Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded »

Ann VanderMeer is the publisher of Buzzcity Press and the fiction editor for Weird Tales. Jeff VanderMeer is the founder and editor for Ministry of Whimsy Press. He is the author of City of Saints and Madmen, Secret Life, Shriek, and Veniss Underground. He is the editor of the Leviathan series and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Coeditors of the Best American Fantasy series and Steampunk, they both live in Tallahassee, Florida.

Blending the romantic elegance of the Victorian era with modern scientific advances, the popular Steampunk genre spotlighted in this collection is innovative and stimulates the imagination. This artfully assembled anthology of original fiction, nonfiction, and art can serve as an introduction to the Steampunk culture or provide dedicated fans with more fuel. Stories of outlandishly imaginative technologies, clockwork contraptions, eccentric heroines, and mad scientists are complemented by canon-defining nonfiction and an array of original illustrations. This collection showcases the most sensational Steampunk talents of the last decade, including Daniel Abraham, John Coulthart, William Gibson, and Margo Lanagan, and demonstrates exactly why the future of the past is so excitingly new.

Publishers Weekly

The dynamic VanderMeers follow 2008's Steampunk with this engaging anthology of 23 stories (three original to this volume, including Jeffrey Ford's "Dr. Lash Remembers"), two essays (including one by Gail Carriger), and a roundtable interview, all of which define, deepen, and demonstrate the clockwork beauty of automaton-laden science fiction. Standouts include Tanith Lee's madness-inspired "The Persecution Machine"; Caitlín R. Kiernan's hauntingly beautiful tale of "The Steam Dancer (1896)"; Marc Laidlaw's photographic encyclopedia of "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness"; Sydney Padua's comic "Lovelace and Babbage: Origins, with Salamander"; the frightening Pinocchio of Cherie Priest's "Tanglefoot"; William Gibson's proto-steampunk tale "The Gernsback Continuum"; and "Flying Fish ‘Prometheus' (A Fantasy of the Future)" by Vilhelm Bergsøe, a Danish contemporary of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Fabulous interior design by John Coulthart completes this worthy sequel to its well-regarded predecessor. (Nov.)