Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [1]
All of this prelude about being “born again” into Our Lord Science Fiction, and the necessity of proper psychoactive sacraments, brings us of course to the volume you hold in your hands. But before I begin extolling the worth of these stories and their editor, allow me to offer a small new insight into the allure of steampunk, an a-ha moment that occurred to me only as I framed my thoughts here.
By now, I and hundreds of others, both within and without the field, have written ourselves hoarse on the peculiar virtues and traits of this fascinating subgenre, so I won’t rehash all the learned analyses again. But since the phenomenon of steampunk shows no sign of — well, losing steam — and in fact seems to be still accelerating, there must exist some hidden engine at the heart of the mode which we have not yet identified.
I believe it is this:
Steampunk is science fiction’s age thirteen.
Steampunk is the adolescent SF genre dreaming of the adult it hopes to grow up to become.
Steampunk is science fiction’s subconscious attempt to have — or re-have — a happy childhood, shorn of all the fossilized crap encrusting the medium.
Mike Ashley makes much the same point in the opening paragraphs of his witty and learned introduction, but in a more scholarly way, compared to my perhaps overly poetic metaphors. But this only marks a minor difference in style and angle of attack between us, not in shared vision.
Having had the privilege of cohabiting with Mike Ashley in a certain online forum of savants for over a decade, and of enjoying his patronage as expert commissioning editor of several of my stories, I can say with all proper objectivity that this man is not only one of the most erudite and insightful historians and critics of our field, but also an admirable fellow who, like David Hartwell, has succeeded in maintaining unbesmirched his wide-eyed, passionate love affair with science fiction. His generous embrace of the field in all its manifestations and all its ages is heartening and inspiring.
Ashley is one of only a very few editors learned enough to have assembled this treasure trove of truly enjoyable and eye-opening Ur-steampunk. His Indiana-Jones-style expeditions through the bowels of the British Library, his safaris through jungles of moldering pulp, have acquainted him with exotic tribes and species unknown to lesser explorers.
But the real brilliance of this volume lies in the very stroke of its conception: to forsake the secondary texts of modern authors — which, however entertaining and relevant, are, after all, knockoffs and pastiches and xeroxes, to greater or lesser extent — and to return to the pure quill, the Victorian roots of the genre, as codified entertainingly and at first-hand by our ancestors.
The assemblage of these unjustly forgotten stories — each with its perceptive Ashley introduction, in which he offers biographical, cultural and critical insights galore — provides us with a chance to divest ourselves of a century of preconceptions, misconceptions and misprisions, and to return to the dawn of a literature, when the future — our present — still shone with a numinous radiance.
Get young again! You have nothing to lose but your sour old puss!
INTRODUCTION: WHEN STEAMPUNK WAS REAL
Mike Ashley
THERE’S SOMETHING so gloriously reassuring about steampunk fiction. The idea that perhaps the Victorians got it right and that we do live in a world of airships