Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft (365 Books, Day 79)
Obligatory disclaimer: An advance review copy of this anthology was graciously provided by the editor. Also, I know several people who wrote stories for this. This does not affect the content of the review in any way, or, if it does, I'll try to point that out when I come to it.
So there's been a lot of internet conversation lately, which it is very much too three in the morning for me to link to comprehensively because I mean it, there has been a lot, about whether steampunk is innately a reactionary genre, or whether it's just that a lot of people write it that way. Because, you know, a lot of alt-historical Queen Victoria and the sun never setting on the British Empire and colonialism Now With Dirigibles. And the question arises, where is the Mughal steampunk, and the African steampunk, and the Caribbean steampunk, and the steampunk which deals with political issues, and the steampunk which thinks about issues of identity, and on and on and on and on and on?
Well, one of the major goals of this collection, and one of the goals it fulfills admirably, is to start being some of that where. Yes, this is all lesbian steampunk; there is some lesbian element in every one of the stories. It is also full of stories that are crammed with other directions I haven't seen steampunk go before. None of the stories here is set in England for more than about two pages. There's a magnificent Mughal story in here, there are multiple stories set in Africa, in the Caribbean, in places where people are Jewish and Muslim and disabled and political radicals and political conservatives and just in general this book does really, really well at not being The Usual By Now Nearly Archetypal Extremely White Rather Straight Steampunk Book, and without it ever feeling forced-- these are the stories these writers wanted to tell, and they are new stories, and I love that.
Of course, there is also going to be debate about whether some of these stories are actually steampunk. Is it a tech level we're talking about, or does it have to be an actual alternate history using that tech level? If so, how alternate? Clearly, the appropriate tech level does not, in our world, do the things it needs to do in fiction, so how much magic is allowable as a supplement to that tech, and should it be explicitly magic, or does it need to stay fairly implicit? This sort of argument can go on forever, and everyone will have six or seven opinions. I tend to come down on the side of 'yes, I would like it to be vaguely identifiable as alternate history' and 'would like the magic mitigated by at least some technical handwavium', so for me, in this anthology, Mike Allen's 'Sleepless, Burning Life' is actually 'metaphysical fantasy with clockwork in'. Your mileage may vary. It was for me the only one that came down on that side of that genre line, here, and it's not as though I actually mind.
The quality of the stories here is generally extremely high. It's a long anthology, nearly four hundred pages, and there aren't any I thought were out-and-out duds, although of course I liked some better than others. There are several I look at rather sidelong, as I am not sure they accomplish what they meant to be doing, or entirely what that might have been-- Mikki Kendall's 'Copper for a Trickster' has more gratuitous nastiness in it than I feel the story earns, and also earned points in gratuitously depressing with an ending that left me fairly cold; and Teresa Wymore's 'Under the Dome' drowned what might have been an interesting meditation on the boundaries of being human under a weight of unnecessary exposition and a skewed ratio of sex to plot. D.L. MacInnes' 'Owl Song' is clearly meant to be a critique of the usual sort of colonialism but may skew too far into being what it's criticizing; it's the only story in the book which felt as though it exoticized anybody. And Meredith Holmes' 'Love in the Time of Airships' is too long for its plot by at least half. There are also a couple of stories that could have used more space and more room to breathe. I generally greatly enjoyed and admired N.K. Jemisin's 'The Effluent Engines', but it takes a turn at the end that made me stare at it quizzically and wish for another twenty pages. Georgina Bruce's lovely 'Brilliant' also ends very fast, and the aforementioned Mike Allen story feels to me as though it would like to be a novel when it grows up and would, perhaps, be better served by that length and format.
But there weren't any that I actually bounced off, and there is some really impressive work in here, including probably my favorite short story that I've read so far this year. I think I would still be incoherently gleeful over this story if the author weren't a dear friend of mine, but I can't prove that. Anyway, I really highly recommend Rachel Manija Brown's 'Steel Rider'. It's an extremely different premise very well crafted, and an alternate history I find believable on the level of myth, which is rare.
