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.
Other Mammoth titles
The Mammoth Book of Pirates
The Mammoth Book of Men O’War
The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 22
The Mammoth Book of Boys’ Own Stuff
The Mammoth Book of Brain Teasers
The Mammoth Book of Merlin
The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures
The Mammoth Book of The Beatles
The Mammoth Book of the Best Short SF Novels
The Mammoth Book of Chess
The Mammoth Book of Quick Puzzles
The Mammoth Book of New IQ Puzzles
The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories
The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF
The Mammoth Book of Great British Humour
The Mammoth Book of Fun Brain Training
The Mammoth Book of Dracula
The Mammoth Book of Tattoo Art
The Mammoth Book of Bob Dylan
The Mammoth Book of Mixed Martial Arts
The Mammoth Book of Codeword Puzzles
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24
The Mammoth Book of Really Silly Jokes
The Mammoth Book of Undercover Cops
The Mammoth Book of Weird News
The Mammoth Book of Lost Symbols
The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies
The Mammoth Book of Antarctic Journeys
The Mammoth Book of Muhammad Ali
Edited by Sean Wallace
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Contents
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
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
Steampunk: Looking to the Future Through the Lens of the Past
Ekaterina Sedia
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 par
ts 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.
The question, of course, remains: what does it matter if we reimagine the past? Sure, it is nice to pretend that the wealth we’re enjoying now was not ill-gotten, but it doesn’t really help to right past wrongs. However, I would argue that by reimagining how things could’ve gone, we can hold up the mirror to our present, and by extension to our future. After all, if we cannot imagine a better past, how can we even begin to understand what we need to do today to build a more equitable, more sustainable, kinder future?
This book offers as many answers as there are writers – from Freidrich Engels building a Dialectical Engine and the mechanical-jawed factory girls of Nick Mamatas to the creation of Shweta Narayan’s mechanical bird to Catherynne M. Valente’s unapologetically punk approach to Victoriana, the possibilities are as boundless as their imaginations. All of these stories have one thing in common: while they may push the boundaries of what is commonly considered steampunk, they never waver in their interrogation of the human condition, and the ways in which our past shapes our future.
Ekaterina Sedia, May 2011, New Jersey
Fixing Hanover
Jeff VanderMeer
When Shyver can’t lift it from the sand, he brings me down from the village. It lies there on the beach, entangled in the seaweed, dull metal scoured by the sea, limpets and barnacles stuck to its torso. It’s been lost a long time, just like me. It smells like rust and oil still, but only a tantalizing hint.
“It’s good salvage, at least,” Shyver says. “Maybe more.”
“Or maybe less,” I reply. Salvage is the life’s blood of the village in the off-season, when the sea’s too rough for fishing. But I know from past experience, there’s no telling what the salvagers will want and what they’ll discard. They come from deep in the hill country abutting the sea cliffs, their needs only a glimmer in their savage eyes.
To Shyver, maybe the thing he’d found looks like a long box with a smaller box on top. To me, in the burnishing rasp of the afternoon sun, the last of the winter winds lashing against my face, it resembles a man whose limbs have been torn off. A man made of metal. It has lamps for eyes, although I have to squint hard to imagine there ever being an ember, a spark, of understanding. No expression defiles the broad pitted expanse of metal.
As soon as I see it, I call it “Hanover”, after a character I had seen in an old movie back when the projector still worked.
“Hanover?” Shyver says with a trace of contempt.
“Hanover never gave away what he thought,” I reply, as we drag it up the gravel track toward the village. Sandhaven, they call it, simply, and it’s carved into the side of cliffs that are sliding into the sea. I’ve lived there for almost six years, taking on odd jobs, assisting with salvage. They still know next to nothing about me, not really. They like me not for what I say or who I am, but for what I do: anything mechanical I can fix, or build something new from poor parts. Someone reliable in an isolated place where a faulty water pump can be devastating. That means something real. That means you don’t have to explain much.
“Hanover, whoever or whatever it is, has given up on more than thoughts,” Shyver says, showing surprising intuition. It means he’s already put a face on Hanover, too. “I think it’s from the Old Empire. I think it washed up from the Sunken City at the bottom of the sea.”
Everyone knows what Shyver thinks, about everything. Brown-haired, green-eyed, gawky, he’s lived in Sandhaven his whole life. He’s good with a boat, could navigate a cockleshell through a typhoon. He’ll never leave the village, but why should he? As far as he knows, everything he needs is here.
Beyond doubt, the remains of Hanover are heavy. I have difficulty keeping my grip on him, despite the rust. By the time we’ve made it to the courtyard at the center of Sandhaven, Shyver and I are breathing as hard as old men. We drop our burden with a combination of relief and self-conscious theatrics. By now, a crowd has gathered, and not just stray dogs and bored children.
First law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community. Is it scrap? Should it be discarded? Can it be restored?
John Blake, council leader, all unkempt black beard, wide shoulders and watery turquoise eyes, stands there. So does Sarah, who leads the weavers, and the blacksmith Growder, and the ethereal captain of the fishing fleet: Lady Salt as she is called – she of the impossibly pale, soft skin, the blonde hair in a land that only sees the sun five months out of the year. Her eyes, ever-shifting, never settling – one is light blue and one is fierce green, as if to balance the sea between calm and roiling. She has tiny wrinkles in the corners of those eyes, and a wry smile beneath. If I remember little else, fault the eyes. We’ve been lovers the past three years, and if I ever fully understand her, I wond
er if my love for her will vanish like the mist over the water at dawn.
With the fishing boats not launching for another week, a host of broad-faced fisher folk, joined by lesser lights and gossips, has gathered behind us. Even as the light fades: shadows of albatross and gull cutting across the horizon and the roofs of the low houses, huddled and glowing a deep gold and orange around the edges, framed by the graying sky.
Blake says, “Where?” He’s a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.
“The beach, the cove,” Shyver says. Blake always reduces him to a similar terseness.
“What is it?”
This time, Blake looks at me, with a glare. I’m the fixer who solved their well problems the season before, who gets the most value for the village from what’s sold to the hill scavengers. But I’m also Lady Salt’s lover, who used to be his, and depending on the vagaries of his mood, I suffer more or less for it.
I see no harm in telling the truth as I know it, when I can. So much remains unsaid that extra lies exhaust me.
“It is part of a metal man,” I say.
A gasp from the more ignorant among the crowd. My Lady Salt just stares right through me. I know what she’s thinking: in scant days she’ll be on the open sea. Her vessel is as sleek and quick and buoyant as the water, and she likes to call it Seeker, or sometimes Mist, or even just Cleave. Salvage holds little interest for her.