And in short-story news, that mysterious lesbian steampunk anthology I mentioned awhile back? It’s almost here. Editor JoSelle Vanderhooft just announced the table of contents for Steam-Powered, a print anthology soon to be out from Torquere Press. The ToC includes my own story “The Effluent Engine”, which I released as a freebie earlier this year for the A Story for Haiti fundraiser, plus some other kickass folk who are worth paying for, such as:
Georgina Bruce: “Brilliant”
DL MacInnes: “Owl Song”
Sara M. Harvey: “Where the Ocean Meets the Sky”
Beth Wodzinski: “Suffer Water”
Rachel Manija Brown: “Steel Rider”
Shira Lipkin: “Truth and Life”
Matt Kressel: “The Hand that Feeds”
Meredith Holmes: “Love in the Time of Airships”
Teresa Wymore: “Under the Dome”
Tara Sommers: “Clockwork and Music”
Mikki Kendall: “Copper for a Trickster”
Mike Allen: “Sleepless, Burning Life”
Shweta Narayan: “The Padishah Begum’s Reflections”
Amal El-Mohtar: “To Follow the Waves”
Steamy goodness!
There have been many discussions of steampunk lately within the SF/F community, most of them focusing on the question of why steampunk is so hot right now. I tend to fall into the camp of “why ask why?” Just go with it. And remember that one of the appeals of steampunk — at least for me — is the chance to rewrite and reclaim Imperial-era (also known as Victorian) history, and contemplate the many ways in which our world might have changed if just one or two small tweaks to the timeline had occurred. Hence my steamed-up (pun intended) Haiti — and I have a few stories in mind for punking American history too, which I may get around to someday. Gullah hydrofoils! Cherokee guerilla presses fomenting revolutions in American journalism! A Civil War whose outcome is radically altered by the early introduction of clockwork robots, and the nimble-fingered women who are needed to build/program them! And so on. There’s so much more potential to this field than just dirigibles and difference engines.
Anyway, check out Steam-Powered; I think it’s gonna be good.
I beg you to do that American history punking sooner rather than later. Please. Please. It sounds FABULOUS.
You know, like the expansionist Taino kingdom I’m writing about in book 2.
Forms of alt-history and different earths with magic have taken the same boring form for so long (with exceptions like Stan Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt), and I’m excited to see new vistas.
I think your ideas for alternate American histories sound great – I’d love to read stories about any of those! And I agree that one of the best things about steampunk is the chance to recreate history in empowering and challenging ways.
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