Jeff VanderMeer

Stand-alone novels, story collections, anthologies edited with Ann VanderMeer:

Veniss Underground — (2003) Publisher: In his debut novel, literary alchemist Jeff VanderMeer takes us on an unforgettable journey, a triumph of the imagination that reveals the magical and mysterious city of Veniss through three intertwined voices. First, Nicholas, a would-be Living Artist, seeks to escape his demons in the shadowy underground–but in doing so makes a deal with the devil himself. In her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. And finally, haunted by Nicola’s sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola’s lover, embarks on a mythic journey to the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city to bring his love back to light. There he will find wonders beyond imagining…and horrors greater than the heart can bear. By turns beautiful, horrifying, delicate, and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of the imagination. This special edition includes the short stories “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight”; “Detectives and Cadavers”; and “A Heart for Lucretia” and the novella Balzac’s War, offering a complete tour of the fantastic world of Veniss.

Best American Fantasy — (2007) edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer and Matthew Cheney. Publisher: A prestigious new anthology series, Best American Fantasy is guest edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, with Matthew Cheney serving as the series editor. This inaugural volume showcases the best North American fantasy short fiction from the preceding year.

Best American Fantasy

The first thing that stands out is that if I merely stuck to looking for fantasy stories from the usual sources, I probably wouldn't have come across many of the short stories in this anthology. And that I think is the strength of Best American Fantasy — that it reprints stories some genre readers were never aware of. That's not to say this doesn't have its fair share of "expected" stories but for the most part, it's been a real treat. The editors also reveal their favored style as the fiction not only leans towards the literary but to the adventurous side as well.

I did enjoy most of these stories and a few were challenging reads for me. There were three stories that really stood out. "Origin Story" by Kelly Link is a fantastic read. She takes on the tropes of comic book superheroes and readers are dealt a one-two combo punch when it comes to characterization and drama.

This isn't the first time I encountered "First Kisses from Beyond the Grave" by Nik Houser but it stands up well upon re-reading. Houser incorporates both humor and horror into his story as well as making his protagonist a convincing teenager. This is one of the longer pieces in the book but I didn't notice because I was engrossed with the prose which seemed light and playful, easily concealing its layers of depth and gravity.

My third favorite is "A Fable with Slips of White Paper" by Kevin Brockmeier and, though it is short, itleaves a resonating emotion. Brockmeier maintains the tone and length of a fable yet adapts it to modern sensibilities. Perhaps the most difficult part in such a piece would be the ending, yet Brockmeier manages to successfully pull it off without sounding didactic or cliché.

At the end of the book is a "Recommended Reading" list and this space is also where the editors make their processes transparent by revealing the publications they received and considered for the anthology. Best American Fantasy really stands out as it covers very different territory from other "best of" anthologies and one can't deny the quality of the stories included. Those looking for intelligent literary reading will do well with this anthology. —Charles Tan    
FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

Strange Tales of Secret Lives — (2008)  Publisher: In this new collection by World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer, the secret lives of librarians, doctors, lawyers, university students, bank tellers, sex shop clerks and dozens of others are revealed for the first time. Ordered by profession, these short-short stories range from the hilarious to the somber, the absurd to the revelatory. Using real people as the springboard, VanderMeer has created a rich blend of the factual and the imaginary in which everyone gets the secret life they deserve. A luminous little bookmeant for dipping into one secret life at a time.

Strange Tales of Secret Lives

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from Strange Tales of Secret Lives and this book certainly did surprise. Jeff VanderMeer explains the origins of Secret Lives in the introduction: this is a collection of various short stories of (hopefully) fictional what-ifs of real people: a researcher is really a king, a pharmacist plans to live the double-life of a detective, etc.

