by Sean Wallace
Through the window, the moon threw a pale white parallelogram on the floor. Yan stood in the middle of it, moving her head about, trying out her new face.
Hundreds of miniature pneumatic actuators were hidden under the smooth chrome skin, each of which could be controlled independently, allowing her to adopt any expression. But her eyes were still the same, and they shone in the moonlight with excitement.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
She nodded.
I handed her a bowl, filled with the purest anthracite coal, ground into a fine powder. It smelled of burnt wood, of the heart of the earth. She poured it into her mouth and swallowed. I could hear the fire in the miniature boiler in her torso grow hotter as the pressure of the steam built up. I took a step back.
She lifted her head to the moon and howled: it was a howl made by steam passing through brass piping, and yet it reminded me of that wild howl long ago, when I first heard the call of a hulijing.
Then she crouched to the floor. Gears grinding, pistons pumping, curved metal plates sliding over each other – the noises grew louder as she began to transform.
She had drawn the first glimmers of her idea with ink on paper. Then she had refined it, through hundreds of iterations until she was satisfied. I could see traces of her mother in it, but also something harder, something new.
Working from her idea, I had designed the delicate folds in the chrome skin and the intricate joints in the metal skeleton. I had put together every hinge, assembled every gear, soldered every wire, welded every seam, oiled every actuator. I had taken her apart and put her back together.
Yet, it was a marvel to see everything working. In front of my eyes, she folded and unfolded like a silvery origami construction, until finally, a chrome fox, as beautiful and deadly as the oldest legends, stood before me.
She padded around the flat, testing out her sleek new form, trying out her stealthy new movements. Her limbs gleamed in the moonlight, and her tail, made of delicate silver wires as fine as lace, left a trail of light in the dim flat.
She turned and walked – no, glided – towards me, a glorious hunter, an ancient vision coming alive. I took a deep breath and smelled fire and smoke, engine oil and polished metal, the scent of power.
“Thank you,” she said, and leaned in as I put my arms around her true form. The steam engine inside her had warmed her cold metal body, and it felt warm and alive.
“Can you feel it?” she asked.
I shivered. I knew what she meant. The old magic was back but changed: not fur and flesh, but metal and fire.
“I will find others like me,” she said, “and bring them to you. Together, we will set them free.”
Once, I was a demon hunter. Now, I am one of them.
I opened the door, Swallow Tail in my hand. It was only an old and heavy sword, rusty, but still perfectly capable of striking down anyone who might be lying in wait.
No one was.
Yan leapt out like a bolt of lightning. Stealthily, gracefully, she darted into the streets of Hong Kong, free, feral, a hulijing built for this new age.
. . . once a man has set his heart on a hulijing, she cannot help hearing him no matter how far apart they are . . .
“Good hunting,” I whispered.
She howled in the distance, and I watched a puff of steam rise into the air as she disappeared.
I imagined her running along the tracks of the funicular railway, a tireless engine racing up, and up, towards the top of Victoria Peak, towards a future as full of magic as the past.
Acknowledgements
“Love Comes to Abyssal City” © 2011 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally appeared in Hot & Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Mouse Ran Up the Clock” © 2009 by A. C. Wise. Originally appeared in Electric Velocipede. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Tanglefoot” © 2008 by Cherie Priest. Originally appeared in Subterranean Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Benedice Te” © 2004 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. Originally appeared in Challenging Destiny. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Five Hundred and Ninety-Nine” © 2014 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Original to this volume.
“Smoke City” © 2011 by Christopher Barzak. Originally appeared in Asimov’s. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil” © 2012 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. Originally appeared in Lightspeed. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Anna in the Moonlight” © 2014 by Jonathan Wood. Original to this volume.
“Edison’s Frankenstein” © 2009 by Monkeybrain, Inc. Originally appeared in Postscripts. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Canary of Candletown” © 2011 by C. S. E. Cooney. Originally appeared in SteamPowered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Green-eyed Monsters in the Valley of Sky, An Opera” © 2014 by E. Catherine Tobler. Original to this volume.
