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Dec. 3rd, 2010 01:12 pmI am fairly sure that some of you on my flist will see the title of Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and know immediately that this is an anthology you will wish to read. To those people, I say only: awesome! I really loved some of the stories, liked most of them, and think the book's worth your time. It comes out on January 25th, and you can pre-order it here.*
Some people may want a little more detail. To those people I say: Steam-Powered is very definitely a book of lesbian steampunk stories. (Sometimes this makes it feel like a romance anthology, but there are enough stories that break the girl-meets-girl pattern that I generally didn't get bored.) It's also a book full of steampunk stories that are attempting, in a number of ways, to write steampunk that questions a lot of the assumptions of a genre that tends too often to fall back on nostalgic glorification of the grand old colonial days of the Great British Empire. So not only are these stories all female-centric and non-heteronormative, as the title implies, but they're punching back in other ways - most of these stories also incorporate race and class and religion and nationality in ways that steampunk tends, as a rule, not to do. And the vast majority are not set anywhere near England! (California steampunk! African steampunk! Mughal Empire steampunk! And in ways that are not exoticized, but absolutely integral to the stories.) So some of you will see this, and again know that you are interested in these stories, and those people can probably stop reading this review here if you want.
And if you want a little more, like, for example, a lengthy story-by-story breakdown of My Thoughts, then you can
( click the cut! )
*I should probably disclaim that I got an advance review copy of the book from the editor, for the purposes of book-blogging. I have no idea if this will be a thing that will happen ever again, and I hope this should not need stating anyway, but for the record: I make no claims to critical authority, but I obviously only say nice things about books if I think they are true.
Some people may want a little more detail. To those people I say: Steam-Powered is very definitely a book of lesbian steampunk stories. (Sometimes this makes it feel like a romance anthology, but there are enough stories that break the girl-meets-girl pattern that I generally didn't get bored.) It's also a book full of steampunk stories that are attempting, in a number of ways, to write steampunk that questions a lot of the assumptions of a genre that tends too often to fall back on nostalgic glorification of the grand old colonial days of the Great British Empire. So not only are these stories all female-centric and non-heteronormative, as the title implies, but they're punching back in other ways - most of these stories also incorporate race and class and religion and nationality in ways that steampunk tends, as a rule, not to do. And the vast majority are not set anywhere near England! (California steampunk! African steampunk! Mughal Empire steampunk! And in ways that are not exoticized, but absolutely integral to the stories.) So some of you will see this, and again know that you are interested in these stories, and those people can probably stop reading this review here if you want.
And if you want a little more, like, for example, a lengthy story-by-story breakdown of My Thoughts, then you can
( click the cut! )*I should probably disclaim that I got an advance review copy of the book from the editor, for the purposes of book-blogging. I have no idea if this will be a thing that will happen ever again, and I hope this should not need stating anyway, but for the record: I make no claims to critical authority, but I obviously only say nice things about books if I think they are true.
