Steampunk! (2011)

By Kelly Link

420pp, Fiction

Notes

2022-07-29

It’s 2019 and I can confirm that I don’t like Steampunk. I’ve skipped the genre for while because I assumed I wouldn’t like it but then I saw that Kelly Link had edited an anthology called Steampunk! which offers a broad take on the genre and was part of the same series as her Monstrous Affections YA anthology which I really liked. So I read it – or most of it. None of it was bad it was just rigorously and conclusively not what I look for in genre fiction.

The good though: The stories often focus on using the kind of neo-colonial setting to critique colonialism, though this tends to be rather on the nose. Though I guess it could be that Link’s selection focuses on the YA end of things so lack nuanced (not a necessary feature of books for young adults to be sure but not an unusual one either).

I suppose I struggle to get what ‘steampunk’ brings to the table other than a particular aesthetic. Even by that standards of modern publishing it feels more like a marketing category rather than a set of story telling affordances (how I’m mainly thinking of genre, in its positive connotations).