Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  We sat together, alone in the dark. Dickie snorted. Down the lane, lady laughter bubbled out of Sadie’s. I shivered, even though the night was warm.

  I wanted to help Dickie home, but his place is so far west of town that doing so would have meant getting caught out for sure. And the fact is, I wanted—I needed—to have my look at Sadie’s gals, I needed to go get my fill, even though I knew: Needing to see is where the trouble starts; ain’t no amount of looking that fills you.

  Besides, sleeping out couldn’t possibly bother Dickie Tucker; sleeping in his crumbling shack wasn’t much better than sleeping out. At least on the church steps he had fresh air and the Lord watching.

  But it didn’t matter. I was still tangled in Sheriff’s hedge when I heard clicking and clanking come from the darkness out west of the church. I looked up and seen that it was four clockies from the bunch that make their camp up on Windmill Mesa, refugees and veterans of that same Long War that had taken Dickie’s good right eye. They looked down at Dickie, their eyes glowing like pairs of coals peeking out from a stove grate. One hunkered and nudged Dickie, who snored deep and didn’t stir. The croucher clicked at his mates, and one tick-tocked off, returning with a wheelbarrow snitched from the side of Emet Kohen’s Mercantile Emporium. They hauled Dickie up, then wheeled him down the lane, right past my nose. Dickie smelt terrible of manure and I can’t even guess what, but the clockies were clean. They smelled like copper and gun oil, and water from the springs way back in the box canyons.

  As he was wheeled past, Dickie’s one good eye rolled open. It fixed on me blearily, and he mumbled, “Go have yer look, Seth Everett. Couldn’t possibly do no harm.”

  At the next alley the party cut west, into the darkness, and if they dumped Dickie back into his own pitiful sod hut, or rolled him right past, all the way to their neat homestead on top of Windmill Mesa, I really can’t say.

  Lost Pages from “The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana”

  Jess Nevins

  JESS NEVINS is a college librarian by trade and manic geek researcher by preference. He is the author of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (2004) and the forthcoming Heroes of the World: An Encyclopedia of Global Pulp Heroes. As for this excised section of his Victoriana encyclopedia, he writes, “The idea of steampunk existing in the nineteenth century is certainly an attractive one, but, sadly, the reality of such a thing would result in its use at war and its catastrophic failure. War so often drives technological innovation, and there’s no reason steampunk would be immune to that, especially in the bloody and war-torn nineteenth century. And so much of nineteenthcentury war was futile, appallingly fatal, and generally abortive, so it seemed fitting to me that steampunk vehicles would prove likewise.” Visit him at RATMMJESS.LIVEJOURNAL.COM.

  STEAM DEVICES. The symbiotic relationship between real events and nineteenth century popular literature is underappreciated by critics and academics where it is not entirely ignored. The reality of female private investigators, and their influence on fictional female detectives (see: Lady Detectives), has gone unnoticed by modern writers. Of course, much of what appears in fiction is romanticized, sentimentalized, and made more neat and suitable for fiction—reality is often disappointing in that regard. One prominent example of this is the numerous experiments with steam weapons and steam vehicles—”steam devices,” in the phraseology common to the era— during the nineteenth-century.

  Steam power was a constant throughout the nineteenth century; the first real steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, debuted in 1803. But it was the addition of the screw propeller to a steam-powered ship, first with the S.S. Archimedes in 1839 and then, via noted English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the S.S. Great Britain in 1843, that caused a revolution in both real-life transportation and in the thinking of authors. Before the Archimedes and the Great Britain, science fictional voyages used existing forms of transportation, usually balloons and wind-powered ships. But the introduction of successful steam-powered ships spurred authors to create new vehicles and new energies to power them, and spurred real-life engineers and inventors to create them.

