Steampunk Revolution Read online

  STEAMPUNK REVOLUTION

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY ANN VANDERMEER

  THIS IS A COLLECTED WORK OF FICTION.

  ALL EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS BOOK ARE FICTITIOUS

  AND ANY RESEMBLANCE TO REAL PEOPLE OR EVENTS IS PURELY

  COINCIDENTAL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO

  REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PORTIONS THEREOF IN ANY FORM WITHOUT

  THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

  INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY ANN VANDERMEER

  COVER DESIGN BY ELIZABETH STORY

  COVER ART COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY DAN JONES / TINKERBOTS

  INTERIOR DESIGN BY JOHN COULTHART

  TACHYON PUBLICATIONS

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  SERIES EDITOR: JACOB WEISMAN

  PROJECT EDITOR: JILL ROBERTS

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES BY WORZALLA

  FIRST EDITION: 2012

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FICTION

  “Smoke City” copyright © 2011 by Christopher Barzak. Originally published in Asimov’s SF, April/May 2011.

  “On Wooden Wings” copyright © 2011 by Paolo Chikiamco. Originally published in Philippine Speculative Fiction VI, edited by Nikki Alfar and Kate Aton-Osias (Kestrel DDM: Pasig City, Philippines).

  “To Follow the Waves” copyright © 2010 by Amal El-Mohtar. Originally published in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft (Torquere Press: Round Rock, Texas).

  “The Seventh Expression of the Robot General” copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in Eclipse 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books: San Francisco).

  “Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham, GBE, a.k.a. Roboticus the All-Knowing” copyright © 2011 by Lev Grossman. Originally published in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (Harper Voyager: New York).

  “Beside Calais” copyright © 2012 by Samantha Henderson. Originally published in Strange Horizons, May 2012.

  “Ascension” copyright © 2012 by Leow Hui Min Annabeth. Originally published in The Steampowered Globe, edited by Rosemary Lim and Maisarah Bte Abu Samah (Two Trees Pte Ltd: Singapore).

  “The Effluent Engine” copyright © 2011 by N. K. Jemisin. Originally published in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft (Torquere Press: Round Rock, Texas).

  “Goggles (c.1910)” copyright © 2012 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Original to this anthology.

  “The Heart Is the Matter” copyright © 2012 by Malissa Kent. Original to this anthology.

  “Urban Drift” copyright © 2010 by Andrew Knighton. Originally published in Dark Horizons 56, March 2010.

  “Arbeitskraft” copyright © 2012 by Nick Mamatas. Originally published in The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace (Running Press: Philadelphia).

  “An Exhortation to Young Writers (Advice Tendered by Poor Mojo’s Giant Squid)” copyright © 2012 by David Erik Nelson, Morgan Johnson, and Fritz Swanson. Originally published on The Fiction Writing Directorate, 6/14/10 (WWW.VERBHOUNDS. COM/AN-EXHORTATION-FROM-THE-GIANTSQUID).

  “Peace in Our Time” copyright © 2011 by Garth Nix. Originally published in STEAMPUNK!, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (Candlewick Press: Somerville, Massachusetts).

  “Possession” copyright © 2007 by Ben Peek. Originally published in Fantasy Magazine, November 2007.

  “Addison Howell and the Clockroach” copyright © 2011 by Cherie Priest. Revised version based on the story originally published in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (Harper Voyager: New York).

  “Salvage” copyright © 2011 by Margaret Ronald. Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #77, September 2011.

  “Nowhere Fast” copyright © 2011 by Christopher Rowe. Originally published in STEAMPUNK!, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (Candlewick Press: Somerville, Massachusetts).

  “A Handful of Rice” copyright © 2012 by Vandana Singh. Original to this anthology.

  “White Fungus” copyright © 2009 by Bruce Sterling. Originally published in Beyond: Scenarios and Speculations, April 2009.