Also-- okay, look. I am setting down my critical objectivity, over there on that table, and I will come and pick it back up again in a moment, I promise. I just-- THIS IS A LESBIAN STEAMPUNK GUNDAM STORY, OKAY? AND IT IS PERFECT. IT IS ACTUALLY GUNDAM. EXCEPT IT'S ALSO A WESTERN. IT MEETS ALL YOUR LESBIAN-STEAMPUNK-GUNDAM-WESTERN NEEDS, WHICH I DID NOT EXACTLY KNOW I HAD, BUT I TOTALLY DID! AND NOW THEY HAVE BEEN MET. I particularly recommend this to people who liked Gundam 00, but it also reminds me strongly of Turn A Gundam. ALSO, IT'S JUST REALLY GOOD. This story made me fistpump. With a big silly grin on my face. I am incoherently happy about this story. I love it to pieces.
Okay. Walking back over to that table and picking up my critical objectivity now; hopefully it hasn't got any dust on it. I also really liked Shweta Narayan's 'The Padishah Begum's Reflections', which is just doing exactly what good stories ought to do: it's complex, braided, structurally beautiful yet never hard to read, fits its length perfectly and weaves in various legends and histories from India in ways that I found very compelling. It has weight and depth and feels alive, one of those stories where you know perfectly well that there's a whole big world out there just beyond the frame that you could walk into, except that you're totally satisfied with what you see of it, because it's right. Also, Mughal steampunk = awesome. Amal El-Mohtar's 'To Follow the Waves' feels almost in the same universe as Narayan's, or one universe over (it's definitely several countries and some time away), and is also in perfect harmony with itself: lovely prose, lovely actions having consequences, and knowing when to end. And Tara Sommers's 'Clockwork and Music' is a look at mental illness and the medicalization of it and the interactions of it with gender that does not actually make me want to scream and throw things, so, you know, I'll take that, that's much better than usual.
In general, this is a lush and arresting book, well curated, flowing, flawed, sometimes abbreviated, sometimes frustrating, almost never boring, almost continually surprising. I hope it gets read widely, both because it's relevant to a lot of ongoing things, and because, quite simply, it deserves to be. This is a major and impressive anthology, and I hope it finds its audience, or makes one.
ETA to discuss how one would obtain this-- it's still in preorders. Torquere Press does not have a page for this right now, so what you'd want to do is get in touch with the editor; comments here should work. Or email her (info through that link).
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
So there's been a lot of internet conversation lately, which it is very much too three in the morning for me to link to comprehensively because I mean it, there has been a lot, about whether steampunk is innately a reactionary genre, or whether it's just that a lot of people write it that way. Because, you know, a lot of alt-historical Queen Victoria and the sun never setting on the British Empire and colonialism Now With Dirigibles. And the question arises, where is the Mughal steampunk, and the African steampunk, and the Caribbean steampunk, and the steampunk which deals with political issues, and the steampunk which thinks about issues of identity, and on and on and on and on and on?
Well, one of the major goals of this collection, and one of the goals it fulfills admirably, is to start being some of that where. Yes, this is all lesbian steampunk; there is some lesbian element in every one of the stories. It is also full of stories that are crammed with other directions I haven't seen steampunk go before. None of the stories here is set in England for more than about two pages. There's a magnificent Mughal story in here, there are multiple stories set in Africa, in the Caribbean, in places where people are Jewish and Muslim and disabled and political radicals and political conservatives and just in general this book does really, really well at not being The Usual By Now Nearly Archetypal Extremely White Rather Straight Steampunk Book, and without it ever feeling forced-- these are the stories these writers wanted to tell, and they are new stories, and I love that.
Of course, there is also going to be debate about whether some of these stories are actually steampunk. Is it a tech level we're talking about, or does it have to be an actual alternate history using that tech level? If so, how alternate? Clearly, the appropriate tech level does not, in our world, do the things it needs to do in fiction, so how much magic is allowable as a supplement to that tech, and should it be explicitly magic, or does it need to stay fairly implicit? This sort of argument can go on forever, and everyone will have six or seven opinions. I tend to come down on the side of 'yes, I would like it to be vaguely identifiable as alternate history' and 'would like the magic mitigated by at least some technical handwavium', so for me, in this anthology, Mike Allen's 'Sleepless, Burning Life' is actually 'metaphysical fantasy with clockwork in'. Your mileage may vary. It was for me the only one that came down on that side of that genre line, here, and it's not as though I actually mind.
