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 Year’s Best Science Fiction – Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois

Seems like only yesterday that I was reading the 23rd Annual Collection edited by Gardner Doizos, and here we are with the 24th. Actually, it was almost exactly a year ago – one day difference. In fact, I could have posted this review yesterday, having just finished the book, but decided to wait till today.

Now that’s consistent reading behaviour, I’m sure you’ll grant me, and this 24th Annual represents consistent, high-quality, book editing on the part of Gardner Dozois.

For your money ($21.95 is the US cover price; I paid £9.97 on Amazon UK), you get 652 pages of original, recent, science fiction, by some of the greatest names working in the field.

The opening tale, “I Row-Boat” by Cory Doctorow, apart from the cute SF pun of its title, is a sweet and interesting tale of what happens following the Singularity that sees human beings upload themselves as data, and artificial intelligences gain status as sentient beings. The rowing boat of the title is Robbie, who has chosen, in spite of his sentience, to continue to work as a boat, carrying passengers out from a larger boat on diving expeditions. But what happens when the coral reef the divers are visiting itself gains sentience? And who are these divers? People? Or downloaded intelligences occupying human shells?

Robert Charles Wilson’s “Julian: a Christmas Story,” describes a post-oil religious society which scavenges its past without ever quite believing in it. The narrator tells a story about Julian, who will become known as Julian the Agnostic or Julian Conqueror at some indeterminate point in the future. In this story he’s a kind of exiled prince, son of a deposed leader, and propagator of heretical ideas.

“Tin Marsh” by Michael Swanwick is a claustrophobic story of planetary prospecting, a Treasure of the Sierra Madre in space. The narrator is a prospector who torments her partner to breaking point and suffers the consequences when the statutory anti-violence chip in his brain malfunctions.

“The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDDonald, is one of his trademark tales of the Indian Subcontinent in the future, a place which mixes ancient religious ideas with bang up-to-date explorations of artificial intelligence.

Kage Baker’s “Where The Golden Apples Grow”, like “Tin Marsh”, takes us to one of the traditional frontiers of classic science fiction. Whereas “Tin Marsh” is set on Venus, “Golden Apples” is set on a newly colonised Mars. The title’s homage to Ray Bradbury is a bit of a giveaway. So Mars is a bit like the wild west, or the Australian outback, and there are colonists and farmers and long distance truckers who ship ice from the poles to the settlements on the equator.

Alastair Reynolds has two stories in the collection. “Signal to Noise” is a superb tale of a scientist crossing between alternate realities as a stream of data – data that gradually degrades as the noise level increases. This is also a poignant story of grief and loss: what happens if the “you” in this life suddenly loses a loved one, but can temporarily visit an alternate universe and take the place of the “you” who has suffered no such loss? His other entry, “Nightingale” couldn’t be more different. Set in the same future as his other Conjoiner/Ultra novels (see review of Absolution Gap, below), it’s an atmospheric story of an incursion into an apparently deserted hospital ship in search of a war criminal.

Gregory Benford’s excellent “Bow Shock” is a brilliant story set in the very recognisable milieu of university scientific research, complete with office politics, professional jealousy, vicious backbiting, and the pressure to publish. In the end it’s another poignant story about a scientific discovery that is much more than it initially seems.

If Benford’s world is familiar enough to be happening today, right now, in a university near you, Robert Reed’s novella “Good Mountain” takes place in an environment so alien that it takes you pages to work out what’s going on. In this strange tale, what seem to be human beings mix with what seem to be genetically engineered sub-humans (“mockmen”) and travel to unfamiliar places on board what seem to be giant worms. On a world barely able to support intelligent life, they wrestle with forces beyond their control, seeing their society gradually disintegrate into fire and suffocating darkness.

If that wasn’t weird enough for you, David D. Levine’s story “I Hold My Father’s Paws” sees an estranged son and his father try to reconcile just before the father decides to become somewhat less (or more) than human.

If some of these stories are good old-fashioned modern space operas, others are most definitely post-Singularity humans-are-just-data stories of physical transformation and interface problems. Mary Rosenblum’s “Home Movies” explores the life of a person who records experiences on behalf of clients who cannot be physically present.

On the other hand, Daryl Gregory’s compelling “Damascus” explores the link between religious psychosis and some variant of CJD (or Mad Cow Disease, if you’re a cow).

Greg Egan’s “Riding the Crocodile” manages to be both post-singularity and a kind of space opera, as humans-who-are-data decide to explore an inaccessible part of the universe at the end of an impossibly long life.

“The Ile of Dogges” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette is set in the censor’s office in the time of Ben Jonson, and features a cameo from Jonson himself, who attempts to bribe the censor into not burning the only copy of his latest play. I’ll leave you to guess where the science fiction comes in.

Ken Macleod’s “The Highway Men” is another tale of the post-oil economy, featuring the kind of accidental hero you might expect to find in the highlands of Scotland.

Stephen Baxter’s “The Pacific Mystery” is an absolute corker of an alternate history, and the only story here I’d read before (In The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF). It’s set in a world in which World War 2 didn’t really happen, because the British appeasers held sway and for some reason the Japanese were unable to cross the Pacific to make war on the USA. But why…? is the great pleasure of this lovely and ultimately sad story.

There are many great stories here, but I’ll mention just one more. “Every Hole is Outlined” by John Barnes (not that John Barnes, surely?) is another space opera involving long-lived humans who are a breed apart. It’s also a kind of deep space ghost story, which leads me to conclude that this collection is imbued with sadness, a sense of missed opportunities and loss. If you read “Every Hole” and “The Pacific Mystery” and “Good Mountain” back to back you might find yourself weeping for the fate of humanity.

These sad stories probably reflect something at large in our culture that we’re barely aware of, and probably won’t recognise properly for some time to come.

As usual, unmissable and highly recommended.

The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, edited by Mike Ashley

The subtitle of this collection is a bit of false advertising: “New Generation Far-Future SF,” is what it says, but somebody sack the editor, because he has taken considerable liberties. He’s been asked to do the job, and then somewhere along the line he’s got all het-up by the know-nothing marketing monkeys who work for his publisher, and he’s decided, as a fuck-you, to find a few stories from the Golden Age which fit the brief. But do they really? I think not.

As one slightly bitter Amazon.com reviewer points out, 11 of the 19 stories in the collection were published before 2000. Certainly, some of them were being reprinted for the first time, but it turns out that relatively few of these stories are “new generation” and precious few are set in what now passes for the “far future.” I’ve pointed out before that the current trend in SF is to throw humanity into impossibly distant futures. In the Golden Age, writers generally thought in hundreds of years at best. These days, the fashion for post-human, sigularity SF thinks in terms of tens or hundreds of thousand years.

So there are a couple of stories that fit that brief, but a whole chunk of them that do not. This is carping, of course. I’m not saying that there aren’t extreme ideas here, but some of them are most definitely not “new generation” and the effect can be jarring, to encounter, for example, the thoughtless sexism of some of the Golden Age stuff (like “The Girl Had Guts” by Theodore Sturgeon).

That carping aside, I just wonder what the point of this collection is. Pick any of the Gardner Dozois “Best SF…” collections of the last 10-20 years, and you’d have a pretty similar representation of new voices and extreme ideas, all picked with Dozois’ unerring taste. Get his “Best of the Best” and this Mammoth collection pales in comparison.

Another one of my grumpy summer reads: not 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.