Steampunk note: In her review for Locus Magazine, Lois Tilton suggests that despite the title, these works are, by and large, not steampunk:
The subtitle – Stories and Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense – is unfortunately misleading. Not all stories set in the 19th century are steampunk, not even when they involve imaginary scientific innovations. Jules Verne did not write steampunk, he wrote scientific romance. Nor are the stories collected here steampunk, even if one author lays claim to the title. Most of them contain no such element, and those that do lack the “punk” element, the narrative tone that looks back at this era from the current century with a wink of “if this had only happened back then.”
Rather, what we have here is a retrospective recreation of the 19th century sensibility, played straight, not for punkish effect.
She isolates Richard Harland's 'Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism' as the closest to true steampunk in the collection. This assessment reflects a relatively exclusive definition of steampunk, one that identifies the historical perspective as core to the style. It is worth noting, however, that as a discursive field and cultural practice, steampunk is often viewed and used in far more permissive and open terms, and as such the simple presence of the aesthetic tropes or iconography of the style can associate a work with it to many readers and producers.
Source:
'Lois Tilton Reviews Short Fiction', Locus Magazine, August 2011.(www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2011/08/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-august-2/). (Sighted: 30/11/2016).
'The narrator is an inventor and Egyptologist who has come into good fortune and is now offering a sealed Twentieth Century burial casket to selected tomb robbing collectors. He also has a staff of robotic servants in the form of mummies, although they are capable of following only a few scripted commands. But his real purpose is revenge, as his remarks to his visitors hint.'
Source: Locus Magazine (www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2011/08/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-august-2/). (Sighted: 30/11/2016)
'Obviously a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, in this case featuring the great detective’s young cousin Magnus, currently a resident of Bedlam as a consequence of certain circumstances that may not be discussed. Shepherded by his keeper, Almost-Doctor Shrike, he volunteers to help the police with a strange case of a man who stole an armload of daffodils from Green Park, murdering the keeper in the process.'
Source: Locus Magazine (www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2011/08/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-august-2/). (Sighted: 30/11/2016)
'Young Smollett has come from the country to take the post of boot-boy in a wealthy London house. He would be happy in his new situation except for the ghost who haunts his attic chamber. [...] His tormenter seems to be a former housemaid who had pilfered her mistress’s beads and now presses them on Smoll so that she won’t be discovered with the stolen goods; the beads burn him, but he is too terrified to refuse her, because she will not leave until he takes them.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Hugh Gordon is a haunted scientist, which is a way of becoming a mad one. Although his laboratory is full of 'glass bells much larger than a man, dozens of them connected by copper wires and containing delicate Faraday cages of my own design.' He is as much as mystic as he is an empirical scientist, inspired by the notion of disembodied spirits traveling to distant worlds. It is such a manifestation that begins to haunt his home and laboratory, frightening his wife and servants and causing destruction of his notes and apparatus.'
Source: Locus Magazine (www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2011/08/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-august-2/) (Sighted: 30/11/2016)
'Laura is sitting up late with her old friend Maurice, a poet, deeply engaged in discussion when he is moved to reveal the great tragic secret of his youth: the woman he loved was driven by financial need to marry a cruel man who isolated and tormented her and destroyed her writing, which in Maurice’s opinion was quite fine. At last, with her child’s death, Claire took her own life, leaving behind a manuscript, which was found scattered on the floor near her husband’s corpse as he lay with his face “frozen into an expression of indescribable terror, and entirely blanched, as if vitriol had been flung across the features.” This manuscript eventually came into Maurice’s possession, and it has haunted him ever since, although he has never been able to finish reading it.'
Source: Locus Magazine (www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2011/08/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-august-2/). (Sighted: 30/11/2016)
'The narrator as a child suffered so dreadfully from nightmares that his parents took him for treatment to Dr Kessel for his experimental treatment. Kessel was confident that his mechanism would draw off Anthony’s “bad thoughts.” In the night, the boy explores the facility.'
Source: Locus Magazine (www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2011/08/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-august-2/). (Sighted: 30/11/2016)