The quality of the stories here is generally extremely high. It's a long anthology, nearly four hundred pages, and there aren't any I thought were out-and-out duds, although of course I liked some better than others. There are several I look at rather sidelong, as I am not sure they accomplish what they meant to be doing, or entirely what that might have been-- Mikki Kendall's 'Copper for a Trickster' has more gratuitous nastiness in it than I feel the story earns, and also earned points in gratuitously depressing with an ending that left me fairly cold; and Teresa Wymore's 'Under the Dome' drowned what might have been an interesting meditation on the boundaries of being human under a weight of unnecessary exposition and a skewed ratio of sex to plot. D.L. MacInnes' 'Owl Song' is clearly meant to be a critique of the usual sort of colonialism but may skew too far into being what it's criticizing; it's the only story in the book which felt as though it exoticized anybody. And Meredith Holmes' 'Love in the Time of Airships' is too long for its plot by at least half. There are also a couple of stories that could have used more space and more room to breathe. I generally greatly enjoyed and admired N.K. Jemisin's 'The Effluent Engines', but it takes a turn at the end that made me stare at it quizzically and wish for another twenty pages. Georgina Bruce's lovely 'Brilliant' also ends very fast, and the aforementioned Mike Allen story feels to me as though it would like to be a novel when it grows up and would, perhaps, be better served by that length and format.
But there weren't any that I actually bounced off, and there is some really impressive work in here, including probably my favorite short story that I've read so far this year. I think I would still be incoherently gleeful over this story if the author weren't a dear friend of mine, but I can't prove that. Anyway, I really highly recommend Rachel Manija Brown's 'Steel Rider'. It's an extremely different premise very well crafted, and an alternate history I find believable on the level of myth, which is rare.
Also-- okay, look. I am setting down my critical objectivity, over there on that table, and I will come and pick it back up again in a moment, I promise. I just-- THIS IS A LESBIAN STEAMPUNK GUNDAM STORY, OKAY? AND IT IS PERFECT. IT IS ACTUALLY GUNDAM. EXCEPT IT'S ALSO A WESTERN. IT MEETS ALL YOUR LESBIAN-STEAMPUNK-GUNDAM-WESTERN NEEDS, WHICH I DID NOT EXACTLY KNOW I HAD, BUT I TOTALLY DID! AND NOW THEY HAVE BEEN MET. I particularly recommend this to people who liked Gundam 00, but it also reminds me strongly of Turn A Gundam. ALSO, IT'S JUST REALLY GOOD. This story made me fistpump. With a big silly grin on my face. I am incoherently happy about this story. I love it to pieces.
Okay. Walking back over to that table and picking up my critical objectivity now; hopefully it hasn't got any dust on it. I also really liked Shweta Narayan's 'The Padishah Begum's Reflections', which is just doing exactly what good stories ought to do: it's complex, braided, structurally beautiful yet never hard to read, fits its length perfectly and weaves in various legends and histories from India in ways that I found very compelling. It has weight and depth and feels alive, one of those stories where you know perfectly well that there's a whole big world out there just beyond the frame that you could walk into, except that you're totally satisfied with what you see of it, because it's right. Also, Mughal steampunk = awesome. Amal El-Mohtar's 'To Follow the Waves' feels almost in the same universe as Narayan's, or one universe over (it's definitely several countries and some time away), and is also in perfect harmony with itself: lovely prose, lovely actions having consequences, and knowing when to end. And Tara Sommers's 'Clockwork and Music' is a look at mental illness and the medicalization of it and the interactions of it with gender that does not actually make me want to scream and throw things, so, you know, I'll take that, that's much better than usual.
In general, this is a lush and arresting book, well curated, flowing, flawed, sometimes abbreviated, sometimes frustrating, almost never boring, almost continually surprising. I hope it gets read widely, both because it's relevant to a lot of ongoing things, and because, quite simply, it deserves to be. This is a major and impressive anthology, and I hope it finds its audience, or makes one.
ETA to discuss how one would obtain this-- it's still in preorders. Torquere Press does not have a page for this right now, so what you'd want to do is get in touch with the editor; comments here should work. Or email her (info through that link).
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.