Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
In the first major YA steampunk anthology, fourteen top storytellers push the genre's mix of sci-fi, fantasy, history, and adventure in fascinating new directions.
Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and re-craft a world of automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, utopian revolutionaries, and intrepid orphans solve crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships. Here, fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, embrace the genre's established themes and refashion them in surprising ways and settings as diverse as Appalachia, ancient Rome, future Australia, and alternate California. Visionaries Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have invited all-new explorations and expansions, taking a genre already rich, strange, and inventive in the extreme and challenging contributors to remake it from the ground up. The result is an anthology that defies its genre even as it defines it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780763656386 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Candlewick Press |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Lexile: | 940L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant are firm believers in the do-it-yourself ethos that powers the steampunk movement. They started a zine, founded an independent publishing house, own two letterpresses, and edited the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy&Horror for five years.
Kelly Link is the author of three acclaimed short story collections and a collection for young adults. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Restless Dead, and have won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Tiptree, British Science Fiction, and World Fantasy Awards.
Born in Scotland, Gavin J. Grant moved to the U.S. in 1991. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Bookslut, and Time Out New York, is still a zine reviewer for Xerography Debt, and has published stories in several literary magazines. He and Kelly Link and their daughter live in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Gavin J. Grant is a firm believer in the do-it-yourself ethos that powers the steampunk movement. He started a zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, in 1996, cofounded Small Beer Press, an independent publishing house with his wife, Kelly Link, and in 2010 launched WeightlessBooks.com, an ebooksite for independent presses. He has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Bookslut, Xerography Debt, Scifiction, The Journal Of Pulse Pounding Narratives, and Strange Horizons. He co-edited The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and for five years co-edited the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy&Horror. He lives with his wife and daughter in Massachusetts.
Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebula Awards, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”) Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and play Ping-Pong. In 1996 they started the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
M. T. Anderson is an accomplished author of a wide range of titles, including works of fantasy and satire, for readers of various ages. He studied English literature at Harvard University and Cambridge University and went on to receive his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.
M. T. Anderson is known for challenging readers to look at the world in new ways. “We write because we can’t decipher things the first time around,” he says. His previous books include Thirsty, a vampire novel; Burger Wuss, a revenge story set in a fast-food emporium; and Feed, a futuristic satirical novel widely lauded as one of the most important and pioneering works of the recent dystopian craze. A finalist for the National Book Award, Feed received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize or YA fiction in 2003 and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor.
The author’s passion for history and classical music were inspirations for his sophisticated and much-lauded epic The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation,Volume I: The Pox Party, a National Book Award Winner, and Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves. The two novels, both Michael L. Printz Honor recipients, trace the story of a fictional slave in pre–Revolutionary War Boston — a time when American Patriots rioted and battled to win liberty, while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim.
M. T. Anderson’s work may be best known for its sophisticated wit and storylines, highlighting his belief that young people are more intelligent than some might think. When asked why he gives so much credit to his young audience, Anderson says that “Our survival as a nation rests upon the willingness of the young to become excited and engaged by new ideas we never considered as adults.”
M. T. Anderson was an instructor at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he now serves as a board member. From 2003–2012, he also served on the board of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, a national nonprofit organization that advocates or literacy, literature, and libraries. He has published stories for adults in literary journals such as the Northwest Review, the Colorado Review, and Conjunctions. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I grew up in New York City, but when I was little, we spent most of our vacations with my mother’s family in Texas and Louisiana. It was before most people had air conditioning, so I have a lot of memories of still, thick nights when it was too hot to sleep, listening to the cicadas fiddling away outside and making up stories in my head. I always liked to write, but it never occurred to me that I could do it as a profession. I loved reading and talking about books, so I studied literature in college and graduate school. When I began teaching school in Boston, during my office hours, if no students showed up, I wrote stories full of folklore and history and old ballads. Eventually, one of them turned into my first novel, and I was off and running. Now I’m living in New York City again, where I go to cafes to write, because they have good chai and I like to people-watch when I can’t think of the next sentence.
My first Candlewick book, The Freedom Maze, took me just about forever to write—eighteen years, in fact, although I wrote (and finished) several other things while I was working on it. The story began with a dream. I was looking out my window at a garden and a maze that weren’t there in waking life. Somehow I knew they existed in the past and were part of something important. Figuring out what that was took me a while, as did discovering Sophie and her family. It’s a good thing I like researching almost as much as I like making up characters, because researching plantation life in slavery times took me even longer, and involved everything from dusty archives to driving back roads in Louisiana looking for ruined slave quarters. Getting them all to come together took me longest of all, but I loved making Sophie’s story all it wanted to be.
Three Things You Might Not Know About Me:
1. I was born in Japan and my first word was “mizu” (Japanese for “water”) even though I’m not Japanese, not even a little.
2. The first summer I went to sleepaway camp, I won a prize (invented, I think, just for me) for reading every book in the camp library.
3. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in a yurt in Outer Mongolia.