Steampunk’d edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg – review

Steampunk’d, the latest anthology edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg, offers sci-fi and fantasy readers a good selection of stories that should help them decide whether or not they like the steampunk asthetic if they haven’t made up their minds already.  Fans who already know they enjoy steampunk should find stories that they can really enjoy.

Steampunk has fascinated me since the first time I encountered it.  The idea of steam-powered and clockwork devices being the dominant forms of technology, rather than the combustion engine, offers writers and artists all kind of interesting avenues to pursue.  I also like the return to pulp-style adventure stories about explorers and inventors, because it makes for very fast paced and interesting stories.  This particular anthology contains stories by Michael A Stackpole, Jody Lynn Nye, and Donald J Bingle, among others.

“Chance Corrigan and the Tick-Tock King of the Nile” is Stackpole’s contribution.  The main character, Chance Corrigan, is a brilliant inventor who has learned his lessons the hard way and prefers to travel anonymously, due to the fact that some of his mistakes were not only devastating, but also the kind of exploits that make a person infamous.  He’s approached in a bar by a slick businessman who has a group of thugs in tow, and he’s taken to Egypt in order to help to build a dam on the Nile river.  The machinery being used to build the dam is powered with Tesla Coils, and Corrigan has been hired to make the machines more efficient.  He improves the production output rather handily, but then goes on to discover that the project is not all it seems to be.  He not only has to save his own life, but the lives of everyone along the Nile river valley.

In Donald J Bingle’s “Foggy Goggles,” a New York Times reporter goes to Las Vegas, Nevada, to investigate the story of a professor who revolutinized airship travel by creating a mechanism to both control the temperature of the heated gas in the balloon itself and manage the ballast, as well.  The reporter has been warned, repeatedly, about the inhospitable desert where he’s traveling, but once he gets there, he discovers near tropical conditions.  Things become further complicated when he realizes how the desert came to be transformed–it’s all due to the profesor’s latest invention.  It will make people’s lives much easier, but at what cost?

Penelope Galferd is the main character in Jody Lynn Nye’s “Portrait of a Lady in a Monocle.”  Penelope is a genius who had joined an inventor’s society.  She has fallen into disfavor because she accused her ex-boyfriend of stealing one of her inventions to present to the club.  She is accused of behaving out of jealousy, since the ex-boyfriend is receiving such acclaim for his device.  Rather than simply sit back and play the victim, though, Penelope takes action and sets out to prove her innocence with a few more of her inventions in tow.

Stephen D Sullivan’s “Of a Feather” is one of the really fun, adventure pulp style stories in this book.  Kit is a female scientist leading an expidition deep into the heart of the Amazonian jungle in order to study Ranodons.  The story is set in an alternative universe where pockets of prehistoric life have survived and are just beginning to be studied.  The Ranodons are a vicious species, and they have been hunted to near extinction by tribesmen in the area.  Kit hopes that by studying them they might be protected.  Instead, an old rival comes into the picture to poach Kit’s research and use the creatures for nefarious purposes.  It’s up to Kit to save her crew, their expedition, and the Ranodons she came to study.

“Foretold” by Bradley F. Beaulieu was probably my favorite story in the anthology.  In the frozen north of Europe, mining crews use gigantic mechanical arachnids to mine meteorites.  They employ astronomers in order to predict where the meteorites will fall.  Since the materials are extremely valuable,  piracy is an issue, and secrecy about where the next fall is predicted is of the utmost importance.  Maks is one of the astronomers, and he has an apprentice whom he never seems to allow to work by himself.  Maks claims that it’s because his apprentice makes too many mistakes and is too unfocused, but his fellow crewmembers believe it’s more likely that Maks is simply frustrated because his apprentice seems to follow his own methods rather than the ones that Maks has taught him.  The crew is attacked for a recent haul by pirates, and the apprentice is kidnapped. Maks survives and realizes that his apprentice must be rescued because the boy has a far more important role to fill than simply being a mere astronomer.

This anthology was easily one of the most enjoyable of the themed DAW anthologies I’ve ever read.  That’s really saying something, because I love the DAW anthologies and look forward to them being released with quite a bit of excitement.  I read it quickly, because I just couldn’t seem to put it down.  I wanted to find out what was going to happen next in all the stories.  There is an abundance of strong female characters who are capable and just as brilliant, if not more so, than their male counterparts.  These pages are populated by decisive, intelligent people at the forefront of the technology of their day.  They are creating scientific marvels and embarking on grand expeditions to tame and discover the world.  There is sound science and psuedo-science and just plain magic interwoven throughout the stories that makes them feel believable while letting the reader keep the necessary sense of wonder to fully appreciate them.

My biggest complaint would have been that there are several characters and worlds that were introduced  in these stories that simply made me want to read more.  They’re exciting snippets that, while self-contained, hint at far deeper imaginings than what was revealed in the scant excerpts delivered in this volume.  I would definitely recommend this anthology to readers who want sci-fi that doesn’t get utterly bogged down in  hard to comprehend complex terminology as well as fans of adventure stories and people who appreciate smart and ingenius characters who can get themselves into and out of fixes faster than you can strap on a pair of goggles.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to young adult readers, either. There was very little material that could be considered objectionable in this collection of stories.  There was no strong language and very little in the romance department (there are a few chaste kisses and some admissions of attraction, but very little beyond that).  Naturally, there’s some violence, because most of these do read like adventure stories in the best sense, but all of it is precipitated by events that make it a fairly resonable response to the situation at hand.  There is very little in the way of bloodshed or gore. Mostly, there are a few gunfights and some fistfights, but nothing beyond what you’d see in the last couple of Indiana Jones films.

All in all, I would just highly recommend this anthology.  It was a blast to read, and I know that there are several of these stories that I’m going to want to revisit time and time again, hoping beyond hope that they might be expanded into longer pieces sometime down the road.