  “Beatrice” copyright © 2010 by Karin Tidbeck. Originally published in Vem är Arvid Pekon (Man av Skugga Förlag: Göteborg, Sweden). Published for the first time in English by permission of the author.

  “The Stoker Memorandum” copyright © 2012 by Lavie Tidhar. Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, January 2012.

  “Mother Is a Machine” copyright © 2005, 2010 by Catherynne M. Valente. Originally published in Jabberwocky, Summer 2005.

  “Study, for Solo Piano” copyright © 2011 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Fantasy Magazine, May 2011.

  “Fixing Hanover” copyright © 2008 by Jeff VanderMeer. Originally published in Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology, edited by Nick Gevers (Solaris Books: Oxford, United Kingdom).

  “Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil” copyright © 2012 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. Originally published in Lightspeed, February 2012.

  “Captain Bells & the Sovereign State of Discordia” copyright © 2012 by JY Yang. Originally published in The Steampowered Globe, edited by Rosemary Lim and Maisarah Bte Abu Samah (Two Trees Pte Ltd: Singapore).

  NONFICTION

  “Winding Down the House: Towards a Steampunk Without Steam” copyright © 2010 by Amal El-Mohtar. Revised version based on the essay originally published on Tor.com, 10/29/2010 (WWW.TOR.COM/ BLOGS/2010/10/TOWARDS-A-STEAMPUNKWITHOUT-STEAM).

  “The (R)Evolution of Steampunk” copyright © 2012 by Austin Sirkin. Original to this anthology.

  “Steampunk Shapes Our Future” copyright © 2012 by Margaret Killjoy. Original to this anthology.

  “From Airships of Imagination to Feet on the Ground” copyright © 2012 by Jaymee Goh. Original to this anthology.

  In memory of my grandmother Florence Merlin

  who taught me how to be a rebel by how she lived her life

  Ann VanderMeer

  Introduction

  FICTION

  Carrie Vaughn

  Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil

  Cherie Priest

  Addison Howell and the Clockroach

  Paolo Chikiamco

  On Wooden Wings

  Lev Grossman

  Sir Ranolph Wykeham-Rackham

  Malissa Kent

  The Heart Is the Matter

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Mother Is a Machine

  Ben Peek

  Possession

  Karin Tidbeck

  Beatrice

  Nick Mamatas

  Arbeitskraft

  Genevieve Valentine

  Study for Solo Piano

  Samantha Henderson

  Beside Calais

  David Erik Nelson, Morgan Johnson, and Fritz Swanson

  An Exhortation to Young Writers (Advice Tendered by Poor Mojo's Giant Squid)

  Vandana Singh

  A Handful of Rice

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Fixing Hanover

  Margaret Ronald

  Salvage

  Andrew Knighton

  Urban Drift

  Leow Hui Min

  Ascension

  Annabeth Christopher Rowe

  Nowhere Fast

  N. K. Jemisin

  The Effluent Engine

  Amal El-Mohtar

  To Follow the Waves

  JY Yang

  Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia

  Jeffrey Ford

  The Seventh Expression of the Robot General

&nb
sp; Lavie Tidhar

  The Stoker Memorandum

  Christopher Barzak

  Smoke City

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Goggles (c.1910)

  Garth Nix

  Peace in Our Time

  Bruce Sterling

  White Fungus

  NONFICTION

  Amal El-Mohtar

  Winding Down the House: Towards a Steampunk Without Steam

  Margaret Killjoy

  Steampunk Shapes Our Future

  Jaymee Goh

  From Airships of Imagination to Feet on the Ground

  Austin Sirkin

  The (R)Evolution of Steampunk

  Acknowledgments

  Contributor Biographies

  “After all, what our world is and can be are more about human imagination than well…anything else. And isn’t that a lot of what steampunk has to say? Imagine! Play! Create! Push past the artificial boundary of time to ask the real questions: What does it mean to be human? What are we going to do with all this technology? How can we create the future we want and need?”

