Steampunk – edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The big question with any anthology like this is, if you’re new to the genre, does this make a good introduction? I think the answer here is a qualified yes. It has to be qualified, because this is a genre which is at its best in the longer form – novella, at least, or novel – and at shorter lengths you perhaps don’t get as much time to immerse yourself in what can be a very strange fictional world.

What is steampunk? An alternative name for it might be “Victorian Fantasy”. Steampunk is a genre of science fiction inspired not by the latest developments in science and technology, or by speculation about the future, but by the original practitioners of fantasy and science fiction: Mary Shelley, H P Lovecraft, H G Wells, and Jules Verne. Steampunk re-imagines the science and technology of the late 19th Century and creates adventure stories full of steam-powered robots, airships, golems, and Victorian dress.

The setting doesn’t always have to be the 19th Century. Another way of thinking about steampunk is to see it as counter-factual historical fiction, or alternate history. So there can be a lot of “what ifs” as well as not-quite-right technology. Ian R. MacLeod’s fantastic novel The Light Ages is an example of this (in it, the industrial revolution is driven by aether/magic rather than by the steam engine).

If you watch any Doctor Who, you’ve already been exposed to some steampunk tropes. The Doctor, like the hero of Wells’ The Time Machine, is a time traveller. His incarnations often wear Victorian style frock coats and accessories; he stores his soul in a pocket watch; he encounters clockwork androids and moving statues; his TARDIS seems to be cobbled together from semi-organic parts and anachronistic technologies; and so on. This year’s Christmas Special, “The Next Doctor” was quintessentially steampunk: with an enormous steam-powered robot, Victorian setting, and even a hot air balloon.

So if you like that kind of thing, then you’ll like this. The collection begins with a very interesting essay which discusses the popularity of a certain style of 19th Century gung-ho dime novel fiction (Edisonades), which is (of course) forgotten as far as literature studies are concerned. It’s one of the ironies of English/American literature that you end up studying the stuff that hardly anybody reads. The really popular stuff, the trashy adventure stories and romances, are largely forgotten.

While the Edisonade celebrated technology and invention, steampunk more often focuses on the dark side, the unintended consequences (the enslaved child labourers in the Doctor Who Special are an example).

The first story here is James P Blaylock’s “Lord Kelvin’s Machine”, which is about an attempt to foil an evil genius who wants to destroy the world by triggering volcanic eruptions. There are other stories here from Ian R. MacLeod, Mary Gentle, Ted Chiang, Paul Di Filippo, Rachel E. Pollock and Neal Stephenson.

Perhaps the most disturbing story here is “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel” by Joe R. Lansdale, which takes the form and content of the Edisonade adventure novel and mixes it with very dark stuff indeed, including graphic violence and sexual violence.

“The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance” by Michael Chabon is set in an alternative America in which the rebels haven’t successfully revolted, and the British are still in charge – complete with air ships and plans to travel into space. It’s interesting, but reads a bit too much like the opening of a novel.

Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” is a golem story, set in a world in which automata are animated by the magic of the Kabbalah (and face opposition from the equivalent of Luddites).

The collection finishes with a survey of steampunk sources by Rick Klaw, and another survey of steampunk graphic novels and comic books.

Recommended, but do read some novels as well.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

I’ve missed out on most of Joe Haldeman’s career. I believe I read The Forever War a couple of decades ago, and I dismissed him as one of those gung-ho Viet Nam vet writers who writes SF novels as extended metaphors for the war.

More recently, I came across his superb novella, “The Hemingway Hoax”, which I believe was later published as a full-length novel. I’ve not read the longer version – it worries me. What could you possibly add to a perfect novella to turn it into a novel? Anyway, I realised belatedly that Haldeman was a more three-dimensional writer than I’d given him credit for. His style is fresh, natural, contemporary – you’d never believe he started his career in the 70s.

The Accidental Time Machine was published last year, and it’s a straightforward SF adventure with a simple premise. There’s very little toying with paradox and and brain-aching concepts, and it’s straight on with the story, a ripping yarn about a graduate student who builds a bit of lab equipment that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Instead, it seems to be able to move forward in time. The twist is, it goes further forward by a factor of twelve each time it’s switched on.

Problem is, it has a tendency to move a little bit in space, too – which makes it the Maguffin – or the main driver of the plot.

Haldeman keeps the science plausibly in the background – though an author’s note at the end links it to recent scientific research. His hero is pleasantly hopeless – though smart enough to learn, and the future he encounters is intriguing. The book’s an effortless read, it’s not one of these 900-page epics with two sequels, so it’s well worth picking up.

There’s a taster for Haldeman’s latest, Marsbound, at the end, which is enough to make you want to read that one, too.

Recommended.

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers

Another Powers entry in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, The Drawing of the Dark takes us back to the Siege of Vienna in 1529, during which Suleiman the Magnificent’s over-extended forces were (just) defeated by an admixture of poorly supported conscripts and mercenaries.

