(no subject)
I am fairly sure that some of you on my flist will see the title of Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and know immediately that this is an anthology you will wish to read. To those people, I say only: awesome! I really loved some of the stories, liked most of them, and think the book's worth your time. It comes out on January 25th, and you can pre-order it here.*
Some people may want a little more detail. To those people I say: Steam-Powered is very definitely a book of lesbian steampunk stories. (Sometimes this makes it feel like a romance anthology, but there are enough stories that break the girl-meets-girl pattern that I generally didn't get bored.) It's also a book full of steampunk stories that are attempting, in a number of ways, to write steampunk that questions a lot of the assumptions of a genre that tends too often to fall back on nostalgic glorification of the grand old colonial days of the Great British Empire. So not only are these stories all female-centric and non-heteronormative, as the title implies, but they're punching back in other ways - most of these stories also incorporate race and class and religion and nationality in ways that steampunk tends, as a rule, not to do. And the vast majority are not set anywhere near England! (California steampunk! African steampunk! Mughal Empire steampunk! And in ways that are not exoticized, but absolutely integral to the stories.) So some of you will see this, and again know that you are interested in these stories, and those people can probably stop reading this review here if you want.
And if you want a little more, like, for example, a lengthy story-by-story breakdown of My Thoughts, then you can read on!
Helpfully, I have broken my thoughts down BY CATEGORY.
Absolute Favorites:
"Brilliant," Georgina Bruce: I loved the protagonist-narrator too, who is clever and mischievous and daring, but let's be honest here: the main reason I fell in love with this story is that it features a rude, spoiled, bratty girl who matures into having secret depths of awesome, which as we all know is a character type that I have a great weakness for. And romance on a train! And dirigible theft! And cross-dressing! Basically this story packed a lot of my favorite things into less than twenty pages.
"Steel Rider," Rachel Manija Brown: Another review of this story described it as a LESBIAN STEAMPUNK GUNDAM WESTERN, and I'm not sure I can add to that, because that's exactly what it is, and it's awesome. The rules are that sometimes women, when they have nothing left to lose, walk into the desert; sometimes they come out changed, and also, soulbonded to a giant steel robot. And then they ride around generally being gunslingers, with all the duels in the desert and stoically angsting about backstory trauma that this implies, except with soulbonded giant steel robots. I would read so much in this universe. (Of the three stories that incorporated Judaism in the anthology, I also liked the way this one did it best, though it may have benefited from being placed the first in a row of them.)
"To Follow the Waves," Amal El-Mohtar: I basically just thought this story was gorgeous all the way through. The protagonist is a gem-cutter and dream-crafter, stumped on a recent commission because she's never been to the sea. It's about love and dreams and appropriation and how those things play into each other, and it had probably my favorite ending of any of the stories in the collection.
Almost Favorites:
"The Effluent Engine," N.K. Jemisin: I may be biased in favor of this story by having recently read the entire Benjamin January mystery series set in 19th-century New Orleans, and therefore found it super exciting to read a steampunk AU of that era and time period. But also: it's a romance between a DASHING SPY and a GENIUS INVENTOR, with all of the adventure and dirigible-focused hijinks that one would expect from this standard plotline, except both protagonists are ladies of color and the plot is about fighting colonialism. It's awesome and exuberant and the only reason this did not make it into the 'passionately loved' category is because the romance progessed so far so fast; this could have been a book.
"Suffer Water," Beth Wodzinski: A cyborg bounty hunter in the post-apocalyptic west is hunting for a mad scientist. I suspect I liked this story especially because it came after several relatively fluffy girl-meets-girl stories and provided a nice contrast; I also like the way it handled trust and body consent issues in the short space it had. Sometimes people do not want to be 'fixed.'
"Sleepless, Burning Life," Mike Allen: This is a story with a creation-mythology at its heart, and it's an incredibly unique and gorgeous mythology that I loved a lot, and loved as well the questions about the truth of that mythology. The only thing that kept this from being in the top category is my frustration with the questions of the ending. I want to know what happened!
"Clockwork and Music," Tara Sommers: My feelings about this were actually really mixed. I am really dubious about the use of automatons as literalized metaphors to comment on mental illness treatment - but on the other hand, the story does complicate that premise, and the prose is gorgeous, and I thought the depiction of the characters themselves was really human and nuanced and did not discount the validity of their issues. So despite my strong doubts about the central premise and the statement made by it, I ended up really liking the story almost despite myself.
"The Padishah Begum's Reflections," Shweta Narayan: This is the MUGHAL EMPIRE STEAMPUNK, and it's awesome, and I suspect I would have liked it even more if I was actually better-versed in the history of that empire and the way that this story interweaves itself into that. I loved that the protagonist was an automaton in a position of political power, and the diplomatic and trade negotiations and the way that history and legend play into the story. My only caveat here is that occasionally I got lost in the jumps back and forth between backstory and present, which may have been because I was a.) reading on a subway and b.) not reading in a format that was very condusive to flipping back a few pages to note repective dates.