I'm not a fan of flash fiction and most of the stories here definitely fall under that category yet VanderMeer manages to write it with such imagination and gusto that it becomes palatable, even when reading it all in one sitting. What VanderMeer does differently is that he doesn't stick to a formula even if the premise of the collection seems to require it. He mixes things up, changes the pattern, inter-relates consecutive stories, and adds weird but relevant images to each piece. The order of the stories isn't arbitrary — there is a distinct rhythm and purpose to the sequence. I liked the latter part of the book best — where some of the meatier stories are.

Overall, Secret Lives is an interesting novelty book at best. Its strength is clearly its concept (where else would you buy a book compiling secret lives?) and while the writing is above average, it doesn't strike me as a must-have unless you happen to personally know one of the people mentioned in the book. Still, as far as originality and imagination goes, Secret Lives proves that Jeff VanderMeer still has his edge.
—Charles Tan

Fast Ships, Black Sails — (2008) Publisher: Do you love the sound of a peg leg stomping across a quarterdeck? Or maybe you prefer a parrot on your arm, a strong wind at your back? Adventure, treasure, intrigue, humor, romance, danger — and, yes, plunder! Oh, the Devil does love a pirate — and so do readers everywhere! Swashbuckling from the past into the future and space itself, Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, presents an incredibly entertaining volume of original stories guaranteed to make you walk and talk like a pirate.

Fast Ships, Black Sails

I was never a big fan of pirates (ninjas, on the other hand...) but nonetheless, the very word evokes adventure and the high seas. Fast Ships, Black Sails doesn't really stray far from that expectation and delivers eighteen stories marked with action, treachery, and a sense of wonder.

A good chunk of the stories revolve around traditional concepts of a pirate, with only a few exceptions, such as "Boojum" by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, which takes place in space. The rest take place on stormy waters with sea-worthy vessels manned by rascally crews. Surprisingly, many of the stories are modern in the sense that they subvert the cliché (erroneous as it may be) that women are bad luck on a ship, as the stories not only feature female protagonists but female pirates, be they allies or antagonists. (Of course, real life sometimes thumbed its nose at this superstition too, as evidenced by historical female pirates such as Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Grainne ni Malley.)

The first story that caught my eye was "Castor on Troubled Waters" by Rhys Hughes. The tone is light and funny, and this entry stands out because I feel this is more of a trickster story than a pirate one (although obviously, there is room for overlap). The brevity is also a welcome change of pace.

"The Nymph's Child" by Carrie Vaughn is in a precarious situation. This is one of those open-ended stories that, if not executed properly, could leave readers unsatisfied. For me, it works and ends at just the right scene. Characterization is the strength of the piece and the author manages to subvert a couple of genre tropes while making good use of those that she retains.

My third favorite piece is Naomi Novik's "Aramina, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake." Novik writes a compelling and interesting character as well as constantly inserting conflict and tension into the narrative, making this one of the more exciting pieces in the anthology. No dragons in this story, but the subtle inclusion of the fantastical is just about right.

There are several other stories that I really enjoyed in this collection as well as some that I found to be ho-hum. Overall, your impression of Fast Ships, Black Sails will depend on your expectations. If you're looking for unconventional literary stories, this isn't the place to find them. If you want pirates and adventure, go grab this anthology. The gems — there are a couple of 'em and I'm not even a huge pirate fan — in my opinion more than make up for the stories that didn't strike my fancy.
—Charles Tan    
FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

The New Weird — (2008) Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Publisher: This avant-garde anthology that presents and defines the New Weird — a hip, stylistic fiction that evokes the gritty exuberance of pulp novels and dime-store comic books — creates a new literature that is entirely unprecedented and utterly compelling. Assembling an array of talent, this collection includes contributions from visionaries Michael Moorcock and China Miéville, modern icon Clive Barker, and audacious new talents Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, and Sarah Monette. An essential snapshot of a vibrant movement in popular fiction, this anthology also features critical writings from authors, theorists, and international editors as well as witty selections from online debates.

