Tatiana's Reviews > Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

I haven't enjoyed a YA anthology this much since Zombies Vs. Unicorns. Picking authors who can write and have a lot of interest in the genre, as opposed to those who are popular, really paid off here. (The only exception to this assumption is the opening short story by Cassandra Clare. But I guess there was no way to avoid that as Clare is currently considered to be the shining beacon of YA steampunk and thus assigned as the main attraction in this book.)

The subtitle of the collection is An Anthology if Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, and indeed it's not a lie, this book is full of imaginative and original stories.

My vision of what "steampunk" is is pretty pedestrian and looks something like this:



+



+



For the most part, the authors cater to such "vision" and a few even manage to bend it to their purposes and create some darn good stories. Although there are some who think that using words like "engineer" or "gadget" once or twice in a story is sufficient to make it steampunk. I disagree, but what do I know?

Now to the stories themselves.

My most favorite in the collection, without contest, Dylan Horrocks's Steam Girl. It's a sweet story about a developing friendship (and maybe more) between a lonely boy and a new girl in school who calls herself Steam Girl and tells strange tales about her inventions and various steampunky interplanetary adventures. Are her stories real or imaginary?

The other shorts that caught my attention:

Libba Bray's The Last Ride of the Glory Girls - about a gang of girls who rob trains using a clockwork that stops time. This story is so good I wouldn't mind reading a whole book about the Glory Girls and their adventures.

In Clockwork Fagin by Cory Doctorow limbless and mutilated children injured by steam-powered machines who live in an orphanage get rid of their evil master and substitute him with an automaton.

Next two stories are both ghostly and with the most feminist flare. The main character in Ysabeau S. Wilce's Hand in Glove, Constable Aurelia Etreyo, seeks both respect from her male colleagues and justice for an innocent man accused of multiple murders. The narrator of Delia Sherman's The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor, a servant girl who dreams of becoming an engineer, helps her master to find hidden treasure with some help from the resident ghost.

Calling Elizabeth Knox's Gethsemane steampunk would be a stretch. But this story about 4 strange people caught in a natural disaster is so curiously and intricately written that I am willing to forgive the deficiencies in steampunk department. I loved how life stories of the characters intertwined and transformed, rolling into one another.

The collection also has two successful post-apocalyptic pieces. In Garth Nix's Peace in Our Time and Christopher Rowe's Nowhere Fast steampunk future is, respectively, a cause and the effect of the downfall of the civilization.

The two graphic stories (Shawn Cheng's Seven Days Beset by Demons and Kathleen Jennings's Finishing School) presented in Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories while provide some diversion from prose are pretty negligible.

My least favorite stories, in the descending order of my enjoyment, are:

Kelly Link's The Summer People has absolutely nothing to do with steampunk. It's a tale about a girl's quest to rid herself of the fae folk she is bound to serve.

The Oracle Engine by M.T. Anderson is set in a AU Ancient Rome and involves a future-predicting machine used for revenge.

Both Cassandra Clare's Some Fortunate Future Day and Holly Black's Everything Amiable and Obliging have good ideas (the first one is about time reversing and the second - automaton-loving), but are too unpolished, unappealing in terms of writing and character development. It might be a matter of personal taste though, I have never liked anything written by either of these authors.

All in all my experience with this collection has been very pleasant. Even the weakest short stories in this anthology are very readable. I recommend.