  —James H. Carrott (Cultural Historian, 2011)

  WHEN JEFF VANDERMEER AND I published Steampunk (the first book in this series) in 2008, we approached the concept through the literature. At that time we had no idea that an entire subculture had grown up around this form of retro-futurism. We had done a lot of research around the fiction but only briefly delved into film, comics, and other creative endeavors. Then we found Steampunk Magazine, which gave us another view of this fast-growing subculture, attended a Steampunk convention, and soon had a better sense of it all. It’s not surprising that we weren’t more aware, given that it wasn’t until the New York Times article in 2008, the month our anthology was published, that the Steampunk subculture became mainstream.

  From there, however, steampunk seemed to go viral. We were even approached for an interview by the Weather Channel. I, being a weather geek, was thrilled for the opportunity but asked the interviewer, why us? Why would the Weather Channel be interested in Steampunk? He answered global warming, alternate energy sources, recycling, DIY thinking. This got me to take an even closer look at what was going on in this subculture.

  When we agreed to do the second book in 2010, Steampunk Reloaded, we wanted to show how the fiction of this subgenre had grown and transformed. It had expanded beyond just science fiction featuring the Victorian era, and we were able to include many more alternative Steampunk backgrounds and approaches. Correspondingly, the subculture had also expanded and become more diverse and more international—in a very short period of time.

  Which brings me to the volume you hold in your hands. So many people asked me to publish a third, but what could I do in a third volume that hadn’t already been done in the first and second? The Weather Channel experience seemed to be the key: I was interested in looking at how Steampunk could change the world, could really make a difference. When I attended WorldCon in 2009 I had participated in a Steampunk panel, along with writer Lev Grossman and editor Liz Gorinsky. We also had a Victorian scholar on the panel, who spoke about all the ways that that time period was horrible. But Steampunk is an opportunity to force us to address those issues of the past, examine what went wrong, what we can do to put it right and make a better world. Just as traditional science fiction uses the future to discuss issues that concern us now, Steampunk fiction can use the past (or alternate pasts) to bring to light issues that we might otherwise have trouble discussing.

  During the panel, someone asked if Steampunk would ever be a political force. Could there possibly be a Steampunk candidate in our future? I said yes and everyone laughed. Perhaps it is folly, but I still think the ideas that spring from a Steampunk point of view are valid for a political movement. How else can we make positive change without understanding our past? Let’s not run away from our past, but examine it, take it apart, and put it back together again—the right way. (In a way, civilization depends on some kind of critical self-evaluation, given current global warming and human rights concerns.)

  But it is also true that many of us don’t know our own history, much less the histories of other parts of our shared planet, and this is another reason Steampunk is relevant. At the Steampunk Worlds Fair in 2011, Emma Goldman (aka Miriam Rosenberg Roček) organized a mock late-1800s Worker’s Union Labor rally to illustrate to all what it was really like back in those days. Can you think of a better way to teach about a moment in history, to explain to a modern audience how things were then? She used creative ways to challenge the status quo and to think about change—and she used Steampunk to do this.

  Revolution—how else can you effect a positive change? In the Steampunk context, it means to examine our relationship with technology, with each other, and with the world around us. And by doing that through the lens of Steampunk, it allows our imaginations to take off. Let’s use creative play to look at creation, invention. For example, Bruce Sterling calls his story in this book salvagepunk, not Steampunk. Well, maybe so, but it seems to me that something like salvagepunk is one direction in which Steampunk is headed. Which raises other questions. Does a story have to have steam in it? Does it have to take place during the Victorian Era in an alternate UK or US? I say no, that’s not punk. Clearly defined boundaries? Pah! Boring. If you want to start a revolution, you must challenge the current situation, and if that means Steampunk becomes something other than its origins indicate, or a part of Steampunk pushes beyond that…it’s all to the good.