  The first known example of this took place in April 1855 during the Crimean War. The siege of Sevastopol had so far been a bloody and futile effort, and Thomas Cochrane, the tenth Earl of Dundonald (and model for both C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey) had what he thought was a solution. Cochrane was a foresighted thinker where nautical technology was concerned: he had proposed a saturation bombing ship and a gas warfare ship in 1812 for use against the French, he patented a tunneling shield with Marc Isambard Brunel (father to Isambard Kingdom Brunel), and Cochrane was an early proponent of steamships. In 1854, in response to the negative news from Crimea, he had collaborated with Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the creation of an “armoured land vehicle” for use in the siege of Sevastopol. Together with engineer Henry Bessemer, who had developed a method for spin-stabilized artillery shells, Cochrane and Brunel created a “landrover”—in other words, a working, steam-powered prototypical tank. On 31 April 1855 the landrover was at the forefront of an attack on the city. Unfortunately, as one survivor of the attack wrote in a letter to the Times of London, the results were not positive:

  But, alas! what misery awaited us. The landrover was emitting a perfect hailstorm of grape, canister, round shot, shell, and bullets, the Bessemer rockets in particular mangling the Russians in a most frightful manner, and our brave boys were engaged at bayonet range with the Cossacks, who were beginning to melt away in the face of the landrover’s fire, when a harsh screaming sound, increasing in vehemence, came from the landrover and struck us numb with horror. Then, with “a mighty and a strong wind,” the landrover exploded. Even at head-quarters, two and a-half miles, perhaps, distant, the explosion burst open and broke windows. I, tripped up by one of the thick low scrubby bushes which break our every march, was thrown into the air, but by providence was spared the worst. Men lay on every side of me gashed and torn, cut in two as if by a knife or their bodies doubled up like so many strips of brown paper. Those few survivors fled in a disorderly chaos back up the ravine, our losses distressingly heavy and our spirits low. . . .

  Forgotten today, not least because the explosion of the landrover killed so many British soldiers, the landrover gained no small amount of attention at the time. Rani Lakshmi Bai (1835–1858), queen of the Indian state of Jhansi, reportedly began work on a mobile steam-powered version of Tipu’s Tiger, a clockwork device showing a tiger devouring a European soldier. But the steam Tiger, if it existed, disappeared when the British sacked Jhansi in 1858. And iterations of the landrover, or at least references to it, regularly appeared for many years in both casebook fiction (see: THE CASEBOOK), such as R. Reid’s Revelations of an Indian Detective (1885), which claimed that a new version of the landrover was in use against the Thugs, and in penny bloods, either as deus ex machina saviors (as in the Kabul climax of the first half of English Jack Amongst the Afghans; or, The British Flag—Touch It Who Dare! (see: ENGLISH JACK) or as machines of horror in the Depraved Dreadfuls of the 1860s and 1870s (as, for example, the “unspeakable vehicle” in Lord Manningtree’s “special yard” in Fanny White and Her Friend Jack Rawlings. A Romance of a Young Lady Thief and a Boy Burglar (circa 1865) (see: FANNY WHITE)).

  Regrettably, the next appearance on record of a steam device is even less salutary, or successful, than the Earl of Dundonald’s landrover. The Russia of Tsar Alexander II (1818—1881, Tsar from 1855 to 1881) was notoriously cruel, treating Poles (in the 1863 January Uprising), Kazakhs (the 1871 invasion of the country of Ili), and separatist and rebellious Russians (throughout Alexander’s reign) with equal brutality. But Alexander, though autocratic, wanted to reform Russia and make it a modern country worthy of comparison with the European powers. Alexander saw the value of modern technology—he modernized and expanded Russia’s railway system, among other things—and was struck by the potential of the Earl of Dundonald’s landrover. Since th
e 1850s Russia had been attempting to match European colonial expansion in Asia by annexing parts of China, forcing three treaties on the Chinese government between 1858 and 1860, and in 1871, when the Kazakh country of Ili (northeast of modern Sinkiang) revolted against Chinese rule and declared itself independent, Alexander saw yet another territory which Russia could acquire, as well as an opportunity to create a steam device. He ordered the creation of a steam-powered weapon-carrying vehicle for use in Ili—and with an eye to the constant peasant rebellions he ordered it made into the shape of something which Russian peasants would reflexively fear: the hut of Baba Yaga, the cannibalistic witch of Russian folklore.