The New Weird

It’s easy to imagine two different readers reacting in opposite ways to The New Weird. One might find it delightfully odd; the other might find it as terrifying as Kafka on LSD. And a third might find it delightfully odd because it’s as terrifying as Kafka on LSD. Certainly, no one is likely to find it boring.

The New Weird is a well-organized anthology, with a short, useful introduction; a section entitled “Stimuli,” containing older selections (though not very old; the oldest piece, by Michael Moorcock, has an original copyright date of 1979, while the Thomas Ligotti selection was published only in 1997); “Evidence,” stories published mostly in this millennium and intended to demonstrate precisely what New Weird is, or was; “Symposium,” short essays by three writers and shorter commentary by European editors; and “Laboratory,” a communal story by “some of our finest fantasists generally not identified as ‘New Weird.’” Each section has its own points of interest, though the last is of dubious value; as discussed below, some writers even seem to be mocking the assignment, though perhaps that is merely a matter of style.

Which brings us back to the definitional problem. In his introduction, Jeff VanderMeer quotes M. John Harrison asking whether New Weird “is… even anything.” It is VanderMeer’s thesis that the popularity of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station in 2000 crystallized a shift in traditional weird fiction — from the sort written by H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, which ultimately became modern-day horror fiction — to a new type of supernatural or fantastical horror fiction. The twin stimuli for the shift were the New Wave of the 1960s and the “unsettling grotesquery” of 1980s horror, such as Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. The difference was that this new type of fiction surrendered to the weird, without ironic distance, using “rough-hewn but effective plots featuring earnest, proactive characters.” VanderMeer suggests that this work was not particularly subtle and therefore considerably more accessible to readers than its influences had been. Some writers of work identified as New Weird, like Miéville, also argued that it had a specific political component, particularly in opposition to globalization and global corporations. Others, like Steph Swainston, found political categorization too limiting, finding instead a sort of spiritual meaning in the use of New Weird. It wasn’t long before those authors writing the work most identified as New Weird came to deny the label, particularly as their work continued to grow and evolve. VanderMeer contends that none of them ever wrote anything that was much like what they’d written before “for the most part” – neatly setting aside the fact that a number of these writers, like Harrison, Swainston and Mieville continue to write books set in the universes they originally defined as New Weird. VanderMeer implies that New Weird was essentially a moment in time, a marketing category, a way of shaking up the field that has made it possible for writers to come up with “their own wonderfully bizarre and transgressive recombination[s].” Ultimately, VanderMeer comes up with what he calls a working definition of New Weird:

New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects – in combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers of their proxies (including such forebears as Mervyn Peake and the French/English Decadents). New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary power on a “surrender to the weird” that isn’t, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The “surrender” (or “belief”) of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text. (xvi)

It’s a good definition, and largely supported by the stories the VanderMeers choose to fill out their anthology. If I were to tinker with it, it would be to emphasize that world-building seems to be especially critical to New Weird, more so than to traditional science fiction, fantasy or horror. Place is primary to character, and place tends to shape events more than characters do.

The first story in the anthology demonstrates this primacy of place in New Weird fiction. M. John Harrison’s “The Luck in the Head” is a complex and very strange story set in Uroconium, “an indifferent city.” This tale of the anniversary of Uroconium’s liberation from the Analeptic Kings and its current rule by the incredibly ancient Mammy Vooley is one that seems to begin in the middle, as if there is much untold, leaving much work to the reader’s imagination, leading one to wish she could unhinge herself from reality to follow the goings on. Ardwick Chrome, the protagonist, is seeking relief from disturbing, senseless dreams that torment him as he lies strapped to his bed. The convoluted plot has Chrome attempting to stop his dreams by assassinating Mammy Vooley at the request of an insect woman, and all flows into ever increasing strange and random changes. No doubt it is weird; it is also repellent. It is not a story to enjoy, but one to be distantly admired as the work of a vivid imagination.

Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities,” is a more accessible story, but no less weird. This tale strikes me as unlike much of Barker’s work, lacking the vulgarity of his Mister Be Gone or the must-look-away images of his Hellraiser films. It is about an unusual festival conducted by two Eastern European cities, and a tragedy that befalls them. This story is alive with the oddness of cities truly becoming their populations, and the descriptions Barker writes stay vivid long after the pages fall closed.

“Crossing Into Cambodia: A Story of the Third World War” by Michael Moorcock is a more dubious choice for a “weird” tale, striking me more as a straightforward vision of the evils of war in the wake of Vietnam (and, even more so, Iraq, though Moorcock was writing while George W. Bush was still decades away from his Supreme Court victory, much less “Mission Accomplished”). That may be a matter of timing, though, for sometimes reality has a way of catching up with the weird in ways we don’t appreciate.

Who can resist a story that begins, “It was a cold morning, two days before Jape Day, and little children were eating the eyeballs of corpses in Blood Park”? Simon Ings treats us to uncanny horror combined with gruesome humor, in “The Braining of Mother Lamprey.” Kathe Koja’s “The Neglected Garden” tells a tale of unrequited, obsessive love and horrible indifference as a woman becomes a part of her former lover’s garden. Thomas Ligotti once again demonstrates the importance of place to weird tales in “A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing,” a short tale of almost poetic language about a metaphysical parade that closes out the “Stimuli” section.

“Evidence” is a more difficult section of the book because so much of the material makes more sense if one has knowledge of the authors’ larger works. China Miéville’s “Jack,” for instance, is far more intelligible to a reader who knows of the city of New Crobuzon, which first appeared in Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. It’s a good story, and it can stand alone, but without the authority of the city in which it is set surrounding it, it is a lesser tale. Jeffrey Thomas’s “Immolation,” one of the strongest, darkest and saddest stories in the book, takes on new meaning if the reader is aware of Thomas’s PUNKTOWN series. Leena Krohn’s short novel Tainaron: Mail from Another City is a lovely work, and the excerpt here does not do it justice, just as “The Ride of the Gabbleratchet” from Steph Swainston’s Dangerous Offspring hardly begins to give the reader the slightest taste of her marvelous FOURLANDS trilogy. The New Weird depends so heavily on complex worldbuilding that it is difficult to convey its flavor in a short story, making the task the VanderMeers have set for themselves virtually impossible to accomplish. It takes time and much description and action to show a complete world — and many more words than will fit within the confines of a story. Indeed, most writers require more than a single long novel.

Nonetheless, several stories included here manage to convey the haunting atmosphere of New Weird. Brian Evenson does it in “Watson’s Boy,” the tale of a man who spends his days picking up keys for no other reason than that they are there and they are all he knows. The world here is small, enclosed, and easier to describe, thus fitting within a single story. Jeffrey Ford, a true master of the short form, astonishes again with “At Reparata,” a tale of a wonderful kingdom where everyone gets the title he or she truly deserves. And Alistair Rennie’s “The Gutter Sees the Light that Never Shines” is foul and funny at the same time, a fine last tale to evidence that New Weird is not without a sense of humor.

The next section of the book, “Symposium,” is uneven in its usefulness, but overall is likely to give a kick to anyone who has the slightest penchant for literary criticism and the future of the fantastic. This is the second “definitional” book that I know of (the first was Feeling Very Strange by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel) that has used excerpts from online discussions to try to explain the boundaries of a subgenre of science fiction/fantasy/horror — perhaps a logical outgrowth of the fact that those of us who read in these genres are those most likely to use tools like Internet message boards. The discussion, between authors, readers, editors, critics, and some complete unknowns, is thoughtful and thought-provoking, extremely well-edited to convey the best of the conversation while preserving its occasionally playful tone. Essays by Michael Cisco, Darja Malcolm-Clarke and K.J. Bishop develop the idea that New Weird is a fuzzy label, alive and changing but, as Cisco puts it, very much “the scene.” One of the most interesting parts of the book is the section in which the VanderMeers set forth the perspectives of European editors on New Weird. These editors talk about problems of translation and of the development of strange fiction in their own countries and their own languages, and of trends that have developed independently of English-language influence that have occurred simultaneously.

