Steampunk Revolution
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Paolo Chikiamco runs Rocket Kapre (WWW.ROCKETKAPRE.COM), an imprint and blog dedicated to publishing, facilitating, and promoting works of the fantastic (in prose and comics) by Filipino authors. Once an associate at a top Philippine law firm, he came to realize that although fact is often stranger than fiction, it’s not quite as creatively fulfilling. He is the editor of Usok and Alternative Alamat, and his fiction has been published in such venues as Scheherazade’s Façade, Philippine Genre Stories, and the Philippine Speculative Fiction series. He is also the writer of High Society, the first in a series of steampunk comics set in the same world as “On Wooden Wings.”
Amal El-Mohtar is an Ottawa-born Lebanese-Canadian, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the UK. She is a Nebula Award nominee and a two-time winner of the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem as well as the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. Her fiction and poems have appeared in multiple venues online and in print, including Strange Horizons, Apex, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, Welcome to Bordertown, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium. She also edits Goblin Fruit, an online quarterly dedicated to fantastical poetry. You can find her online at AMALELMOHTAR.COM.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. Ford’s fiction has been widely translated around the world and is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. His latest collection, Crackpot Palace, will be published in August 2012 by Morrow/Harper Collins.
Jaymee Goh is the steampunk postcolonialist of Silver Goggles (SILVERGOGGLES.BLOGSPOT.COM). Her work engages with historicity, identity, cultural appropriation, imperialism, and neocolonialism in steampunk. She graduated from McMaster University with an M.A. in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, having written a thesis on the application of postcolonial theory to steampunk. She has written on racialized steampunk for the WisCon Chronicles (Aqueduct Press, 2011 and 2012), and contributed to Tor.com, Racialicious. com, the Apex Book Company Blog, Beyond Victoriana.com, and Steampunk II: Reloaded (Tachyon Publications, 2010). Her fiction has been published in Expanded Horizons, Crossed Genres, and Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories.
Lev Grossman is the author of four novels, including the New York Times bestsellers The Magicians and The Magician King; NPR called The Magician King “triumphant.” He is the book critic for TIME magazine, and his journalism has appeared in the Times, the Believer, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, Wired, and the Village Voice. He also makes frequent appearances on NPR. In 2011 Grossman won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer from the World Science Fiction Society. His alignment is chaotic good.
Samantha Henderson lives in Covina, California, by way of England, South Africa, Illinois, and Oregon. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, and Weird Tales; the anthologies Running with the Pack and Fantasy; and reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, and the Mammoth Book of Steampunk. She is the co-winner of the 2010 Rhysling Award for speculative poetry and is the author of the Forgotten Realms novel Dawnbringer.
Leow Hui Min Annabeth is a Southeast Asian student with an interest in postcoloniality and feminism. She currently holds a diploma in maths and science, which is admittedly rather odd for a literature-loving girl who never got the hang of integral calculus, but the more you know.... Her essays have been published in Transformative Works and Cultures, Bitch, and POSKOD. SG, and her fiction has appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Crossed Genres, among other places. Things she does not like include cultural imperialism, crushed dreams, and tea with non-non-dairy creamer.
N. K. Jemisin is a Brooklyn author whose short fiction and novels have been nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula, shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree, and have won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include the intersections of race and gender, resistance to oppression, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group and a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop. Her latest novel, The Killing Moon, will be published in May 2012 from Orbit Books. Her website is NKJEMISIN.COM.
Morgan Johnson has been pretending to be a giant squid on the Internet for twelve years. He is a cofounder of Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) with David Erik Nelson and Fritz Swanson and blogs at NEWSWIRE.POORMOJO.ORG. He lives in Oakland, California.
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, and The Red Tree, which was nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Most recently, her seventh novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, was published by Penguin. Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; The Ammonite Violin & Others; and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. In 2011, Subterranean Press released a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her partner, Kathryn.
