Steampunk Specs

edited by Allan Kaster
 

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A collection of spectacular steampunk speculations, including several genre classics. These tales will sweep you away with their amazing automata, daring dirigibles, grinding gears, and scintillating steam as days long gone are infused with tech.

• “Smoke City” by Christopher Barzak — A woman comes to terms with the loss of her family to the child labor mills of the city.

• “Dr. Lash Remembers” by Jeffrey Ford — A doctor tries to cope with a strange plague terrorizing the citizens of London.

• “Machine Maid” by Margo Lanagan — A sexually repressed wife gets revenge on her husband through a robot maid.

• “Arbeitskraft” by Nick Mamatas — Friedrich Engels strives to spread class revolution as a labor organizer for factory cyborg matchstick girls.

• “Ninety Thousand Horses” by Sean McMullen — An acclaimed mathematician, with a murky past, is forced to spy for an industrialist prior to becoming Britain’s foremost rocket expert during World War II.

• “Tanglefoot (A Clockwork Century Story)” by Cherie Priest — An orphan boy builds an automaton, in an aging scientist’s laboratory, that becomes more than an idle companion.

• “Clockwork Fairies” by Cat Rambo — An English aristocrat courts a woman who would rather spend her time in a laboratory than at high society balls.

• “Edison’s Frankenstein” by Chris Roberson — At Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, in 1893, an Algerian bodyguard crosses paths with a disoriented naked man.

• “A Serpent in the Gears” by Margaret Ronald — A dirigible journeys to an isolated land and discovers people and animals merged with machine parts.

• “Zeppelin City” by Michael Swanwick & Eileen Gunn — Radio Jones finds a way to listen in on the Naked Brains, who rule the world, while Rudy the Red fights against the oppressors.