Liked Reasonably Well:
"Where the Ocean Meets the Sky," Sara M. Harvey: I would like this story just for the fact that its alternate-history premise is that Emperor Norton has ACTUALLY BECOME EMPEROR OF CALIFORNIA. *___* And its protagonist is one of his dirigible privateers! SO AWESOME. There is not much actual story beyond this except a fairly sweet but nondescript romance between aforementioned dirigible privateer and a customs officer, but the premise is super cool.
"Truth and Life," Shira Lipkin: Sort of a pre-Pygmalion story with a lesbian golem-maker. I like the prose and the setting very much, but it was too short to really grab me.
"Copper for a Trickster," Mikki Kendall: A very dark story about imprisonment and the price of freedom. I thought it generally did what it was intending to, although I wish that the whole setup had ended up being more complicated.
Had Problems With:
"Owl Song," D.L. McInnes: A British upper-class FEMINIST LESBIAN INVENTOR is exiled from home for flaunting her sexuality, goes to South America to pursue her dreams of inventing and exoticizes the locals. Trying too hard in all kinds of directions - there's lots of "gasp! you refuse to turn to feminine pursuits!" in the first half and "you will never understand our ways" in the second half - and I think kind of ends up being the very thing that it wants to critique.
"The Hands that Feed," Matthew Kressel: This one's set mostly in a Lower East Side pawnshop and centers on the dynamic between a middle-aged lonely pawnshop owner and her beautiful Indian immigrant assistant, neither of whom are as sweet as they seem. I bounced off this, for no big specific reasons I can pinpoint - just that I had a hard time connecting with the characters, and I think italicizing all the Yiddish made it feel distancing, instead of just being part of the character's world.
"Love in the Time of Airships," Meredith Holmes: I liked the basic concept of this - class issues and treachery in France while preparing for the fight against Bismarck! - but it needed another round of edits or two to check for sledgehammers and anvils. The husband and upper-class friends are Evil, the spunky lesbian engineer is Good, and the protagonist takes about two paragraphs to realize that her entire way of life is wrong and embrace intellectual pursuits and progressive lesbian sexuality. I did like the ball scene.
"Under the Dome," Teresa Wymore: I found the worldbuilding totally fascinating - animal-grafted hybrids work in factories, with the promise of upward mobility for special talents - and then was disappointed to find that the actual story mostly focused on dark and problematic sex. Not that there's anything wrong with dark and problematic sex in fiction if used for a good purpose, but I do want slightly more of a plot than that.
*I should probably disclaim that I got an advance review copy of the book from the editor, for the purposes of book-blogging. I have no idea if this will be a thing that will happen ever again, and I hope this should not need stating anyway, but for the record: I make no claims to critical authority, but I obviously only say nice things about books if I think they are true.
Some people may want a little more detail. To those people I say: Steam-Powered is very definitely a book of lesbian steampunk stories. (Sometimes this makes it feel like a romance anthology, but there are enough stories that break the girl-meets-girl pattern that I generally didn't get bored.) It's also a book full of steampunk stories that are attempting, in a number of ways, to write steampunk that questions a lot of the assumptions of a genre that tends too often to fall back on nostalgic glorification of the grand old colonial days of the Great British Empire. So not only are these stories all female-centric and non-heteronormative, as the title implies, but they're punching back in other ways - most of these stories also incorporate race and class and religion and nationality in ways that steampunk tends, as a rule, not to do. And the vast majority are not set anywhere near England! (California steampunk! African steampunk! Mughal Empire steampunk! And in ways that are not exoticized, but absolutely integral to the stories.) So some of you will see this, and again know that you are interested in these stories, and those people can probably stop reading this review here if you want.
And if you want a little more, like, for example, a lengthy story-by-story breakdown of My Thoughts, then you can read on!
Helpfully, I have broken my thoughts down BY CATEGORY.
Absolute Favorites:
"Brilliant," Georgina Bruce: I loved the protagonist-narrator too, who is clever and mischievous and daring, but let's be honest here: the main reason I fell in love with this story is that it features a rude, spoiled, bratty girl who matures into having secret depths of awesome, which as we all know is a character type that I have a great weakness for. And romance on a train! And dirigible theft! And cross-dressing! Basically this story packed a lot of my favorite things into less than twenty pages.
"Steel Rider," Rachel Manija Brown: Another review of this story described it as a LESBIAN STEAMPUNK GUNDAM WESTERN, and I'm not sure I can add to that, because that's exactly what it is, and it's awesome. The rules are that sometimes women, when they have nothing left to lose, walk into the desert; sometimes they come out changed, and also, soulbonded to a giant steel robot. And then they ride around generally being gunslingers, with all the duels in the desert and stoically angsting about backstory trauma that this implies, except with soulbonded giant steel robots. I would read so much in this universe. (Of the three stories that incorporated Judaism in the anthology, I also liked the way this one did it best, though it may have benefited from being placed the first in a row of them.)
"To Follow the Waves," Amal El-Mohtar: I basically just thought this story was gorgeous all the way through. The protagonist is a gem-cutter and dream-crafter, stumped on a recent commission because she's never been to the sea. It's about love and dreams and appropriation and how those things play into each other, and it had probably my favorite ending of any of the stories in the collection.