The least successful section of the book is the one labeled “Laboratory.” The VanderMeers commissioned a piece from a number of fantasists not commonly known for their work in New Weird, writing in a round robin. The instigator is Paul Di Filippo, who unfortunately writes as if he is making fun of the whole concept of New Weird, choosing names for characters, gods and places that echo those used by Miéville and Swainston in a way that mocks them, and situations that sound more silly than weird. One almost begins to feel as if one is being laughed at for taking this New Weird stuff so seriously. Fortunately, the writers who follow Di Filippo are not so blatant in their disregard for the form, but their contributions rarely mesh with one another, and the story never coalesces.

Finally, the VanderMeers offer an extremely valuable “Recommended Reading” section at the back of the book. Even those who consider themselves well-versed in the New Weird might find some works here that he or she has overlooked, and be happy to have discovered them. As the VanderMeers state, it is not an exhaustive list, but it is stimulating. I’ve read a number of the works on the list since my first reading of The New Weird, and while some were better than others, they certainly all added to my understanding of this marvelously odd literary movement.

The New Weird is therefore an engaging and thought-provoking if imperfect book. Scholars of the fantastic will certainly wish to include it in their libraries, and it is a good impetus to discussion. Casual readers, however, may find it much more difficult to appreciate; still, it is a good place for them to start on an exploration of this little corner of science fiction/fantasy/horror, one where all three genres seem to be bundled into one very strange whole. —Terry Weyna

Predator: South China Sea — (2008) Young Adult. Publisher: On a remote South China Sea island, a deadly hunt is underway... but not the kind of expedition the participants expected. In this remote, jungle-covered island somewhere between Thailand and Indonesia some of the most exotic animals in the world have been gathered as the prizes in a challenge of human against nature. The hunters come from all walks of life. Each has come to the island for personal reasons, some secret, some deadly. But when the encampment's owner, ex-Khmer Rouge Colonel Rath Preap, finds the fences cut and his security men missing, it's clear that the game has turned. And as the hunters battle for survival, they discover there is another creature out for blood... an adversary that has faced death on a thousand worlds — a Predator with an unstoppable lust for conquest!

The Situation — (2008)

The Situation

I'm a big fan of both Jeff VanderMeer and PS Publishing, so imagine my surprise when I found a copy of The Situation in my hard drive, a giveaway from Wired that I had downloaded but forgotten, mainly because it wasn't in my immediate must-be-read-for-review-or-else-we'll-send-ninjas queue. The first scene immediately hooked me, evoking a New Weird atmosphere as corporate drones created insects that crawled into your ears and conjured nightmares, all the while being quite readable instead of the overwhelming details that characterize China Mieville's NEW CROBUZON novels.

The fiction is presented in short bursts of scenes, each one as evocative and compelling as the one that preceded it. The bizarreness of it all seems like the perfect analog to the corporate environment where workers slave away their time working for rich employers, although in this case it is filtered through the lens of the surreal and the fantastic. VanderMeer is consistent throughout, creating apt analogies for the toxic workplace. Aside from that, The Situation is a quick, fun read and if nothing else, an enjoyable “Fuck You” to the incompetents at the office. Even those unfamiliar with VanderMeer's fiction will find The Situation accessible. —Charles Tan    
FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

Steampunk — (2008) Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Publisher: Replete with whimsical mechanical wonders and charmingly anachronistic settings, this pioneering anthology gathers a brilliant blend of fantastical stories. Steampunk originates in the romantic elegance of the Victorian era and blends in modern scientific advances — synthesizing imaginative technologies such as steam-driven robots, analog supercomputers, and ultramodern dirigibles. The elegant allure of this popular new genre is represented in this rich collection by distinctively talented authors, including Neal Stephenson, Michael Chabon, James Blaylock, Michael Moorcock, and Joe R. Lansdale.