“Selin That Has Grown in the Desert” © 2011 by Alex Dally MacFarlane. Originally appeared in SteamPowered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Clockworks of Hanyang” © 2011 by Gord Sellar. Originally appeared in The Immersion Book of Steampunk. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Curse of Chimère” © 2010 by Tony Pi. Originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Memories in Bronze, Feathers, and Blood” © 2010 by Aliette de Bodard. Originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Return of Chérie” © 2011 by Nisi Shawl. Originally appeared in SteamPowered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“On the Lot and In the Air” © 2009 by Lisa L. Hannett. Originally appeared in Clarkesworld. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Terrain” © 2013 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally appeared in Tor.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“I Stole the DC’s Eyeglass” © 2013 by Sofia Samatar. Originally appeared in We See a Different Frontier. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Colliers’ Venus (1893)” © 2011 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Originally appeared in Naked City. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ticktock Girl” © 2005 by Cat Rambo. Originally appeared in Cyber Age Adventures. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“La Valse” © 2013 by K. W. Jeter. Originally appeared in Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Governess and the Lobster” © 2012 by Margaret Ronald. Originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Beside Calais” © 2012 by Samantha Henderson. Originally appeared in Strange Horizons. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Good Hunting” © 2012 by Ken Liu. Originally appeared in Strange Horizons. Reprinted by permission of the author.
About the Contributors
Sean Wallace is the founder and editor of Prime Books, which won a World Fantasy Award in 2006. In the past he was co-editor of Fantasy Magazine as well as Hugo Award-winning and two-time World Fantasy nominee Clarkesworld Magazine; the editor of the following anthologies: Best New Fantasy, Fantasy, Horror: The Best of the Year, Jabberwocky, Japanese Dreams and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk; and co-editor of Bandersnatch, Fantasy Annual, Phantom and Weird Tales: The 21st Century. He lives in Rockville MD with his wife, Jennifer, and their twin daughters, Cordelia and Natalie.
Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling author. His novels and over fifty short stories have been translated into seventeen languages and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.
A. C. Wise’s fiction has
appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Shimmer and The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4, among others. In addition to her writing, she co-edits Unlikely Story. For more information, visit the author at www.acwise.net.
Cherie Priest is the author of over a dozen novels, including the steampunk pulp adventures The Inexplicables, Ganymede, Dreadnought, Clementine and Boneshaker. Boneshaker was nominated for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award; it was a PNBA Award winner, and winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Cherie also wrote Bloodshot and Hellbent from Bantam Spectra; Fathom and the Eden Moore series from Tor; and three novellas published by Subterranean Press. She lives in Chattanooga, TN, with her husband, a big shaggy dog and a fat black cat.
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His books for 2013 and 2014 include Kalimpura and Last Plane to Heaven from Tor and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. He blogs regularly about his terminal colon cancer on his website at www.jlake.com.
Benjanun Sriduangkaew enjoys writing love letters to cities, real and speculative. Her work can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, and Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year.
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award-winning novel, One for Sorrow, which has been made into the Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories, and Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, will be published by Knopf in 2015. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA programme at Youngstown State University.
Carrie Vaughn is the author of the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. She’s also written a handful of stand-alone fantasy novels and upwards of seventy short stories. She’s a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and in 2011 she was nominated for a Hugo Award for best short story. She’s had the usual round of day jobs, but has been writing full-time since 2007. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado, where she lives with a fluffy attack dog and too many hobbies. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
Jonathan Wood is an Englishman in New York. There’s a story in there involving falling in love and flunking out of med school, but in the end it all worked out all right, and, quite frankly, the medical community is far better off without him, so we won’t go into it here. His debut novel, No Hero, was described by Publishers Weekly as “a funny, dark, rip-roaring adventure with a lot of heart, highly recommended for urban fantasy and light science fiction readers alike”. Barnesandnoble.com listed it has one of the twenty best paranormal fantasies of the past decade, and Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels described it as, “so funny I laughed out loud”. His short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Chizine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as anthologies such as The Book of Cthulhu 2 and The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year One. He can be found online at www.jonathanwoodauthor.com.
