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Steampunk | 
 enlarge | Creators: Ann Vandermeer, Jeff Vandermeer
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $9.05
You Save: $5.90 (39%)
New (29) Used (7) from $9.05
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 20024
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 1892391759
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781892391759
ASIN: 1892391759
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
Replete with whimsical mechanical wonders and charmingly anachronistic settings, this pioneering anthology gathers a brilliant blend of fantastical stories. Steampunk originates in the romantic elegance of the Victorian era and blends in modern scientific advances—synthesizing imaginative technologies such as steam-driven robots, analog supercomputers, and ultramodern dirigibles. The elegant allure of this popular new genre is represented in this rich collection by distinctively talented authors, including Neal Stephenson, Michael Chabon, James Blaylock, Michael Moorcock, and Joe R. Lansdale.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 A fine gathering of 'steampunk' writings October 13, 2008
Neal Stephenson, Joe R. Lansdale, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo and other notables are featured in a fine gathering of 'steampunk' writings. The genre pairs Victorian images with modern technology - such as steam-driven robots and space-faring dirigibles. A satisfying blend of technology, Victorian plots and romance and compassion mark stories that hold many delightful scenes, and are hard to put down.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
 good survey of bad writing August 28, 2008
I can recommend it to people like me, with an interest but not much knowledge of steampunk. The stories are well chosen to give an idea of the range of ideas and styles.
They weren't much fun to read, though. Mostly unimaginative, implausible, sometimes self-parodying pulp fiction with poorly-researched Victorian trappings. Perhaps I'm missing the point, and that's what makes it punk. Even so, it will be of interest either to the committed or the perplexed, but not to people looking for good writing.
"The Steam Man of the Prairie" is intentionally so bad as to be good, however, and "Seventy-Two Letters" is a gem: elegant, provocative, worth reading twice or more until you slap your head and smile.
 Just "OK" August 25, 2008
I had high expectations for the Steampunk anthology; I like Jeff Vandermeer's own writings and i like material from most of the authors included. But, maybe taken all together, most of the material seemed a bit tired and hackneyed. My favorite, by far, was Paul Paul Di Filippo's "Victoria" - a rather sweet take on both the Frankenstein trope as well as the good queen of the British Empire. Joe Lansdale references classic 19thC pulp sci-fi - but the story itself has little besides perversity to recommend it. Ian Macleod is one of my favorite authors - his Light Ages novels are terrific - but i'm glad i didn't start out reading the story included here, because i might well have slid him right off my reading map.
Many misses and few hits... July 24, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Every anthology tends to offer some hits and misses in terms of story selection, and `Steampunk' is no different. Along with three essays on the genre, the book provides 13 tales dealing with "Victorian elegance and modern technology". With the exception of an excerpt from Michael Moorcock's "The Warlord of the Air", all entries have previously appeared in print within the past 25 years.
Reviewer `Redon' gives a good overview of the book's contents. I'll just add my thoughts on some of the material:
For the essays, Jess Nevins provides a concise history of steampunk in literature, focusing on the role of the "Edisonade" genre of 19th century dime novels in setting the major themes and tropes of the genre. Rick Klaw's essay deals with steampunk in television and film, and Bill Baker provides a history of steampunk comics and graphic novels.
My selections for the best stories in the book, with capsule summaries:
"The Giving Mouth" by Ian R. McLeod: more steam-fantasy than steampunk, McLeod's story takes a page from Michael Swanwick's seminal novel the "Iron Dragon's Daughter" and juxtaposes slag heaps, industrial decay, and magic in a coming -of-age tale with a melancholy, but effective, tone.
"The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider" by Joe R. Lansdale: mixing steampunk with splatterpunk, Lansdale relates a violent encounter between the steam-driven robot from the popular 19th century boy's novels, and H. G. Wells's time traveler, made mutated and vampiric by too much travel in the 4th dimension. Readers will be laughing out loud at one paragraph, and squirming at the next. Having a Lansdale story in this collection is bit like bringing along your cousin Bubba from Mississippi - the one who likes NASCAR, squirrel hunting, and making politically incorrect remarks about People of Color, militant lesbian feminists, and ponytailed men who do yoga - to a soiree hosted by the staff of The Nation magazine. But there's no getting away from the fact that Lansdale delivers a great story, howevermuch it sits uneasily with the other entries. [The succeeding tale, "The Selene Gardening Society", which is meant to be a light-hearted parody of a Victorian drawing-room comedy, seems like even thinner gruel than it actually is, coming as it does after a Lansdale adventure. Not a good placement of story order in the anthology by the editors !]
"Seventy-two Letters" by Ted Chiang: a well-written novelette dealing with an alternative Victorian England where Kabbalistic magic gives rise to homunculi and androids, which power a counterpart of our own Industrial Age. Much of the story's plot hinges on the concept of `preformationism', which dominated scientific thought regarding sexual reproduction until supplanted by modern embryology in the late 19th century. Unfortunately, Chiang fails to provide any exposition on the topic in the course of unfolding his narrative; thus readers not familiar with this rather obscure theory may find themselves a bit lost.
