Reimagining the Industrial era

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Reimagining the Industrial era
February 18, 2012
By MATTHEW SURRIDGE
The Gazette

Coined more than two decades ago, the word "steampunk" was a play on the then-popular style of science fiction called "cyberpunk." Steampunk is a type of science fiction based on Victorian technology and clockwork instead of computers and spaceships.

Or, put another way, it's a kind of industrial-era fantasy, imagining unreal worlds filled with automata and zeppelins, an adventurous playing-about with the 19th century. It has also become a visual style defined by goggles, gears and hundred-yearold fashions.

Steampunk is not necessarily just a modern form. Some readers see hints of the genre in earlier tales, by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and even Charles Dickens, back as far as Edgar Allan Poe. So it's not surprising to find a new anthology of Poe's tales and poetry, with steampunk-themed illustrations, marketed as Steampunk Poe.

The book is a fairly short collection, seven stories and six poems, ranging from familiar classics like The Masque of the Red Death and The Raven to surprises like The Spectacles and A Dream Within a Dream. The illustrations, by experienced children's book artists Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac, are lavishly coloured and stylized, often incorporating computer-manipulated photography.

Some of the texts in Steampunk Poe seem to have been selected mainly for the way they lend themselves to a steampunk interpretation - an obvious example being The Balloon-Hoax, which gives the artists the chance to play with fantastical airships, a genre trademark. Still, overall, the pictures match Poe's words surprisingly well.

Like Poe, the illustrations are horrific, comic in a macabre way, and on occasion surprisingly gory. They're particularly effective in the more impressionistic tales like The Masque or The Telltale Heart. The atmosphere of The Fall of the House of Usher doesn't really come alive, while the retro-futuristic Paris imagined for Murders in the Rue Morgue seems simply anachronistic. Still, Basic and Sumberac make the project work, finding details in Poe's text that inspire atmospheric steampunk images, and making an implicit argument for Poe's inclusion in the steampunk canon.

More contemporary steampunk fiction is on offer in a new anthology of short stories for young adult readers edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. Their collection, simply called Steampunk!, shows off many of the strengths and weaknesses of the genre. Filled with adventure and wild imagery, it also feels like a little less than the sum of its parts.

All of the tales are technically sound. The prose is smooth and sometimes, particularly in Link's The Summer People, quite fine. The structures of the stories are, on the whole, as precise and elegant as the machined gears of a ticking pocket-watch.

But taken as a whole, the anthology feels curiously tepid. The stories are conscious of the darker side of the Victorian era, the sexism and racism and classism and colonialism, but deal with these things in fairly simple ways. While the attempt is laudable, the result too often feels ironically like a collection of 19th-century moralizing tales for children, with all the flatness that implies.

While the book claims on its cover to be "an anthology of fantastically rich and strange stories," too many pieces fail to be either. Libba Bray's Last Ride of the Glory Girls has an engaging voice, but an obvious plot. Garth Nix's Peace in Our Time has a nice visual sense, but is an undramatic recital of events. Shawn Cheng, with Seven Days Beset by Demons, and Kathleen Jennings, with Finishing School, contribute stories in comics form; it's a nice idea, but both tales are too brief, and too facile.

There is some interesting work. Christopher Rowe's post-apocalyptic Nowhere Fast seems to cynically imply that the desire for vaguely defined freedom its young protagonists feel is in fact what led the world to disaster. M.T. Anderson's brilliant The Oracle Engine, to my mind clearly the best story in the book, forsakes Victoriana to draw inspiration from pre-Imperial Rome.

Steampunk! is not a bad book. If few of the stories seem to really hit on all cylinders, none are complete misfires. And there is an engaging diversity of setting, avoiding Victorian London in favour of places on the periphery of empire, like Wales, the American West and the South Pacific. One piece, Cory Doctorow's Clockwork Fagin, is set in a crooked orphanage in Toronto, where the story follows the rise to power of Monty Goldfarb, "Montreal Monty," a kind of supercharged steampunk Duddy Kravitz.

Overall, the anthology feels like something of a missed opportunity. It's nicely done, but unmemorable. By contrast, as well-known as some of the stories are in Steampunk Poe, there's a wildness to them that keeps them oddly surprising. That demonic energy is what Steampunk! mostly lacks. Ultimately, though, these are different books - Poe denser and darker, Steampunk! brassier and more diverse. Both are engaging reads, but the older tales are more likely to last in the reader's mind.

Steampunk Poe By Edgar Allan Poe Illustrated by Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac Running Press Teens, 263 pages, $22

Steampunk! Edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant Candlewick Press, 420 pages, $26