Chris Roberson is probably best known for his alternate history Celestial Empire series, which, in addition to a large number of short stories, consists of the novels The Dragon’s Nine Sons, Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, The Voyage of Night Shining White, and Three Unbroken. His other novels include Here, There & Everywhere; Paragaea: A Planetary Romance; Set the Seas on Fire; Book of Secrets; End of the Century; and Further: Beyond the Threshold. Recently, he’s been writing graphic novels, including Elric: The Balance Lost, featuring Michael Moorcock’s characters, and two New York Times bestselling Cinderella mini-series spinning off Bill Willingham’s Fables. Along with his spouse and partner Allison Baker, Roberson was a co-founder of the small press Monkeybrain Books, which in 2012 launched a digital comics imprint, Monkeybrain Comics. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.
C. S. E. Cooney lives and writes in a well-appointed Rhode Island garret, right across the street from a Victorian Strolling Park. She is the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills. With her fellow artists in the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, she appears at conventions and other venues, dramatizing excerpts from her fiction, singing songs, and performing such story-poems as “The Sea King’s Second Bride”, for which she won the Rhysling Award in 2011. Her website can be found at www.csecooney.com.
E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first novel, Gold & Glass, is now available.
Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, she writes stories, found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 and other anthologies. Poetry can be found in Stone Telling, The Moment of Change and Here, We Cross. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (forthcoming in late 2014).
Gord Sellar is a Canadian, but he wrote this story near Seoul, which also used to get called Hanyang back in the nineteenth century, and he wrote this bio in Ho Chi Minh City, which used to be (and unofficially often still is) called Saigon. He doesn’t know where he will be when this book sees print, but you can find out at www.gordsellar.com. (Notes for this story, and related stories set in the same world, are at: http://bit.ly/1fremPM.)
Tony Pi is a Canadian writer who works at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He has previously been a finalist for his short fiction in the Prix Aurora Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His fiction appears in a multitude of places (Clarkesworld Magazine, InterGalactic Medicine Show and more), but further adventures featuring Professor Voss can be found in Ages of Wonder (DAW) and Abyss & Apex.
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as system engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Asimov’s and the Year’s Best Science Fiction, and have earned her a Nebula Award, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award. Her latest release is the Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station, Drifting. She blogs and cooks at www.aliettedebodard.com.
Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a 2009 Tiptree winner; her stories have been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s SF Magazine and in anthologies including both volumes of Dark Matter. Shawl was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor. She co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. She edits reviews for The Cascadia Subduction Zone. Shawl co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Her Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is due out in 2015 from Tor. She co-founded the Carl Brandon Society and serves on Clarion West’s board of directors. Her website is www.nisishawl.com.
Since 2008, Lisa L. Hannett has had over fifty short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, ChiZine, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010, 2011 and 2012), and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 and 2013). She has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection 2011 for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. You can find her o
nline at www.lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, a 1920s retelling of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses”, is forthcoming from Atria in 2014. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed and others, and the anthologies Federations, After, Teeth and more. Her non-fiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, The A.V. Club, Strange Horizons, io9 and more, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books). Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks at www.genevievevalentine.com.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press), winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. Her short fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in a number of places, including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld and Weird Fiction Review. She is non-fiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and teaches literature, writing, and Arabic at California State University Channel Islands. Visit her online at www.sofiasamatar.com.
The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction”. Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel, Red Delicious.
Cat Rambo lives, writes and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine and Tor.com. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain”, from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction and information about her popular online writing classes, see www.kittywumpus.net.