Steampunk

Steampunk is an anthology of, well, steampunk stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. If you hurry, you can still get to this first anthology before the second one, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, appears in mid November. Based on the quality of the stories in this collection, I heartily recommend checking it out, especially if you’ve been a bit bemused (or possibly amused) by all the people wearing odd Victorian costumes at SFF conventions nowadays, or if you have at best a vague idea of what steampunk exactly entails. If you’re one of those people who’s interested in, but not entirely sure about, the new hot subgenre du jour (like me, prior to reading Steampunk), this anthology is here to take you by the hand and give you a quick, entertaining education. And oh, it also contains some truly excellent short stories.

After the preface by editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Steampunk starts off with an excellent essay by Jess Nevins about the origins and history of steampunk, including interesting details about the American Edisonades, references to other predecessors such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and to “proto-steampunk” like Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air, an excerpt of which is used as the “Benediction” for the anthology. Most interestingly, the essay gives a partial explanation for the -punk suffix: “Steampunk, like all good punk, rebels against the system it portrays (Victorian London or something quite like it), critiquing its treatment of the underclass, its validation of the privileged at the cost of everyone else, its lack of mercy, its cutthroat capitalism. Like the punks, steampunk rarely offers a solution to the problems it decries — for steampunk, there is no solution — but for both punk and steampunk the criticism must be made before the change can come.” Nevins then goes on to explain that this may only apply to first generation steampunk, and that the politics have mostly disappeared from the current wave — which might explain why some have complained that there isn’t anything “punk” about steampunk and that it’s more about mannerisms and nostalgia. While that may apply to much of the more recent output in the subgenre, reading some of the older stories in this collection will definitely show that the -punk part of the subgenre’s name wasn’t just put there to make it sound like cyberpunk.

Be all of that as it may, after you’re done with all the scholarly debate, steampunk is like any other genre or subgenre or whatever you want to call it: some of it is seminal, some of it is excellent, some it is derivative but still good, and some of it is just people hitching their wagon to the latest fad. Whether you like steampunk or not, it’s hard to argue with the fact that The VanderMeers have done an outstanding job with this collection: most of these stories are simply excellent pieces of short-form speculative fiction.

The anthology starts off with a bang with “Lord Kelvin’s Machine” by James P. Blaylock, a wild and surreal story that displays steampunk working on the grandest of scales. It’s entertaining, wild and a bit silly — and a great way to kick off the collection.

“The Giving Mouth” by Ian R. MacLeod, slows things down considerably. I enjoyed and admired the author’s steampunk-ish novels The Light Ages and The House of Storms (“-ish” because they’re set in a version of Victorian England in which the economy is powered by magic rather than steam). This story is set in a different universe but shares the same melancholy atmosphere. However, it doesn’t work as well here and feels a bit out of place.

The collection then picks up steam (sorry) with the wonderful “A Sun in the Attic” by Mary Gentle, set in a matriarchal alternate universe that vaguely resembles the Victorian era. This little gem is one of those stories that make you wish for more material set in the same world.

Jay Lake’s “The God-Clown is Near” is the first story in the anthology working on the Golem myth. It’s a fun, dark, surreal story that, as I’ve come to expect from this author, is simply delightful.

Things get much darker with Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A DIME NOVEL,” which puts a brusque twist on the Traveler from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. This story is dark and violent, full of rape and torture, and while its concept is unique, it may be a bit much for some readers.

“The Selene Gardening Society” by Molly Brown also builds on a steampunk predecessor (this time From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne) but in a much more whimsical and funny way.

Next up is Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters,” which picks up the golem theme again and ties in a few other ideas, resulting in a memorable story — not that you’d expect anything less from Ted Chiang.

