Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0763657972
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Chockful of gear-driven automatons, looming dirigibles, and wildly implausible time machines . . . should please steampunks of all ages." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Imagine an alternate universe where tinkerers and dreamers craft and re-craft a world of automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Visionaries Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have taken a genre already rich, strange, and inventive and challenged fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, to embrace its established themes and refashion them in surprising ways and settings. The result is an anthology that defies its genre even as it defines it.
“Wherever you’ve sent him, you’d better bring him back. Now.” Her mother sighed and clapped her hands. From the floor above there came sounds of movement: the heavy clank of robotic feet. “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” Steam Girl’s mother said. “I really don’t want to hurt you; after all, you are so clearly my daughter.” Steam Girl tried to think quickly, but her mind was still reeling from everything that had happened. She looked around, desperately trying to remember which of the
that already Julius Caesar’s victories in Gaul were being applauded as prodigious, and Pompey the Great was so beloved by the people of the capital that the Senate grew uneasy. Meanwhile, the auguries at Rome once again forecast failure for Crassus: when his expedition was discussed, horses grew restless, banners toppled, and the sacred owls would sweat. Hearing this, Crassus made his way to the engineers’ workshop and demanded that Marcus Furius tell him when his machine would be completed.
them were some of the happiest times I’d had since I’d walked with John Barks. Like being part of a family it were, but with no Mam to sigh when you forgot to burp the baby and no Pap to slap you when your words was too sharp for his liking. Mornings we rode the horses fast and free over the dusty plains, letting the wind whip our hair till it rose like crimson floss. We’d try to best each other, though we all knew Josephine were the fastest rider. Still, it were fun to try, and nobody could
transmitted through the air. But she had no idea such a feat has actually been achieved. In fact, as far as she knew, no one had successfully harnessed galvanic energy at all. And yet here is that giant coil. And she had seen with her own eyes the galvanic current it produced. “Please finish with us and get out, Constable,” Ehle says. “I want to get back to my work. What is this Califa Squash you were asking about?” Constable Etreyo gives the two doctors a brief history of the Califa
eat since that long-ago cheese waffle. The pink popcorn had stuck in her throat when she’d tried to eat it. “You are not very nice to me, Constable. I only did my job.” “Tell that to Nutter Norm,” Etreyo says, licking at her cone: salted caramel with orca bacon. Her favorite. She knows she should not be enjoying the ice cream while a man waits to die, but she is very hungry and the ice cream tastes very good. “He had a miserable life. He is better off dead.” She tosses the cone away,