Book Reviews

The Buntline Special by Mike Resnick is a Steampunk portal into the historic old West. As mechanical genius Ned Buntline assists famed inventor Thomas Edison on a secret mission, Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers prepare for their face off against the McLaury brothers and the Clanton gang in the famed Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It is a crisp new take on some legendary characters. The Mississippi River separates the budding United States of America from the untamed riches that lie out West. Indian medicine men like Geronimo hold powerful magic over the land, preventing the expansion of...

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Hot and Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance is edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg, the duo who brought us the anthology Steampunk’d, and contains stories by many of the authors whose tales graced the first anthology.  I’m not a fan of the romance genre, so it was with some trepidation that I picked up this book; however, my reluctance proved unwarranted. Not only are the stories in Hot and Steamy rife with romance, but they also feature strong characters, fascinating settings, and unpredictable plots. I daresay this collection is even better than Steampunk’d! A few of the characters featured...

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Christmas might be over, but those who found an e-reader under their brass tree can keep the joy going with Steampunk Santa by Marc Vun Kannon. In the early years of Santa working out of his elfish workshop, he cruised around the countryside in a horse drawn sleigh and used a ladder to enter houses from above to deliver his presents. But as business picks up, he envisions the need to go worldwide with his toy distribution. As 19th Century technology grows, Santa enlist the ingenuity of his workshop elves to come up with a new and better means...

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A lot of writers prefer to stay within their comfort zone and stick to a particular genre. Joe R. Lansdale is not one of them. Lansdale could probably create his own genre if he wanted, one embracing the extraordinary and bizarre. His book Flaming Zeppelins – The Adventures of Ned the Seal is cast firmly under the Steampunk category. After all, it has airships! But this expands to others forms of fiction as well, including noir, western, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and historic. Originally published as separate hardbacks, Zeppelins West in 2001 and Flaming London in 2005, Lansdale has...

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Steampunk’d is a collection of short stories edited by anthology veterans Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg. With such prestigious editors, a beautiful cover design, and publisher DAW Books on the spine, I had high hopes for this anthology that promises “14 original stories of what might have been if steam tech took different paths in the Victorian era.” The book opens with a story by best-selling novelist Michael A Stackpole, “Chance Corrigan and the Tick-Tock King of the Nile.” The tale is fairly typical Steampunk fare about an American engineer persuaded by a Greek tycoon to speed the...

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Leanna Renee Hieber Sourcebooks Fire Historical Paranormal Fantasy ISBN 9781402260520 Ages 12 and up 336 Pages Leanna Renee Hieber makes her debut as a young adult novelist with Darker Still, a story that invokes the epistolary nature of Stoker’s Dracula, the murder mystery of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Wilde’s magical curse in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the Victorian Gothic elements present in all of these stories.  I worried that the blend of all these components in one text might have produced a story that felt derivative and untidy, but Hieber manages to avoid this. ...

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With Fate Conspire is a five hundred page historical fantasy novel with a steampunk twist. Not having read the rest in the series, the plot was a little difficult to disentangle at first, especially because of the multiple and often unexplained viewpoints, but overall the novel stood very strongly on its own. Its basis in the faerie world may cause an initial incorrect diagnosis that this is written for a young adult readership, before the novel’s darker tones override this notion. However, the steampunk elements are second to the fantasy elements, with the power of fantastical machinery playing a...

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