  The Russian conquest of Ili was quick and thorough, but the steam device was a failure: with all the will in the world, Russian engineers could not make a steam-powered vehicle which would both walk and carry artillery. Reportedly Alexander was furious at the device’s failure. However, Russian revolutionary activists believed that the problem was not with the concept but with the shape of the vehicle, and like Alexander saw the potential battlefield utility of a steam vehicle.

  In the early 1870s the peasants of Chyhyryn, in the central Ukraine, revolted against a proposed land reallocation program. The revolt was more passive than active and was rarely violent, but revolutionary activists saw the potential in it—the peasants of Chyhyryn were the descendants of Cossacks and could be relied upon to revert to their Cossack roots, given the right impetus. Iakov Stevanovich, organizer of the “Secret Druzhina” uprising in Chyhyryn, later wrote in his The Chyhyryn Affair (1881):

  The primary task I set myself was injecting a revolutionary element into this dumb protest. It was in the guise of a peasant from Kherson Province that I first became acquainted with Lazar Tenenik. After several meetings with him, I let him know that I had something important to impart. His interest caught, he asked, “Tell me, good fellow, is it good or evil you bring for us?” I explained that I brought special plans which would allow the muzhiks to build a weapon which would allow them to defy the authorities. . . .

  Stevanovich does not go into detail about the weapon, and contemporary accounts of what happened in Chyhyryn are vague. A Times of London article from 14 May 1877 says only:

  A telegram from Odessa states that the Cossacks of Chyhyryn, north of Odessa, attacked a posse of rural police. The body of Cossack peasants offered resistance to a squadron of dragoons, who thereupon charged them. An explosion of unknown origin killed several dozen on both sides.

  But tradition has it that Stevanovich’s “weapon” was steam vehicles in the shape of horses, designed to ignite the imagination of the Cossacks of Chyhyryn and give them an advantage against the government troops.

  * * *

  Failures like Stevanovich’s steam horses, the mechanical ostrich of the 1880s, and Archibald Campion’s abortive robot soldier in 1893 did not stop the major powers of the world from trying to make the Earl of Dundonald’s concept a working reality. These attempts were also failures, but far more damaging ones. Japan, Russia, France, and Great Britain all saw the Boxer Rebellion as an ideal situation for testing new steam devices. As French novelist and journalist Pierre Loti described in Les Derniers Jours de Pékin (1902), these devices failed catastrophically:

  The wall of Pekin dwarfs us. It is Ozymandian in scale, a dead black in the bleak light of a snowy autumn morning. No witnesses as we approach the city, not one, our only escort the rows of the Chinese dead, left where they fell. Ravaged, lifeless earth along the walls; the ground churned, sinister with ashes, with still-smouldering machines, what is left of human bodies. Only crows, attending to the bodies, salute us with their deathly cawing. The dogs had already eaten their fill.

  The triple gates, once five storeys high, impregnable, now shapeless broken stumps torn by Allied machinery, now house-high piles of brick being slowly buried beneath the ash and snow. Our horses’ hooves disappear into the coal-black dust, which blinds and coats all in spite of the rain and the snowflakes which sting our faces.

  Silently, as though we were riding upon felt, we pass under the broken arches and enter a land of ruin and ashes. Allied sentries, and a few squalid beggars shivering in corners. That is all. Hushed solitude inside the walls. Nothing but rubbish and smoke. Little gray bricks, the sole material of which Pekin was built, scattered in myriads. A city of small low houses adorned with gilded wooded lacework, a city of which only a mass of queer debris is left. Fire and shell and Allied machinery have reduced the tidy order of Pekin to chaos and abomination.

  We enter the city at the Tartar quarter, where there was the fiercest fighting—it contained the European legations. Legation Street and Ha Ta Men Avenue may still be discerned from this endless labyrinth of smoking ruin, but Pekin’s former decorous order is now a chaos of shattered brick, human remain, and what is left of the Allied machinery.