This is another of Powers’ secret histories, one which seeks to explain just why Suleiman chose to attack Vienna so late in the season (October), and all the ill-fortune that beset the Ottoman army on their way to Vienna.

Brian Duffy, an Irish swordsman and mercenary, is recruited by the mysterious Aurelianus to act as bouncer in the ancient Herzwesten brewery and inn (former monastery) in Vienna. The beer at this brewery is renowned, but Duffy is still bewildered to find himself beset by obstacles, attempts on his life, and the kind of supernatural incidents that have dogged his life on his journey from Venice to Vienna to take up his post.

Inevitably, he finds himself embroiled in events beyond his ken, and in spite of his resistance, realises that he can be instrumental in preserving the West against the Ottoman onslaught. The message here is not that the East is necessarily evil and the West good, but that a certain balance exists in the universe, which is in danger of being overturned.

I love the idea that western civilisation is built upon the brewing of beer, and even that the true key to human progress is not the gift of fire but the gift of beer. This is the first Powers novel to really play into the Fisher King monomyth, the beginning of a long line of books in which he has explored elements of the myth from different angles (up to and including his recent novel Three Days to Never).

You could call this novel fantasy (does indeed feature swords and sorcery), or magic realism, or steampunk, or even counterfactual history: whatever it is, it’s a superb exploration of the nature of heroism and a superb sideways look at a slice of history.

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

Now available as part of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates was originally published in 1983, Powers’ fourth novel, or (put another way) the second novel of the second phase of his career (Powers published two early books in 1976 and then came back with a completely different approach with The Drawing of the Dark in 1979 – see separate review to follow).

What The Anubis Gates and The Drawing of the Dark have in common with those earlier books is the hero, the sometimes hapless individual who finds himself caught up in extraordinary events and gets pretty much beaten up and torn to shreds before putting himself back together again. This same hero turns up in almost every Powers novel under various names, and Powers sets out to take him to pieces and inflict pain and humiliation such as will make you wince as you read. Smashed hands are not uncommon, as are blows to the head and mortal wounds.

The Anubis Gates is a time travel novel, in which the hero (a somewhat down-at-heel academic who is attempting to write a biography of an obscure 19th Century poet, William Ashbless) joins a group on a trip back in time to witness a Coleridge lecture. As you’d expect with Powers, this time travel has less to do with science than with a kind of internally logical magic, involving gypsies, beggars, ancient magicians, homunculi, and attempts to free Egyptian gods fom the underworld.

[Ashbless is a conceit cooked up by Powers and his friend James Blaylock: a convincingly real obscure poet, contemporary of Coleridge and Byron, who leaves few clues behind as to the details of his life.]

Finding himself trapped in 1810, Powers’ hero Brendan Doyle adopts various personae in his attempts to survive, and (always lagging behind in his comprehension of events) even finds himself in a completely different body, thanks to the doings of a Ripper-like serial killer/werewolf called Dog Face Joe.

This is one of the early examples of the genre Powers termed Steampunk, and it carries his trademark: the retelling of actual events (such as the inexplicable appearance of someone claiming to be Byron in London at a time when Byron was known to be in Turkey) as a secret history, with the hidden details of magic and supernatural included.

Superb.

Ian R. MacLeod – The House of Storms

You may see this book billed as a sequel to MacLeod’s The Light Ages, but actually you could read them in any order. One may take place before the other, but this isn’t a continuation of a plot in the normal sequel sense, and there is a complete set of different characters.

Events in The House of Storms take place some time after those in The Light Ages. By now, the treatment of those adversely affected by Aether is more humane than previously. These so-called Changelings (or The Chosen, as they call themselves) are exiled to an estate in the South West of England called Einfell, where they’re allowed to live out their lives in relative comfort, though still isolated from the society they helped to build.

Consumptive Ralph Meynell is taken to the nearby estate of Invercombe by his powerful and wicked mother Alice, where he meets shoregirl Marion Price and falls in love. Their liaison is inconvenient to the ambitions Alice has for her now-recovered son, and she manipulates events so that Ralph loses Marion and Marion believes their son (Klade) was stillborn.

Alice Meynell is one of the great fictional villains; she has Hitler-like tendencies and starts a civil war, essentially, because the Bristol Post Office loses some of her mail and she has to queue at a cake shop.

As you’d expect from a fantasy novel, there is mystery and magic, but there is also a fully realised fictional world and a cast of fascinating characters. MacLeod, as he always does, takes great pains to tell the story, and his attention to detail is superb. He is surely one of the best writers around – in any genre. Highly recommended, along with anything else he’s written (look out for the novellas “The Summer Isles” and “Breathmoss”, for example).

Declare – Tim Powers

While I'm in an espionage frame of mind, this is something I've been meaning to do for a long time. While I've mentioned Tim Powers often, I've not actually done full-blown reviews of many of his books.