Michael Chabon’s “The Martian Agent” features some of the most gorgeous prose in the anthology, and thanks to its title, feels like the first chapter in a larger tale. Reading this story bumped the author much closer to the top of my endless “must-read-more-by” list.

Paul Di Filippo’s “Victoria” is one of the funniest and most inventive stories in the collection, featuring newt-based human life and a hilarious uber-villain. This irreverent story (which manages to call the entire royal succession into question) is so over the top that it’s sure to make you grin a few times.

The biggest surprise for me was “Reflected Light” by Rachel E. Pollock, an elegant and intricate short tale that implies much more than it states outright and almost begs to be reread. This story about illegal underground manufacturing hints at upcoming social changes in a fascinating society that hopefully will host more stories. It also displays the political side of steampunk in a very succinct way.

Another surprise is Stepan Chapman’s “Minutes of the Last Meeting”, set in Tzarist Russia. This brilliant story switches viewpoints frequently and somehow manages to introduce a new mind-bending layer of innovation every time, right up to the stunning ending.

Last but not least, the editors throw in a treat: a short story by Neal Stephenson set in the same universe as his post-cyberpunk/neo-Victorian novel The Diamond Age. Calling this steampunk is probably a bit of a stretch, but who cares — it’s a fun read that also reminds you, again, how unique Stephenson is as an author.

Closing out the collection are two more non-fiction pieces, including a look at steampunk in pop culture at large by Geek Curmudgeon Rick Claw, and a look at steampunk in the comic book medium by Bill Baker.

Unless you like your speculative fiction sans airships and steam engines, check out this excellent Steampunk anthology. In addition to offering a quick-shot education in the history and development of the genre, it also contains some truly excellent short fiction. Recommended. —Stefan Raets 

Mapping the Beast: The Best of Leviathan — (2009) Publisher: Mapping the Beast collects the best fiction from the landmark anthology series Leviathan and its sister publication Album Zutique. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, Leviathan provided confrontational, sometimes controversial surreal short stories, and helped chart the limits of fantasy fiction. Contributors to Mapping the Beast include Edgar Award winner Jeffrey Ford, Crawford Award winner K.J. Bishop, NEA Fellow Brian Evenson, Philip K. Dick Award winner Stepan Chapman, World Fantasy Award winner Zoran Zivkovic and many others. Editor and founder Jeff VanderMeer provides an indepth introduction and story notes to a collection sure to appeal to readers and academics alike.

The Third Bear — (2010) Publisher: The award-winning short fictions in this collection highlight the voice of an inventive contemporary fantasist who has been compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka. In addition to highlights such as “The Situation,” in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta ray to be used for educational purposes and “Errata,” which follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world, this volume contains two never-before-published stories. Chimerical and hypnotic, this compilation leads readers through the postmodern into what is emerging into a new literature of the imagination.

The Third Bear

The Third Bear is an excellent collection of Jeff VanderMeer’s category-defying short fiction, filled with stories that are unique, mostly excellent, and often incredibly hard to describe. Asking someone who has read this book (say, a reviewer) what one of the stories is about could well get you a blank stare as a response, or a few mumbled words, or simply “you’ll have to read it for yourself.” Pinning these stories down in a few words is very hard, not to mention a bit unfair to both the stories and the new reader. In that spirit, I’m going to stay as vague as possible in this review, but please, don’t let that stop you from picking up this truly excellent collection.

Jeff VanderMeer has been compared to Kafka, Borges and Nabokov, and the first two of those are definitely appropriate comparisons for this collection. (I couldn’t attest to the third one because I’m not much of a Nabokov expert, but I’m sure those critics wouldn’t just make it up.) A story like “The Situation” reads like something Kafka might have written if he’d had easy access to the more popular Sixties-era recreational hallucinogenics. And as for Borges — “Finding Sonoria” is a little gem of a story about a stamp collector, a down and out private detective, and their attempt to find a non-existent country on the basis of a mysterious stamp. If this story were a student, it would probably want to sit next to Borges’ "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in the back of the class, so they could pass notes back and forth and fuck with the teacher’s perception of reality. It also includes one of my favorite lines in the entire book: “Bolger snorted. “You got that right.” It was the kind of snort Crake would’ve expected from a sausage, if a sausage could snort.”