Malissa Kent grew up listening to her father’s stories about heart surgeries (he was a nurse in the heart center at a nearby hospital). And though she carried a pacemaker in her purse as a teenager (just because), this is her first story about hearts. When she’s not injecting Steampunk or Fantastic elements into French history, she’s planning her next trip to France, where she lived for three years. She studied Creative Writing and French at Knox College and earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Stonecoast. She lives in Seattle and is currently putting the finishing touches on her epic Fantasy novel. This is her first publication.
Margaret Killjoy is a nomadic author, editor, anarchist, and activist. He is the founder and current editor of SteamPunk Magazine as well as the author of A Steampunk’s Guide to the Apocalypse, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower, and Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction. He publishes with the zine-publishing group Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness as well as the collectively run genrefiction publisher Combustion Books. He speaks and writes about the social significance of fiction and the rich political history of Steampunk as a genre and an emerging culture.
Andrew Knighton lives and occasionally writes in Stockport, England, where the gray skies provide a good motive to stay inside at the word processor. When not working in his standard-issue office job, he battles the slugs threatening to overrun his garden and the monsters lurking in the woods. He’s had more than thirty stories published in such places as Murky Depths, Redstone SF, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. He occasionally scrawls down thoughts about his latest stories at ANDREWKNIGHTON.WORDPRESS.COM. “Urban Drift” was inspired by nineteenth-century Chicago, where the buildings really did move, and a review of a comic, because Andrew will take inspiration anywhere he can.
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Sensation and Bullet-time, and of more than eighty short stories. His work has appeared in periodicals including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Weird Tales, New Haven Review, and subTERRAIN and in such anthologies as The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, Long Island Noir, and Lovecraft Unbound. His reportage and essays on radical politics and literature have appeared in Clamor, Village Voice, In These Times, The New Humanist, H+, and the anthologies You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong. His editorial work and fiction have been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and Shirley Jackson awards and for the Kurd Lasswitz Prize.
Garth Nix is a bestselling Australian writer best known for his young adult fantasy novels. His books include the award-winning novels Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, Shades Children, and Lord Sunday. He has also written for RPGs and magazines and journals. His latest book is A Confusion of Princes, a YA space opera.
Ben Peek is the critically acclaimed and controversial author of Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Black Sheep, and half the author of Above/Below. His collection Dead Americans will be published in early 2013. Currently, he lives in Sydney with a living American, a cat, and books that he and his partner organize based on the year the author was born. He keeps a low-fi blog at BENPEEK. LIVEJOURNAL.COM.
Cherie Priest is the author of a dozen novels, including the steampunk pulp adventures Ganymede, Dreadnought, Clementine, and Boneshaker. Boneshaker was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award; it was a PNBA Award winner and winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Cherie also wrote Bloodshot and Hellbent from Bantam Spectra; Fathom and the Eden Moore series from Tor; and three novellas published by Subterranean Press. In addition to all the above, her first foray into George R. R. Martin’s superhero universe, Fort Freak (for which she wrote the interstitial mystery), debuted in the summer of 2011. Cherie’s short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in such fine publications as Weird Tales, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies.
Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt as well as a number of short stories. Most of her steampunk work is available at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.
Christopher Rowe has published a couple of dozen stories and been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon awards. His work has been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and praised by the New York Times Book Review. His story “Another Word for Map Is Faith” made the long list in the Best American Short Stories 2007 volume, and his early fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, by Small Beer Press. A Forgotten Realms novel, Sandstorm, was published in 2011 by Wizards of the Coast, and he is hard at work on a new novel, Sarah Across America, about maps and megafauna. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio of Eastern Kentucky University and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife, Gwenda Bond, and several pets.
Vandana Singh teaches physics at a state university near Boston and writes in her nonexistent spare time. She was born and raised in the city of Dilli (aka Delhi, India), where medieval ruins lie strewn among modern-day edifices. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and has frequently been reprinted in Year’s Best publications. She is a winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Her most recent publication is a story for Lightspeed magazine.
