Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft

Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft

Torquere Press, 2011.

Overview: This is a collection of sixteen short stories by as many authors, and while I am not really familiar with steampunk in any form, let alone literature, I think that they were generally well chosen to represent a wide range of takes on the genre that, nonetheless, allowed a new reader to identify certain tropes and themes.

My reaction: I put this book down for several weeks (a danger of short story collections is that that can be easy to do!), but I am still able to remember the plots of most of the stories. I was not surprised to see that some of the authors have substantially less published writing experience when skimming their short bios, because it definitely showed. I will say that the stories that irked me on a technical level often gave me an interesting idea or two to chew on, which is why I'm rating this collection "decent" as a whole. 

Human-machine blends and humanoid automatons were the subject of most of my favorites, but there were a couple of wacky stories involving the supernatural that as far as I can tell might not be traditional  steampunk. "Copper for Trickster" by Mikki Kendall was my favorite of these, as it posed some interesting moral questions for me. Others I recommend are "Steel Rider" by Rachel Manija Brown, "Where the Ocean Meets the Sky" by Sara M. Harvey, "Suffer Water" by Beth Wodinski,  and "The Effluent Engine" by N.K. Jemisin. The one that I almost didn't finish because of the character's casual racism and entitlement issues was "Owl Song" by D.L. MacInnes. I couldn't quite tell if the reader was meant to take offense at that, and dislike the character, or whether it was just the author trying to be "realistic" or what. I was kind of leaning toward the latter until the narrator descends into icky patronization of the protagonist's landlady, but that landlady does call out her tenant's racism, which I was relieved by, and caused me to reconsider the author's motives yet again. That said, I was still disturbed by the story as a whole. "Under the Dome" by Teresa Wymore also upset me, but I was interested in (and repelled by!) the idea of human/non-human hybrids being turned into workers/curiosities.

With all that said, this was a decent collection. It included authors that I would read more from (particularly Rachel Manija Brown and Sara M. Harvey), and I had fun with most of it.