JoSelle Vanderhooft

OK, I got this book pretty much expecting a good N.K. Jemisin story and some cheesy-but-hopefully-fun erotica.
It significantly exceeded my expectations. Although only a couple of the stories are sexually explicit, all but a couple of them are well above the literary quality I would expect from an anthology from a romance/erotica publisher featuring several lesser-known and new writers. I'm definitely going to look up more work from some of these authors - I very much enjoyed the stories from Georgina Bruce, Rachel Manija Brown, Teresa Wymore (even if it's derivative of Mieville!), Amal el-Mohtar & Tara Sommers.
Only a few minor points:
The prologue is really annoying. Good job on the story selection, could have skipped the prologue. People patting themselves on the back for being wonderful, diverse and blah blah really gets to me. Just Do It.
N.K. Jemisin's story: I loved it. Wonderful settings and characterization. But it ends with That Ending. The one I hate. The one where the brilliant, competent woman who is good at what she does acquires a rich lover and the lover says: "I'm not fond of you keeping up this dangerous line of work... I can keep you in comfort for the rest of your days." And the woman instantly gives up everything, and says that sounds great. It doesn't matter if it's a woman lover; it's still aggravating. I'm trying to find some irony in it, but if it's supposed to be there, it's not coming through for me.
Mikki Kendall's story: I completely fail to be convinced that any woman would or should feel guilty for calling on her deity to violently destroy the invaders who enslaved her people and repeatedly raped their children. Not even one from an unusually pacifist culture.
Other than those quibbles - I'd highly recommend this book to anyone; I feel that its appeal transcends both the steampunk and lesbian-erotica niche markets.… (meer)

There's a gazillion good things about this anthology, and only one story struck a particularly sour note for me.

There's a keen sense of history, of the problematic nature of fetishizing the industrial revolution, boatloads of different ways to be queer, and characters i fell a little bit in love with.

Top favorites, CSE Cooney's short story the Canary of Candletown and Amal El-Mohtar's elegiac take-down of steampunk. I can't even put words to it, other than it's like a ballad, a ballet, a post-colonial theorist and a WWE match had a beautiful, beautiful baby.… (meer)

Steam-powered v.1 is a compelling and thought-provoking anthology of Steampunk short stories with lesbian and otherwise female narrators. The writing styles and themes vary greatly, but the stories were all intentionally hand-picked and share some very refreshing overarching themes: non-Western, non-White, non-Christian, non-hetero, feminist and heroine-replete fantasy (one or two are rooted in actual historical events). Although I didn’t immediately pick up on it, Vanderhooft has intentionally placed similar narratives together. To label these arcs in the order in which they appear they would go something like… stories about air travel; slipstream; erotica; industrial workers; gothic/dystopia; clockwork ; and fantasy-setting. Of these arcs, air travel was probably the most fun, while clockwork was the most disturbing. I distain dystopia as a setting or story type, but these ones weren’t the worst I’ve ever read. I was a little disappointed with the slipstream showing but it was a nice touch at any rate. All-in-all, Steampowered was a wonderful piece of post-modern, post-colonial literature.

I don’t intent to spoil these awesome stories, just offer some vague highlights.

N.K. Jemisin’s “The Effluent Engine” : an enticing corporate espionage thriller about rum, set in New Orleans and the Caribbean
Georgina Bruce’s “Brilliant” : the absolute cutest story in the book. Two young women and one clueless mother travel in the same car on a train in Egypt

D.L. MacInnes’ “Owl Song” : a young British heiress tosses away her court life in exchange for a mining camp and the valuable assistance of a local businesswoman in Guyana

Sara M. Harvey’s “Where the Ocean Meets the Sky” : decidedly manga-like story about airship smuggling, with a swoon-worthy romance between a captain and an dock traffic controller

Beth Wodzinski’s “Suffer Water” : doubtless the best written story in the collection, set in Wild West Nevada, a dying cyborg bounty hunter must hunt down her ex-girlfriend creator

Rachel Manija Brown’s “Steel Rider” : slipstream adventure mashup between Haibane Renmei and Stephen King’s Dark Tower? Girls fight for survival with their horse mecha for companionship in the Sierra Nevadas
Shira Lipkin’s “Truth and Life” : Fascinating but very short clockwork impressionism set in Prague

Matthew Kressel’s “The Hands That Feed” : Cross caste Indian romance with Judaism *yawn*

Meredith Holmes’ “Love in the Time of Airships” : settled, uncompliated married woman falls for young bluestocking-esque “aether tube” installer. The tech reminds me of the tubes from The Shadow. A nice piece with lovely Edwardian diction. It could be expanded into a novella.

Teresa Wymore’s “Under the Dome” : human/animal gene splicing, nymphomania and rape. Utterly unpalatable. I recommend you skip it.
Tara Sommers’ “Clockwork and Music” : two girls struggling with identity effect a lugubrious escape from a Waters-esque insane asylum. It was amusing but somewhat dense.