Austin Sirkin has traveled to the present from the future, and in that future he participated in a movement called “iPunk,” wherein people would scrape off the intricate detailing on their technological devices to make everything look sleek and smooth. Upon arriving in the past, Austin was dismayed to discover that his iPunk made him fit in and that he was no longer “cool,” so he reluctantly became a Steampunk. This has given him a unique perspective on Steampunk and life in general.
Bruce Sterling is the bestselling author of novels including Heavy Weather, Involution Ocean, The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, The Zenith Angle, and The Caryatids; the short-story collections Gothic High-Tech and Globalhead; and the nonfiction titles The Hacker Crackdown and Shaping Things. He coauthored, with William Gibson, the critically acclaimed novel The Difference Engine. Sterling also edited Mirrorshades, the definitive cyberpunk anthology, and he is considered one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement.
Fritz Swanson’s work has appeared in such places as McSweeney’s, the Christian Science Monitor, Esopus, and the Mid-American Review. He lives in Manchester, Michigan, with his wife, Sara, and their children, Abigail and Oscar. Visit him at WWW.MANCHESTER-PRESS.COM.
Karin Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, and writes speculative fiction in Swedish and English. She occasionally teaches creative writing and works for the local writers’ center. Her short fiction has been published in Weird Tales, Shimmer Magazine, and Unstuck Annual, as well as the Odd? anthology from Cheeky Frawg Books. She made her book debut in 2010 with the Swedish story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? The dystopian novel Amatka will follow in September 2012. Her first English short story collection, Jagannath, is due out in October 2012. Her website can be found at KARINTIDBECK.COM.
Lavie Tidhar is the author of the BSFA Award–nominated Osama, which has been compared to Philip K. Dick’s seminal work The Man in the High Castle by the Guardian and the Financial Times. He is also the author of the Bookman Histories novels, comprising The Bookman, Camera Obscura, and The Great Game, and of many other novellas and short stories.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowd-funded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic Award, Rhysling, and Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum awards and the Pushcart Prize, and she was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.
Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Tor.com, Weird Tales, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is the coauthor of Geek Wisdom (out from Quirk Books). Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award.
Jeff VanderMeer is a two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and has had stories published by Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Conjunctions, Black Clock, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Recent books include the Nebula finalist novel Finch (2009) and the short-story collection The Third Bear (2010). His The Steampunk Bible was featured on the CBS Morning Show and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for best related book. He also recently coedited the mega-anthology The Weird compendium. A cofounder of Shared Worlds, a teen SF/F writing camp, VanderMeer has been a guest speaker at the Library of Congress and MIT, among others. He writes book reviews for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, and the Washington Post. VanderMeer’s latest novel, just completed, is Annihilation.
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. Kitty Steals the Show, the tenth installment, is due out in summer 2012. She has also written for young adults (Voices of Dragons, Steel) and two stand-alone fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and she’s a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at WWW.CARRIEVAUGHN.COM.
JY Yang is a scientist-turned-writer-turned-journalist who gets the odd SF/F short story published every now and then. She likes chicken rice and furry hats. She blogs at MISSHALLELUJAH.NET and lives in Singapore, in the company of the occasional Pomeranian and an overactive imagination.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Eg
il
Addison Howell and the Clockroach
On Wooden Wings
Sir Ranolph Wykeham-Rackham
The Heart Is the Matter
Mother Is a Machine
Possession
Beatrice
Arbeitskraft
Study for Solo Piano
Beside Calais
An Exhortation to Young Writers (Advice Tendered by Poor Mojo's Giant Squid)
A Handful of Rice
Fixing Hanover
Salvage
Urban Drift
Ascension
Nowhere Fast
The Effluent Engine
To Follow the Waves
Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia
The Seventh Expression of the Robot General
The Stoker Memorandum
Smoke City
Goggles (c.1910)
Peace in Our Time
White Fungus
Winding Down the House: Towards a Steampunk Without Steam
Steampunk Shapes Our Future
From Airships of Imagination to Feet on the Ground
The (R)Evolution of Steampunk
Acknowledgments
Contributor Biographies