I am very new to reading steampunk. I’ve read a few that I’ve really loved and want to read more but I wasn’t really sure where to go next. Enter Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories. A steampunk anthology with stories from some of my favorite authors? Sign me up! When asked if I wanted to interview the editors I jumped at the chance. Keep reading to find out more about the anthology as well as what Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (editors) had to say.
About the Book: Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and re-craft a world of automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, utopian revolutionaries, and intrepid orphans solve crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships. Here, fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, embrace the genre’s established themes and refashion them in surprising ways and settings as diverse as Appalachia, ancient Rome, future Australia, and alternate California. Visionaries Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have invited all-new explorations and expansions, taking a genre already rich, strange, and inventive in the extreme and challenging contributors to remake it from the ground up. The result is an anthology that defies its genre even as it defines it.
Interview with Kelly and Gavin:
What draws you to steampunk as a genre?
Kelly: I like that it’s character-driven, and that it has one foot in the science fiction genre and one foot in the real world, in the community of makers and artists. It does that thing that science-fiction ought to do — it produces a sense of wonder in the reader.
Gavin: The DIY nature of so many of the people involved in it. Our webmaster built a great Flickr widget which pulls in random steampunk photos and the range is fascinating. There are so many people doing so many interesting things. It’s a life for some people, an interest for others, but for many people it’s this lively thing that gets them out doing crazy things, dressing in great outfits, and meeting people.
Gavin: The DIY nature of so many of the people involved in it. Our webmaster built a great Flickr widget which pulls in random steampunk photos and the range is fascinating. There are so many people doing so many interesting things. It’s a life for some people, an interest for others, but for many people it’s this lively thing that gets them out doing crazy things, dressing in great outfits, and meeting people.
If you could visit any steampunk story (in the anthology or otherwise) which would you visit and why?
Kelly: Hmm. I’d love to be inside a Hayao MIyazaki movie. We did visit Studio Ghibli once, on a trip to Tokyo, which was almost as good.
What is your ultimate steampunk accessory?
Kelly: I’d take a clockwork cat, please. (Gavin is allergic to the real kind.) I’m fond of goggles, too.
Gavin: Ok, I think I have to say this book. After that, perhaps this house? Although I would take a zeppelin over either of these. There is a surprising dearth of zeppelins in this book—only one, I think, in Elizabeth Knox’s “Gethsemene.” But I think like anyone who has suffered the indignities of the contemporary airlines I’d sign up for zeppelin flights at the drop of a top hat.
Could the list of contributors for this book be any more amazing? As an editor, how closely do you work with the contributing authors?
Could the list of contributors for this book be any more amazing? As an editor, how closely do you work with the contributing authors?
Kelly: Thank you! We had a handful of writers drop out — Karen Joy Fowler, China Mieville, and Patrick Ness. So I suppose the anthology could have been three-stories-worth-more of amazing, but oh well.
I sat across a pool-side table at a hotel in Newton, Mass, and glared at Cassandra Clare until she finished her story. Unfortunately no one else needed me to sit beside a pool in order to get their story written. None of these stories (I exclude my own) needed any kind of serious revision.
Gavin: Maybe. There are a couple of authors we’d have liked to work with but didn’t get the chance. Maybe next time!
Gavin: Maybe. There are a couple of authors we’d have liked to work with but didn’t get the chance. Maybe next time!
When editing a collection of short stories how do you decide what goes in and what changes are needed?
Gavin: This book is different from other things we’ve edited: with the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror we tried to read as many of the fantasy stories as we could each year—there are a lot!—and then chose 125,000 words that were representative of the genre in that year. With our zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, we just read whatever comes in and there’s never any shortage of good stories. With this book we got to ask a few of our favorite writers to send us stories which was a total treat. As for changes, most of the stories came in quite close to their final form, again, we were very lucky there.
What is the coolest steampunk device you’ve read about?
Gavin: Captain Nemo’s submarine is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Do you recall the first steampunk book/story you read? Was it “love at first sight” or did you read a few before you got in to it?
Kelly: I’d read and really loved work by James Blaylock, Tim Powers, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is another touchstone. I love Hellboy, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and movies by people like Hayao Miyazaki and Guillermo del Toro. But I think it was the real-world stuff, that Cory Doctorow has pointed to on boingboing.net, and the people who are out there making things in the real world that really got me excited about steampunk as a community, and not just a genre.
Gavin: I really enjoyed Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s novel The Difference Engine. One of the things about reading science fiction and fantasy is that your head is wide open to different periods, different technologies, different worlds—and it helped that at university (where I did no literary or creative writing classes at all) a friend made me sit down and read all Jane Austen’s novels. Once I realized (again, since I had as a kid) I could read anything, I never really stopped and steampunk was just so much fun. Who doesn’t like a secret history?! Also, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen really brought me right back into it. As I said above(, Captain Nemo’s submarine is a beautiful, beautiful thing!
Gavin: I really enjoyed Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s novel The Difference Engine. One of the things about reading science fiction and fantasy is that your head is wide open to different periods, different technologies, different worlds—and it helped that at university (where I did no literary or creative writing classes at all) a friend made me sit down and read all Jane Austen’s novels. Once I realized (again, since I had as a kid) I could read anything, I never really stopped and steampunk was just so much fun. Who doesn’t like a secret history?! Also, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen really brought me right back into it. As I said above(, Captain Nemo’s submarine is a beautiful, beautiful thing!
Any recommendations for readers who have never read steampunk or are new to the genre (aside from the incredibly fabulous Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories)?
Kelly: Sure! There’s Jeff VanderMeer and S. J. Chambers’ Steampunk Bible, which is a kind of guidebook to the world of steampunk. If you like romance, there’s Gail Carriger. For old-fashioned adventure stories, try Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker series, or Ysabeau Wilce’s fabulous and funny Flora Segunda books. And if you haven’t read Joan Aiken, try her Dido Twite series. They’re so, so good. Finally, Twin Spica is a manga series that’s a little to the left of steampunk, but I think everyone ought to read it anyway. There are kid astronauts in it, and ghosts, and lots of making things.
Contributors in the anthology:
M.T. Anderson
Holly Black
Libba Bray
Shawn Cheng
Cassandra Clare
Cory Doctorow
Dylan Horrocks
Kathleen Jennings
Elizabeth Knox
Kelly Link
Garth Nix
Christopher Rowe
Delia Sherman
Ysabeau S. Wilce
Be sure to check out the very fun Steampunk! Website too!
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