Extraordinary Engines

CORRECTION: Elementals is by Ian R. MacLeod, not Ken MacLeod. How do I know? Ken MacLeod himself has corrected me in the comments section below. Ahem. How embarrassing.

I have a soft spot for sci-fi and fantasy short story collections. It was how I first entered into the world of speculative fiction, which I have grown to love so much all these years later. I remember the chills I used to get reading ghost stories, whether Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" or M. R. James's "O whistle and I'll come to you my lad," and the feeling of wide-eyed wonder I had upon cracking the pages on Asimov's "Nightfall" or Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." Fantasy came a little later, I'll admit. I'd had Tolkien, Lewis and Alexander read to me as a child, but I kind of re-entered the genre through classic sword and sorcery tales like Howard's "Red Nails" and Leiber's "Claws from the Night."

Unfortunately, I find much modern spec fic in the short form to be sadly lacking. It builds well, but then rushes to a conclusion to get in under the twenty or thirty page limit. So in general I avoid short stories, unless they're by someone I have a lot of respect for. However, I have also long been interested in the wildly popular, yet incredibly underrepresented sub-genre of Steampunk. For those who are unaware, Steampunk imagines a sort of alternate universe of high-technology which is operated entirely through steam or alchemy, and usually resembles Victorian England (or occasionally the American West). My knowledge of the genre was pretty much limited to Alan Moore's truly fantastic graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells (frequently cited as unwitting inventors of the movement). So when I saw this volume claiming to be "The Definitive Steampunk Anthology" I had to pick it up.

As might be expected, the book differs wildly in tone and universe as you skip from story to story. This is both the greatest strength and weakness of the book. On the one hand, you're almost guaranteed to find something you like, while on the other, you're definitely going to find a few rotten apples in this barrel.

So what did I think was good? Pretty much everything here was readable, and none of it was especially confusing. At least one story (Ian R. MacLeod's "Elementals") reminded me strongly of a short story I read in Greg Egan's Axiomatic. If I had to pick favorites, I'd toss them out to James Morrow's Lady Witherspoon's Solution in which a precocious socialite records the results of a wonderous science experiment in her journal, recording both the initial excitement and the horrible denoument in the same prim, proper manner. American Cheetah by Robert Reed was also very good, although it definitely wins the award for "What the hell did I just read?" Imagine a wild west where an automaton Abraham Lincoln takes on robotic James brothers. Yes. You read that right. Finally, Jaff Vandermeer's Fixing Hanover is an unsurprisingly great tale of a fugitive inventor running from his past; both a beautifully written and well plotted story, Vandermeer seems to understand best exactly the constraints he's working under in the short story format. But those are just the best of the best. Honorable mentions go out to Lovegrove's "Steampunch," Baker's "Speed, speed the cable," and Brooke's "Hannah." Everything else is a bit of mixed bag. Nothing's absolutely dreadful, but nothing else really stands out.

In the end, a book like this is hard to review. If you like short stories and Steampunk, go ahead and pick it up. Otherwise, you're better off hunting down the stories separately.

6/10