Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantasticall

445 Pages·2011·4.92 MB·English

by  Link Kelly

This is a work
of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the
authors' imaginations or, if real, are used fictitiously.

Compilation and
introduction copyright © 2011 by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant
"Some
Fortunate Future Day" copyright © 2011 by Cassandra Clare
"The Last
Ride of the Glory Girls" copyright © 2011 by Libba Bray
"Clockwork
Fagin" copyright © 2011 by Cory Doctorow
"Seven Days
Beset by Demons" copyright © 2011 by Shawn Cheng
"Hand in
Glove" copyright © 2011 by Ysabeau S. Wilce
"The Ghost
of Cwmlech Manor" copyright © 2011 by Delia Sherman
"Gethsemane"
copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Knox
"The Summer
People" copyright © 2011 by Kelly Link
"Peace in
Our Time" copyright © 2011 by Garth Nix
"Nowhere
Fast" copyright © 2011 by Christopher Rowe
"Finishing
School" copyright © 2011 by Kathleen Jennings
"Steam
Girl" copyright © 2011 by Dylan Horrocks
"Everything
Amiable and Obliging" copyright © 2011 by Holly Black
"The Oracle
Engine" copyright © 2011 by M. T. Anderson

All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an
information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic,
or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior
written permission from the publisher.

First edition
2011 by
Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

11 12 13 14 15
16 TK 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in TK,
TK, U.S.A.
This book was
typeset in Golden Cockerel.

Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street
Somerville,
Massachusetts 02144
visit us at www.candlewick.com

Orphans use the puppet of a dead
man to take control of their lives. A girl confronts the Grand Technomancer,
Most Mighty Mechanician and Highest of the High Artificier Adepts. Another
girl, who might be from another universe, stuns everyone when she pulls out her
handmade Reality Gun.
Welcome
to fourteen steampunk visions of the past, the future, and the not quite today.
Depending
on whom you believe, steampunk has been exploding into the world for the last
hundred years (thank you, Monsieur Jules Verne) or maybe the last twenty-five
(when the term was first used by K. W. Jeter in a letter to Locus magazine).
We have had fabulous fun working with this baker's dozen of authors,
investigating some of the more fascinating nooks and crannies of the genre.
You'll
find the requisite number of gaslit alleys, intrepid urchins, steam-powered
machines, and technologies that never were. Those are the basic accoutrements
that no self-respecting steampunk anthology could be without, but as we
assembled the book (filing down this story here, finding the right solder to
put these two ideas together there), we discovered that steampunk has gone far
beyond these markers. The two Philips (Reeve and Pullman, respectively)
brought
moving cities and armored polar bears. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The
League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen brought nineteenth-century
London to a halt. Cherie Priest introduced zombies (Boneshaker), Gail
Carriger introduced vampires (Soulless), and Jeff and
Ann VanderMeer brought it all together in Steampunk and Steampunk
II.
Makers
and artists have taken the romance and adventure of steampunk and remixed,
reinvented, and remade the genre from whole cloth — and, yes, brass widgets.
We've spent hours wandering through the online galleries on Etsy and Flickr,
marveling at the clockwork insects, corsets, art, hats, gloves, canes, modded
computers, and even a steampunk house (want!), and we love
the DIY craftiness that keeps inspiring more decadent and more useful machines
and toys.
The
continuing reinterpretation of the steampunk idea made us ask the writers for
stories that explored and expanded their own ideas of what steampunk could be.
So we have a book of mad inventors, child mechanics, mysterious murderers,
revolutionary motorists, steampunk fairies, and monopoly-breaking schoolgirls,
whose stories are set in Canada, New Zealand, Wales, ancient Rome, future
Australia, alternate California, and even the postapocalypse — everywhere
except Victorian
London.

Kelly Link
and Gavin J. Grant