Almost Favorites:
"The Effluent Engine," N.K. Jemisin: I may be biased in favor of this story by having recently read the entire Benjamin January mystery series set in 19th-century New Orleans, and therefore found it super exciting to read a steampunk AU of that era and time period. But also: it's a romance between a DASHING SPY and a GENIUS INVENTOR, with all of the adventure and dirigible-focused hijinks that one would expect from this standard plotline, except both protagonists are ladies of color and the plot is about fighting colonialism. It's awesome and exuberant and the only reason this did not make it into the 'passionately loved' category is because the romance progessed so far so fast; this could have been a book.
"Suffer Water," Beth Wodzinski: A cyborg bounty hunter in the post-apocalyptic west is hunting for a mad scientist. I suspect I liked this story especially because it came after several relatively fluffy girl-meets-girl stories and provided a nice contrast; I also like the way it handled trust and body consent issues in the short space it had. Sometimes people do not want to be 'fixed.'
"Sleepless, Burning Life," Mike Allen: This is a story with a creation-mythology at its heart, and it's an incredibly unique and gorgeous mythology that I loved a lot, and loved as well the questions about the truth of that mythology. The only thing that kept this from being in the top category is my frustration with the questions of the ending. I want to know what happened!
"Clockwork and Music," Tara Sommers: My feelings about this were actually really mixed. I am really dubious about the use of automatons as literalized metaphors to comment on mental illness treatment - but on the other hand, the story does complicate that premise, and the prose is gorgeous, and I thought the depiction of the characters themselves was really human and nuanced and did not discount the validity of their issues. So despite my strong doubts about the central premise and the statement made by it, I ended up really liking the story almost despite myself.
"The Padishah Begum's Reflections," Shweta Narayan: This is the MUGHAL EMPIRE STEAMPUNK, and it's awesome, and I suspect I would have liked it even more if I was actually better-versed in the history of that empire and the way that this story interweaves itself into that. I loved that the protagonist was an automaton in a position of political power, and the diplomatic and trade negotiations and the way that history and legend play into the story. My only caveat here is that occasionally I got lost in the jumps back and forth between backstory and present, which may have been because I was a.) reading on a subway and b.) not reading in a format that was very condusive to flipping back a few pages to note repective dates.
Liked Reasonably Well:
"Where the Ocean Meets the Sky," Sara M. Harvey: I would like this story just for the fact that its alternate-history premise is that Emperor Norton has ACTUALLY BECOME EMPEROR OF CALIFORNIA. *___* And its protagonist is one of his dirigible privateers! SO AWESOME. There is not much actual story beyond this except a fairly sweet but nondescript romance between aforementioned dirigible privateer and a customs officer, but the premise is super cool.
"Truth and Life," Shira Lipkin: Sort of a pre-Pygmalion story with a lesbian golem-maker. I like the prose and the setting very much, but it was too short to really grab me.
"Copper for a Trickster," Mikki Kendall: A very dark story about imprisonment and the price of freedom. I thought it generally did what it was intending to, although I wish that the whole setup had ended up being more complicated.
Had Problems With:
"Owl Song," D.L. McInnes: A British upper-class FEMINIST LESBIAN INVENTOR is exiled from home for flaunting her sexuality, goes to South America to pursue her dreams of inventing and exoticizes the locals. Trying too hard in all kinds of directions - there's lots of "gasp! you refuse to turn to feminine pursuits!" in the first half and "you will never understand our ways" in the second half - and I think kind of ends up being the very thing that it wants to critique.
"The Hands that Feed," Matthew Kressel: This one's set mostly in a Lower East Side pawnshop and centers on the dynamic between a middle-aged lonely pawnshop owner and her beautiful Indian immigrant assistant, neither of whom are as sweet as they seem. I bounced off this, for no big specific reasons I can pinpoint - just that I had a hard time connecting with the characters, and I think italicizing all the Yiddish made it feel distancing, instead of just being part of the character's world.
"Love in the Time of Airships," Meredith Holmes: I liked the basic concept of this - class issues and treachery in France while preparing for the fight against Bismarck! - but it needed another round of edits or two to check for sledgehammers and anvils. The husband and upper-class friends are Evil, the spunky lesbian engineer is Good, and the protagonist takes about two paragraphs to realize that her entire way of life is wrong and embrace intellectual pursuits and progressive lesbian sexuality. I did like the ball scene.
"Under the Dome," Teresa Wymore: I found the worldbuilding totally fascinating - animal-grafted hybrids work in factories, with the promise of upward mobility for special talents - and then was disappointed to find that the actual story mostly focused on dark and problematic sex. Not that there's anything wrong with dark and problematic sex in fiction if used for a good purpose, but I do want slightly more of a plot than that.
*I should probably disclaim that I got an advance review copy of the book from the editor, for the purposes of book-blogging. I have no idea if this will be a thing that will happen ever again, and I hope this should not need stating anyway, but for the record: I make no claims to critical authority, but I obviously only say nice things about books if I think they are true.