  All is gray or black. The gloomy, silent monotony which follows every apocalyptic fire is broken only by the rare glimpse of porcelain or cloisonné peeking through the eternal ash.

  After a few hundred meters we enter Legation Street, the focus of the whole world’s anxious attention for so many months. Everything is in ruins, much still smoking, the Russian “Yaga hut” device leaning against one wall, its iron chicken legs all that remains of the mobile gun platform. In an inner square near a chapel is what is left of the Japanese “Archer Boy.” Only the end of its bow is visible, all else destroyed or submerged beneath the universal little gray bricks

  We finally dismount at the entrance of the French Legation. All around us are piles of rubbish and Chinese corpses not yet carried away. The Legation walls are so pierced with balls that one wonders they still stand. The rubble to our right is the Legation proper, destroyed by the crash of our Fusil Aerienne. At our left is the Chancellor’s home, where the defenders took refuge during the siege, because it was in a less-exposed situation. Few survived the explosion of the British “Nelson” vehicle.

  Tanglefoot (A Clockwork Century Story)

  Cherie Priest

  CHERIE PRIEST is the author of seven novels from Tor and Subterranean Press, including the Nebula award nominee Boneshaker, Dreadful Skin, and the Eden Moore trilogy. Her short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in such publications as Weird Tales, Subterranean Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Stoker-nominated anthology Aegri Somnia from Apex. Though she spent most of her life in the southeast, she presently lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and a fat black cat. You can find her online at www.cheriepriest.com. “Tanglefoot” was sparked by an incident in which she and a friend “were chased away from the Waverly Hills Sanitarium by the cops. We knew it wasn’t ‘open,’ which is to say, we’d arrived well after tours of the old hospital had come to a close; but we wanted to take pictures of the building, the grounds outside, and the ‘guardians’—an assortment of enormous gargoyles hunkering on the roof, overlooking the front entryway. In our defense, we were only trespassing. It’s not like we were breaking and entering.”

  HUNKERED SHOULDERS AND skinny, bent knees cast a crooked shadow from the back corner of the laboratory, where the old man tried to remember the next step in his formula, or possibly—as Edwin was forced to consider—the scientist simply struggled to recall his own name. On the table against the wall, the once estimable Dr. Archibald Smeeks muttered, spackling his test tubes with spittle and becoming increasingly agitated until Edwin called out, “Doctor?”

  And the doctor settled himself, steadying his hands and closing his mouth. He crouched on his stool, cringing away from the boy’s voice, and crumpling his over-long work apron with his feet. “Who’s there?” he asked.

  “Only me, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “Me. It’s only. ..me.”

  With a startled shudder of recognition he asked, “The orphan?”

  “Yes sir. Just the orphan.”

  Dr. Smeeks turned around, the bottom of his pants twisting in a circle on the smooth wooden seat. He reached t
o his forehead, where a prodigious set of multi-lensed goggles was perched. From the left side, he tugged a monocle to extend it on a hinged metal arm, and he used it to peer across the room, down onto the floor, where Edwin was sitting cross-legged in a pile of discarded machinery parts.

  “Ah,” the old doctor said. “There you are, yes. I didn’t hear you tinkering, and I only wondered where you might be hiding. Of course, I remember you.”

  “I believe you do, sir,” Edwin said politely. In fact, he very strongly doubted it today, but Dr. Smeeks was trying to appear quite fully aware of his surroundings and it would’ve been rude to contradict him. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your work. You sounded upset. I wanted to ask if everything was all right.”

  “All right?” Dr. Smeeks returned his monocle to its original position, so that it no longer shrank his fluffy white eyebrow down to a tame and reasonable arch. His wiry goatee quivered as he wondered about his own state. “Oh yes. Everything’s quite all right. I think for a moment that I was distracted.”

  He scooted around on the stool so that he once again faced the cluttered table with its vials, coils, and tiny gray crucibles. His right hand selected a test tube with a hand-lettered label and runny green contents. His left hand reached for a set of tongs, though he set them aside almost immediately in favor of a half-rolled piece of paper that bore the stains and streaks of a hundred unidentifiable splatters.