"Minutes of the Last Meeting" by Stepan Chapman: a strange, overly worked melange of steampunk, cyberpunk, and comic fantasy. The story starts on a traditional alt-history adventure note involving the Tsar, his entourage, and Revolutionary Russia, but then get weirder as it goes on, with the author throwing one SF trope after another into the mix. The mix never quite gels, but the narrative has enough crazed energy to keep the reader engaged all the way to the bitter end.
The remaining stories are, in my opinion, disappointments. Some are underdeveloped and needed more work before seeing print ("The God-Clown is Near", "Reflected Light"). Others are rather pedestrian re-hashes of familiar themes, but have some `progressive' element that the editors deemed stylish enough for inclusion ("A Sun in the Attic"). A contribution by current Fiction Darling Michael Chabon ("The Martian Agent") is over-written and plodding. Other stories are pleasant, somewhat droll satires of Victorian social mores ("The Selene Gardening Society", "Victoria"); but in lacking the dystopian, edgy character of steampunk per se, their inclusion in this anthology is a mystery.
In summary, `Steampunk' has too many Misses to make up for the sparse selection of Hits. The `definitive' Steampunk anthology still awaits print......
Not Free SF Reader July 7, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Another interesting retrospective anthology from the VanderMeer marital team, from the same publisher in Tachyon, too. This one I think with a cooler and more appropriate cover.
The difference here is that neither of the editors are as heavily invested in the subject from a personal writing point of view as with The New Weird. So, there is a Team VanderMeer intro, but then they hand over the non-fictional reins to others more knowledgeable.
For early genre fiction of this ilk, if there is anyone more knowledgeable than Jess Nevins it would be surprising - and they certainly haven't written all the cool stuff on the internet that he has - go and check out his website, it is a marvel. So, pretty much anything he writes on this sort of topic will be worth looking at - and here he gives the early history of work that leads to 'Steampunk'. From before Verne and Wells, to the American explorer-scientist 'Edisonades' as he points out these have been termed, right up to the first 'story 'included here, Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable excerpt.
He does talk about the 'punk' element here, and even first and second wave steampunk, and who the first wave authors were - Blaylock, Jeter, etc. Nevins concentrates on prose.
Rick Klaw talks about Steampunk in popular culture in a wide variety of media, film, anime, etc.
Bill Baker gives an overview of Steampunk in graphic format - and there are lots, and gives a reasonable looking bibliography as such, including the awesome Warren Ellis and John Cassaday Planetary and Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that are must reads, for those that like this sort of thing.
On the whole, reasonably well done, although a couple more lists from Nevins and Klaw wouldn't have gone astray, even though work is mentioned. Such things are good for asking librarians 'here, check these out on Interlibrary Loan for me would you please'?
There is a wide range of stories from the very fluffy-light Molly Brown story through madcap Blaylock, to the, to quote my spousal unit, who read this before me 'the really twisted' Joe Lansdale. The final story is a bit different, nanopunk if you like - from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age setting. A nice score to get a story from him though, and it, too, is cool.
There are no bad stories here, although the footnote ending of Pollack's is weak, and Chabon's is annoying to read with all the em-dash line beginnings that make it like your eyes are trying to herd ants to follow it.
The publisher shouldn't be shy about making use of spare pages to advertise other anthologies they have done or possible books of interest to those of us that buy these things. I don't think many of us mind that, within reason, if you have the space.
Overall, I'd put it a bit under 4.5, but certainly good enough to round up to there.
Steampunk : Benediction: Warlord of the Air - Michael Moorcock
Steampunk : Lord Kelvins Machine - James Blaylock
Steampunk : The Giving Mouth - Ian MacLeod
Steampunk : A Sun in the Attic - Mary Gentle
Steampunk : The God-Clown Is Near - Jay Lake
Steampunk : The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down - Joe Lansdale
Steampunk : The Selene Gardening Society - Molly Brown
Steampunk : Seventy-Two Letters - Ted Chiang
Steampunk : The Martian Agent: An Interplanetary Romance - Michael Chabon
Steampunk : Victoria - Paul Di Filippo
Steampunk : Reflected Light - Rachel E. Pollack
Steampunk : Minutes of the Last Meeting - Stepan Chapman
Steampunk : Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of the Tribes of the Pacific Coast - Neal Stephenson
Fleet going down.
3.5 out of 5
Magnetic field massacre mouse save snakes into mad scientist volcano shootout showdown.
4 out of 5
Eater machined.
3 out of 5
Archival barbarian reports.
3.5 out of 5
Really getting their goat.
4 out of 5
The Time Traveler vampire show is a rip of a ride.
4.5 out of 5
The Moon? What a load of rubbish.
3.5 out of 5
Foetal experiment orders named.
3.5 out of 5
Airship hopes.
3 out of 5
Newt but a Queen.
4 out of 5
Less handy rebels.
3 out of 5
Tsar Nukeallofus.
3.5 out of 5
Nano Protoctol crossbow source defense samurai chainsword rescue.
3.5 out of 5
4.5 out of 5
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