You may or may not know me in real life, but know this: we had a steampunk wedding. If that doesn't tell you how much love I have for this genre, you can go get a lobotomy, because it's not going to change much. The time period of the industrial revolution encapsulating the Victorian era and the Civil War, plus the sci-fi elements of high technology based on basic invention, and especially the embrace of Tesla-style advancements over our more traditional Edison dependence is just delicious. Like decadent cake covered in addictive frosting. There is very little to go wrong.
This being an anthology of short stories, rather than an actual novel, I'm going to have to go through each story to talk about how well the book is pulled off, but remember, I actually like and wanted to like the whole thing.
"Steampunch" by James Lovegrove is the story that starts off the book, and quite easily the best one in here. Not to say that there aren't other stories I like also, but this one is great. It is my favorite and starts the anthology off very strongly. Come on. Boxing, steam-powered automatons, told in a storyteller's first-second POV? And that ending was super unexpected.
The next story dropped my enthusiasm for the book like a rock. "Static" by Marly Youmans tries to do way too much in a small space and ends up doing it all badly. It introduces an idea of a world irradiated by electricity. Okay. And how that effects daily life. Gotcha. But the police are bad, the main character is a prisoner of her great aunt, there is this guy called a Static investigating a death the main character has no sympathy for, and a climax that just takes maybe a single step down from the nonescalating buildup. Terrible. My least favorite in the whole thing.
"Speed, Speed the Cable" by Kage Baker is apparently a short story based in a universe he has already printed books for, but one that I haven't read. I don't think I have to say anything about it other than to quote the description before the tale.
Resident in California, Kage Baker is the author of the very popular Company series of time-travel novels, in which the twenty-third century Zeus Corporation quickly ransacks the pasts of its treasures using an army of immortal once-human cyborgs."Elementals" by Ian R. MacLeod is the first one to introduce thematic ideas, but only seemed to make me think of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I felt that it was meh.
If "Steampunch" hadn't been so great, "Machine Maid" by Margo Lanagan would be a solid contender for my favorite. A newly married couple go to their gold-mining ranch, and the wife utterly hates all sexual contact with her husband. I wasn't sure right away that a passage was referring to forced blowjobs right away, but later content confirmed it. And she has a robotic maid that happens to have more than functions relating to housecleaning. The only thing I don't like about this story was the ambiguous ending.
"Lady Witherspoon's Solution" by James Morrow is awesome. Not because of male genital mutilation, but because it uses the journal form extremely well, and introduces an idea of devolution to the Women's Suffrage battle of the time.
"Hannah" by Keith Brooke is another great one. The only problem is that it could have easily been set in more modern times without much change. Though it does raise ethical questions to the medical procedures of yesteryear.
"Petrolpunk" by Adam Roberts is similar to "Static" in that it tries to do too much. Also, I just realized with derision, it's a self-insert story. Blech. Second least favorite for sure. It started strong, but then devolves into people explaining the story in dialogue sloppily.
"American Cheetah" by Robert Reed is not that awesome either. It tastes too much of a western for my tastes. Robot Abraham Lincoln is a Minnesotan sheriff against robot bank robbers. It was at this point that I decided that if there was anything wrong with the anthology, it was the dependence of automatons to drive the story.
"Fixing Hanover" by Jeff VanderMeer is another one about a robot, this time a robot that washes ashore of a castaway settlement. The main character is interesting, but his girlfriend and the other castaways are not. Nice touch, trying to make the girl seem interesting by giving her two different colored eyes. That kind of Mary Sue move only worked for Yuna.
"The Lollygang Save the World on Accident" by Jay Lake is very strange. I'm still not a hundred percent sure what kind of world it was. It seemed like people who lived on a ship for so long that they don't remember the outside, but then again, I might be off. Certainly a weird one that doesn't explain much of what's going on.
"The Dream of Reason" by Jeffrey Ford is the bookending great story. In another world, which is clearly different, but doesn't hesitate to steal from Earth's Victorian society, particularly in the use of Debtor's Prison, there is a scientist that is convinced that stars are diamonds and matter is just slow-moving light. In order to acquire diamond dust, he decides to slow starlight down completely, using the eternal pathways of a human's mind to exhaust its speed. This is a great one because of the psychological element.
So, there are a lot of good ones, a few meh ones, and a couple terrible ones. Not bad for a short story collection. You could probably do worse, and if you're unfamiliar with steampunk, it wouldn't hurt to give it a look-see.
8.5/10
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