Mikki Kendall’s “Copper for a Trickster” : a Loki-esque rabbit god helps women and children escape from their ogre-like captors. I guess in the end it was a cute Fantasy with some dark imagery.

Mike Allen’s “Sleepless, Burning Life” : Buddhist afterlife as a hapless marionette living outside of time. No dialogue but it was kind of interesting.

Shweta Narayan’s “The Padishah Begum’s Reflections” : I’m not even going to make a guess at what this is about. Suffice it to say, it’s an example of world literature. Every other paragraph time shifts to a different era with an inscrutable dating system, all dealing with automatons and France.

Amal El-Mohtar’s “To Follow the Waves” : Deals with dreamcrafting as a profession and becoming a djinn somewhere on the Mediterranean. Highly unique and well-composed.

By far, my favorite line from the book (as it speaks to me personally) appears on page 48: “You have chosen, in your mode of dress and demeanor, to stride through this world in a manner that ensures your way will be the most difficult possible, rather than least.”… (meer)

Update 2/22/12: I finally finished all of the stories in this volume, so I'll update my review asap with my thoughts on the rest of them.

I haven�Ûªt read the first volume in this series of steampunk lesbian tales, but I intend to look for it as soon as I‰Ûªve finished this one so that I can compare. I plan on updating my review as I read the stories, rather than wait until I‰Ûªve finished the whole thing. As of December 31, I‰Ûªve read five out of 15 stories.

So far, the stories in this book are notable for not being the kind of steampunk I expected (i.e., taking place in Victorian London and involving plucky English ladies or mad scientists, for example). The settings and people are extremely varied -- Persian, Moroccan, Malaysian, and so on ‰ÛÒ as are the steampunk elements, but the actual lesbian relationships are underplayed compared with the backdrop of the stories: war, politics, class, etc. Maybe because it‰Ûªs necessary to do a certain amount of world building in alternate histories, but with a short story, there‰Ûªs less room to do it coherently without sacrificing something else. My favorite stories right now balance the world-building details with character/relationship development.

I received the ebook version of this from Shveta Thakrar.

"Journey's End," by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall ‰ÛÒ I liked the idea of the sentient airships, the way they communicate and bond with their crew, and the way the story explores the meaning of death/dying rituals, including what would cause a person to volunteer to ‰ÛÏgo down with the ship‰Û, to make that sacrifice. I couldn‰Ûªt really emotionally invest in the character‰Ûªs journey ‰ÛÒ the narrative felt too distant and the main character too melancholy ‰ÛÒ but I found it a thoughtful, well-paced story.

"Amphitrite," by S.L. Knapp ‰ÛÒ From women piloting sentient airships to submarines! I‰Ûªm not sure how I feel about this story. Sirens/mermaids causing the men piloting submarines to wreck themselves is a fine idea, as is some countries therefore requiring women to pilot the submarines. But I don‰Ûªt see why the sirens cannot affect women the same way they lure men if the woman in question is a lesbian; it stands to reason the siren‰Ûªs voice should be able to manipulate her as well. It‰Ûªs all about sexual desire, right? Maybe I just missed the point. Otherwise, the details of this alternate history (time period, place, political situation) just didn‰Ûªt feel clear to me.

"In the Heart of Yellow Mountain," by Jaymee Goh ‰ÛÒ This was a Lara Croft-style adventure story, with two women who distrust each other ending up navigating a booby-trapped maze through a mountain in order to gain political influence with their country‰Ûªs new ruler. I enjoyed the women‰Ûªs back-and-forth relationship and like that it didn‰Ûªt go exactly where I expected, and I liked how they used their various strengths to survive. The Asian-inspired setting was particularly well-done.

"Playing Chess in New Persepolis," by Sean Holland ‰ÛÒ I loved the whole idea behind this mechanized chess competition, whereby the participants build their own pieces to move across the board on command and destroy their opponent‰Ûªs. It‰Ûªs a cool mix of chess strategy and geeky scientific/robotic engineering. The parts of the story that concentrated on the chess stuff were excellent, but the romance between opponents felt rushed, like most of it happened off the page.

"A Thousand Mill Lofts Gray," by Jeannelle Ferreira ‰ÛÒ This was the first of the stories to really concentrate, and show, the romance, with a little of the sexy bits thrown in, so I really wanted to like it. Yet too much of the love story between a wealthy photojournalist and the poor seamstress happened off page. I had trouble keeping track of the order of events, because the narrative jumped time without any cues and rarely covered what happened in the interim. At least the ending was happy.

"Dark Horse," by A.M. Tuomala ‰ÛÒ So far, this was my favorite story, even though the ending lost me. (I have no idea what happened or what it means, and I will have to read the story again to see if it‰Ûªs me being obtuse or the story being cryptic.) The romance is pretty hot and the plot, involving political intrigue from a mercenary standpoint, has a lot of action and drama. It‰Ûªs a sort of Moroccan spy story and was the most fun to read.
… (meer)