  So here I present to you stories that largely challenge or comment on the status quo. Stories that provide a different perspective and help us to see the existing world in a new light as we read about an alternative past, or perhaps a possible yet impossible future. What would Friedrich Engels do if he really did liberate a factory and its workers? Would it be as he expected? What happens when a woman challenges the roles that she is forced into? Can people from different walks of life, different backgrounds get along and respect each other’s abilities, intellects, and passions?

  But these are not the only situations explored in these stories. How do we view transportation? What is our relationship between the modes of transportation and our social status in the world? Is transportation a political issue? Should it be? Cherie Priest’s “Clockroach” shows us not only what we can create to solve a problem, but how these creations can be stifled by misunderstanding and fear. And just how closely related are man and machine? Lev Grossman tackles this in a more humorous way in “Sir Ranulph…” Do we build a better human with immortality? Just ask Ben Peek in “Possession.” And what about Christopher Rowe’s “Nowhere Fast,” which provides us a look at a true revolutionary? Good fiction is all about the questions. For example, are we the master of our machines—and should we be? Samantha Henderson’s story “Beside Calias” explores bravery and responsibility, broken relationships, and where one can find reserves of strength where one previously thought there was only weakness.

  Such questions cut across race and gender. Some of these stories take a closer look at not just the larger society but the individuals as well. What happens when we cross boundaries and reach out to the other? What do we learn from such interactions? Is that a scary notion? In Paolo Chikiamco’s story “On Wooden Wings,” two young people from different cultures come to understand each other amidst the prejudices of their communities.

  Beyond individuals and societies, there is also the idea of family. What is a family? Is the idea of a nuclear family the base, the goal, the foundation? And when did that notion take hold? It wasn’t always that way, so let’s tackle that as well. Malissa Kent’s “The Heart Is the Matter” looks at how far a sister will go for another, while Catherynne M. Valente has a new take on motherhood in “Mother Is a Machine.” And what is love, and how do our assumptions undercut love? Karin Tidbeck’s “Beatrice” takes an unflinching look at this question.

  All of these stories are Steampunk stories, by most definitions of the term, and yet did my d
escription of them conjure up the term “Steampunk”? Probably not, which is part of my point. Steampunk allows us to address so many different kinds of situations and issues.

  At its best, I think that Steampunk allows us to take some of these ideas, throw them out there and build a better mousetrap, flying machine, and, dare I say it, a better place to live, a better society. Let’s strengthen our relationships by reaching out and truly knowing others. Let’s stretch our hands across all those boundaries. Let’s have a Steampunk Revolution.

  HERE IT WAS, lying on a bed of stone, inert. Such an innocuous artifact, one that would go unnoticed on any machinist’s workbench. A coil of copper wire wrapped around a steel cylinder just a few inches long, inset with an other-worldly crystal that seemed to glow faintly green with its own light, like a distant aurora. Truly otherworldly, as it happened.

  Harry had searched for the object for more than a year, scouring ancient manuscripts, picking apart the threads of unlikely stories, tracking down reliable eyewitness accounts and separating them from fabrications, deciding which myths had a seed of fact within them and which were pure folly. Finally, she planned the expedition and arranged her disappearance from polite society for a month or more to embark on said expedition—leading to the moment that would make all the effort worthwhile. Or confirm that she had wasted her time utterly.

  It would seem, she was pleased to note, that she hadn’t.

  The Aetherian craft that crashed in Surrey in 1869—her entire lifetime, twenty-five years ago now—was not the first such visitor to this world, some hypothesized. This artifact proved that they were right, that another Aetherian being had arrived a thousand years before and left this mechanism behind. A spare part to the Aetherians, but worshipped as a trinket of the gods in this obscure corner of Iceland ever since.

  Some would say the Cult of Egil was not far wrong, to take the artifact as a holy talisman. Harry couldn’t be bothered with the theology of the matter. She needed it for more mundane purposes. This was a piece of Aetherian technology that no one else in the world possessed. Britain had brought Aetherian wonders to the rest of humanity; by rights, it should have this as well, before anyone else. If she could convey it back home successfully.