy Short Story category and her work has had several Honourable Mentions in the Datlow, Link, and Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies. She has two short story collections out in 2010: Sourdough & Other Stories (Tartarus Press) and The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications). She works parttime at a writers’ center. She is als
o a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006 and she blogs at angelaslatter.com about writing and random things that catch her attention. Of her collaboration with Lisa Hannett, she writes, “Brain and I at first talked about doing a straight narrative called ‘An Audience with the Queen’ or ‘The Prisoner Queen in Bloom.’ However, I am very lucky because Lisa knows everything in the world and mentioned the idea of doing our section in the form of the old Notes & Queries section of an 1800s broadsheet. She even had examples she was able to send me—huzzah for nerdish habits! So we brainstormed to do four main entries and picked four points from Ford’s story that we thought could be used. In one of them I wanted to make an oblique reference to Ford’s ‘The Night Whiskey,’ hence the note about the deathberry in the Prisoner Queen, and I also wanted Millicent to be less innocent that she might appear. I also liked the idea of crossing the Hot Air Opera with the Air Ferry Disaster. Lisa had ideas about the spores, Dr. Lash, and the ear-ink that left pictures on the pillows of the sufferers. The other random queries were things we pulled out of the air. I had to read up on the writing style, and luckily Lisa had been reading a surfeit of Oscar Wilde and was able to edit over the worst of my inconsistent and anachronistic phrasings! We did a back-and-forth on the entries about four times before we were happy. I love working with Lisa as we have a similar work ethic, a comparable aesthetic sense, and yet still have very different voices.”
BRIAN STABLEFORD (“Excerpt from ‘The Titan Unwrecked’ and the translation from Albert Robida’s “The Railway War”) lives in Reading, England. He has published more than 160 books of various sorts, including the recent novels Prelude to Eternity and Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations, the recent story collections The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas and Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica, and the recent nonfiction book The Devil’s Party: A Short History of Satanic Abuse. He is currently translating classics of French scientific romance, including works by Maurice Renard, J. H. Rosny the Elder, and Albert Robida (from whose The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul “The Railway War” is taken). “The Titan Unwrecked” is a sequel to both Paul Feval’s Knightshade and Morgan Robertson’s “Futility, or, The Wreck of the Titan.”
IVICA STEVANOVIC (two images attributed to the comic strip “American Tinker Under the Influence of Absinthe”) was born in 1977, in Nis, south of Serbia. He grew up on comic books and old horror movies. In early childhood he began to draw, and is still working. He illustrated a large number of titles for children, and designed the books’ covers...He mostly likes to illustrate picture books, and his favorite is Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes. So far, he has worked mainly with Serbian publishing houses. His specialty is graphic novels and art book projects. To date he has published Kindly Corpses (2003), Lexicon of Art Legions (2005), Anatomy of the Sky (2006), and Katil (Bloodthirsty Man) (2008). When creating art, Ivica uses different techniques: from ink pen drawing as a basis, through watercolors to digital painting and collage. The results of his work can be seen on www.behance.net/IvicaStevanovic and EDGE77 cgsociety.org/gallery. Stevanovic lives in Veternik (northern Serbia) with his wife, Milica, who is also a children’s illustrator. Stevanovic currently works as a lecturer at the Academy of Art in Novi Sad (Serbia), the Department of Graphic Communication. He has won several prizes in the fields of design, illustrations, cartoons, and comics.
The Editors
Hugo Award winner ANN VANDERMEER and World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer have recently co-edited such anthologies as Best American Fantasy #1 & 2, Steampunk, The New Weird, Last Drink Bird Head, and Fast Ships, Black Sails. They are the co-authors of The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. Future projects include The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Fictions for Atlantic and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities for HarperCollins. Jeff’s latest books are the Nebula-nominated novel Finch and the writing strategy guide Booklife. Ann is the editor-in-chief of Weird Tales magazine. Together, they have been profiled by National Public Radio and the New York Times’ Papercuts blog. They are active teachers, and have taught at Clarion San Diego, Odyssey, and the teen writing camp Shared Worlds, for which Jeff is the assistant director. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with too many books and four cats. For more information, visit WWW.JEFFVANDERMEER.COM.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE: AN UNWELCOME VISITOR
CHAPTER TWO: A CONSPIRACY OF JEWS
CHAPTER THREE: THE FALL OF EMPIRES
At the Intersection of Technology and Romance
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer: What Is Steampunk?
Fiction
William Gibson: The Gernsback Continuum
Marc Laidlaw: Great Breakthroughs in Darkness
JeffreyFord: Dr. Lash Remembers
Stephen Baxter: The Unblinking Eye
Caitlín R. Kiernan: The Steam Dancer (1896)
Andrew Knighton: The Cast-Iron Kid
Margo Lanagan: Machine Maid
Ramsey Shehadeh: The Unbecoming of Virgil Smythe
Shweta Narayan: The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar
Chris Roberson: O One
Samantha Henderson: Wild Copper
David Erik Nelson: The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond
Jess Nevins: Lost Pages from The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana
Cherie Priest: Tanglefoot (A Clockwork Century Story)
Margaret Ronald: A Serpent in the Gears
G. D. Falksen: The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday
Tanith Lee: The Persecution Machine
Daniel Abraham: Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance
James L. Grant & Lisa Mantchev: As Recorded on Brass Cylinders: Adagio for Two Dancers
Vilhelm Bergsøe: Flying Fish Prometheus (A Fantasy of the Future)
Catherynne M. Valente: The Anachronist’s Cookbook
Sydney Padua: Lovelace & Babbage: Origins, with Salamander
The Mecha-Ostrich: A Secret History of Steampunk
Nonfiction
Gail Carriger: Which Is Mightier, the Pen or the Parasol?
The Future of Steampunk: A Roundtable Interview
Biographies
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