Just Finished Reading: Steampunk’d edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H Greenberg

It’s rare – you may have noticed – for me to read short stories. I’ve read quite a few over the years and some of them have been very good indeed. However, the short story is an art form that is difficult to master. In a novel the author has the space and the time to develop character, plot and a whole lot else. Of course the danger with a novel is that the author gets too relaxed and flabby or tries to put everything including the kitchen sink into the narrative. The short story in contrast is very restrictive and demands tight plotting, succinct characterisation or a well presented immediately enticing idea.

This slim volume contained 14 short stories of Steampunk. For those unfamiliar with this SF sub-genre you can think of it as the Victorian version of Cyberpunk. Of course if you’re unfamiliar with Cyberpunk that whole allusion would have been lost on you. Suffice it to say that Steampunk stories take place in a world where there was an explosion of technology in the mid-19^th century and where future generations depend on variations of steam, clockwork and airships. I’ve read a few Steampunk novels in the past and thought that they had some interesting ideas but usually failed to deliver. It was about time, I thought, to get back in the dirigible and give it another try. Despite several of the stories in this volume being good I found myself generally disappointed. The attraction to me of Cyberpunk was that the majority of the plot takes place at street level. Gibson himself said something about the genre being about technology used by ‘punks’ in ways that had never been thought of by its designers. I was much less interested in the lives of the rich and shameless using their tech to control the world. My heart, and sympathies, was always with the hackers and bandits living and fighting in the cracks between the mega-corporations. Unfortunately this volume was far too much top-down looking rather than my preferred bottom-up. Basically there was plenty of steam but very few punks. Even as an introduction to the genre I’d feel disappointed. It didn’t have the down and dirty earthiness I was expecting. Maybe the stories were just too new, written by present day authors climbing onto the Steampunk bandwagon. Whatever the reason I didn’t find what I wanted from this collection. Maybe I’ll have better luck with some of the other collections I’ve subsequently picked up or, possibly more likely, in the longer novels. Not really recommended.