He's got a new novel due out some time this year (fingers crossed) called Three Days To Never, but his previous full-length outing was Declare, which more than anything is what started me reading both fact and fiction about espionage, a throwback to my PhD studies, when I read Mailer's Harlot's Ghost as well as Oswald's Tale.

Lee Harvey Oswald (triple-named in notoriety, as Delillo says in Libra), so it goes, was an agent, an informer. He had his handler. In my review below I mention how events in Le Carré's Absolute Friends are manipulated by an unnamed agency so as to give the appearance that a terrorist plot has been foiled. But the two dead terrorists found at the scene are, in fact, just patsies. "I'm a patsy," was how Oswald declared his innocence following his arrest for the assassination of Kennedy.

The key thing about characters like Oswald (in fiction at least) and Mundy is that they exist in a state of semi-bewliderment, not really clear on the background, the basics, but along for the ride nevertheless. The more you read about espionage, the more believeable it comes to seem that Oswald was a patsy.

Being along for the ride, playing along for a peaceful life: I think we've all been there. You have a veggie girlfriend or boyfriend, so you're a veggie while it lasts. But you're not really. You're not an ideologue, just a passenger on someone else's ideology.

This is how Andrew Hale, the hero of Tim Powers' Declare, exists. He's a classic Le Carré hero, who ends up working in espionage by default, because someone leads him to it, and he joins in the heyday – pre World War 2, when the whole thing was run by gentlemen scholars and amateurs. Hale's recruitment could almost be a carbon copy of Smiley's, or Mundy's, except for the little twist that Powers gives the story. He learns how to act, not because he understands what he's doing, but by rote: learns to react to certain cues, the instructions given by wire, by anonymous voices over the telephone: "Here is a list…"

Powers operates like this: an historical event, something everyone knows a little bit about, is examined closely for anomalous details. Powers takes these anomalies, small mysteries at the heart of events (like: what motivates people to act as they do?), and supplies the explanation: which is usually of a supernatural or fantastic nature. Everything remains internally consistent with the external facts.

So. For example, Hale is taken to the headquarters of the amateur spy organisation, the pre-war SIS, and led up a complex series of passageways and staircases to an office. Whereas we've all wandered in a bewildered way around office complexes sploodged into old buildings, Powers helpfully supplies all the strange details: just this number of exact turns, counterclockwise, just one window facing in this particular direction, and do go back in the exact opposite way you came in.

Hale, it turns out, has a destiny, a unique ability, an accident of his birth, but this orphaned son of a troubled mother doesn't know it yet. Declare covers some familiar locations and events: Paris during the Nazi occupation; Berlin in the Cold War; the Middle East; Philby, Burgess, T E Lawrence; the fall of the Soviet Union.

We were just reading about this in Absolute Friends. The fall of the Soviet Union: why? Why so sudden? Le Carré describes events; Powers offers a supernatural explanation.

Following his recruitment, Hale is sent to Paris, where he lives undercover, working with a small radio receiver, picking up and decoding messages, passing them on. He doesn't know what's going on, but somehow he's gifted, able to receive when others can't, as strange radio codes bounce off the heavyside layer. Tapping out the rhythm: in a trance, or possessed by a higher power. All the usual spy paraphernalia are here: the one-time decoding pads, the radio sets, the beautiful and mysterious Elena who assists him, who always seems to understand more than him, and who comes, perhaps, to love him.

But events drive them apart, he loses her, and doesn't know if she's alive or dead. He encounters her again, years later, in a divided Berlin, as the Communists attempt to mount some extraordinary operation. On the surface, it's tanks and soldiers, but in reality there are massive supernatural forces at work, as the djinn (or genie) that holds the Soviet Empire together is fed or appeased. In 1948, he takes place in a disastrous exercise near Mount Ararat designed to destroy a djinn, and in so doing destroy the one that protects the Soviet Empire. When it all goes horribly wrong, with most of his team killed, Hale is a broken man who returns to his books.

Philby is a constant presence. The high-profile British traitor lived under a cloud after his spy-ring colleagues defected in 1951, but he was still an actor in British intelligence until his own defection, which took place in Beirut in 1963. What happens in that year is described by Powers. As Hale, called back into service, takes part another attempt to destroy the djinn on Mt. Ararat, both Philby and Elena are present. Afterwards, Philby escapes to Moscow.

The final act in the story takes place there, in the days before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hale is in Moscow, hoping to find Elena, hoping she remembers a rash promise they'd made each other years before. And there is Philby: the key to the Soviet Empire: when he dies (in 1988), it begins to die.

I love Declare. It's so many things rolled into one successful whole. A spy novel; a fantasy novel; a romance; a ripping yarn. The bewildered hero Hale is easy to identify with, and the implacably brave and self-sacrificing Elena is easy to love. And I love it because it mixes actual historical events and people like Philby with a fantasy plot that supplies an explanation that is in so many ways more satisfying (and believable?) than any other you might have heard. It's a dense and complex novel, too, so it's one you can read again and again with the same amount of pleasure.