Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [0]
Stories of Steampunk and
Supernatural Suspense
EDITED BY JACK DANN AND NICK GEVERS
Dedication
In memory of Kage Baker
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
James Morrow - The Iron Shroud
Peter S. Beagle - Music, When Soft Voices Die
Terry Dowling - The Shaddowwes Box
Garth Nix - The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder
Gene Wolfe - Why I Was Hanged
Margo Lanagan - The Proving of Smollett Standforth
Sean Williams - The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star
Robert Silverberg - Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar
John Langan - The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons
John Harwood - Face to Face
Richard Harland - Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism
Marly Youmans - The Grave Reflection
Theodora Goss - Christopher Raven
Lucius Shepard - Rose Street Attractors
Laird Barron - Blackwood’s Baby
Paul Park - Mysteries of the Old Quarter
Jeffrey Ford - The Summer Palace
About the Editors
Credits
Copyright
Copyright Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
Introduction
GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT.
Those three words neatly summarize a great paradox of the Victorian age.
After all, the time of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) was by its own declaration an age of spreading enlightenment—the growth of literacy; the rapid introduction of mass-manufacturing technology; the propagation of humane values; the termination of the slave trade; legislation to curb cruelties inherent in industrial labor; and, on a literal level, the provision of ever more illumination to Britain’s (and America’s) cities, first by means of gas lighting, then with electricity. Let there be light! And yet even as the darkness of the streets and of some forms of economic deprivation was alleviated, the ghosts imagined by the population multiplied. Old fears, old phantoms and bogeys, old conceptions of bad luck and supernatural revenge combined with new wraiths and monsters born of the torments of social change and ideological awakening; and from the far corners of the British Empire returning soldiers, administrators, traders, travelers, and missionaries imported foreign narratives of yet more apprehension: accounts of Arabian Nights djinns, Transylvanian vampires, accursed rajahs, Chinese phantasms, West Indian duppies, and African totems. Real-life terrors like the depredations of Jack the Ripper mingled in the popular fancy with these improbable but direly potent materials; and in response, even as some Victorian fiction described hopeful or apocalyptic technological advance, many other tales brooded on the fantastic and the ominously irrational. The purposeful light of extrapolation competed with the looming darkness of the horrid.
This anthology pays innovative tribute to both of those streams of Victorian storytelling: the scientific romance and the classic ghost story, as they matured through the Great White Mother’s reign and in that of her rotund and jocular son Edward VII, before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought shattering disillusionments. After all, a century later, speculative fiction continues to honor the two forms: steampunk novels and stories regularly recapture (and recomplicate) the gadget-encrusted early science fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, while leading horror and dark fantasy authors (many of them represented in this book) pay recurrent homage to the ghostly tale. So . . .
Why not a feast of fine new stories, filled with the pleasurable disquiet of things that go bump in the night and, at times, the thrills of sinister, arcane machinery as well? Perhaps the paradox of Victorian superstition-amidst-enlightenment can be resolved by way of this mixture; and anyway, the results are bound to be extremely entertaining. Thus Ghosts by Gaslight, in which seventeen of the best contemporary writers of supernatural fiction revisit the world of fog and fear that our ancestors knew only too well, on both sides of the Atlantic.
AS YOU’LL SEE reflected in many of the stories in the present volume, the Victorian/Edwardian period’s fiction of the fantastic and