These precise, surprising word choices that make you blink, think and then nod somehow help the reader adjust to, and be drawn into, each story’s particular brand of strangeness. Be prepared for mostly gradual, but occasionally jolting, changes to your expectations. “The Quickening” features a talking rabbit that adamantly insists it is, in fact, not a rabbit — which is not the most interesting thing in this story. “Predecessor” reads like the final scene of what would be a chilling — and very bizarre — horror/action movie. Trying to puzzle out what the rest of the movie looks like is part of the enjoyment of this chilling story, and its lack of context enhances the surreality of, well, everything in it.

This is also one of those collections where each reader will have his or her own favorite story, and one person’s favorite may be someone else’s least favorite — and, maybe more importantly and the entire point of this terribly convoluted sentence, someone’s least favorite story may turn into a favorite upon rereading, which happened to me twice as I browsed and re-browsed through the collection for this review. And so, because I don’t want to have to eat my words later, I won’t list the few stories I currently consider the weaker ones (where “weaker” is anyway meant to be taken as relative to the generally mind-blowing quality of the others) and only list those that, after a few readings, are my favorites:

• “Lost” is a gorgeous prose poem that packs a mighty punch in just five short pages.
• “The Goat Variations” gave me the same kind of existential chill, and almost physical sense of discomfort, as some of Philip K. Dick’s better novels.
• The collection’s final story, “Appoggiatura,” pulls together its bizarre and disparate elements so stunningly at the end that you’re almost forced to reread it.

Those 3 stories are listed here in the same order in which they appear in the collection, and after reading every one of them, I quite literally thought: “Okay, this has to be THE story of the collection — it can’t get possibly much better than this.” Until the next one, and then the next one, and in between each of them, my mind was quite thoroughly blown more than a handful of times

If you’re looking for adjectives and categories, the two on the back cover are as good as any: “surrealist” and “absurdist.” Despite fantasy elements in many of the stories, and a few touches of horror, I’d definitely shelve this one with literary fiction rather than SF&F. Whatever box you try to put it in, The Third Bear is simply an excellent collection of short fiction that you’re guaranteed to think about long after you turn the final page. Highly recommended. —Stefan Raets 

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded — (2010) Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Publisher: Blending the romantic elegance of the Victorian era with modern scientific advances, the popular Steampunk genre spotlighted in this collection is innovative and stimulates the imagination. This artfully assembled anthology of original fiction, nonfiction, and art can serve as an introduction to the Steampunk culture or provide dedicated fans with more fuel. Stories of outlandishly imaginative technologies, clockwork contraptions, eccentric heroines, and mad scientists are complemented by canon-defining nonfiction and an array of original illustrations. This collection showcases the most sensational Steampunk talents of the last decade, including Daniel Abraham, John Coulthart, William Gibson, and Margo Lanagan, and demonstrates exactly why the future of the past is so excitingly new.

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded is the second steampunk anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, following 2008’s first installment. It contains about twice as many stories as its predecessor, but unlike the first collection the quality is more uneven here, resulting in a less impressive but still fascinating anthology that should please fans of the genre.

While the first anthology only contained one story I was less than happy with, there are at least four or five in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded that I could have done without. There are also a few stories here that are at best marginally connected to steampunk, although that probably depends more on how you define steampunk. After all, there are probably as many definitions of steampunk as there are readers. Maybe the best way to define the genre is simply not to, instead following the famous old “definition” of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”

Still, even if you go by that rule, “The Gernsback Continuum” by William Gibson, while a brilliant story that everyone should read, hardly feels like steampunk, unless you consider “any story that imposes science fiction tropes on an earlier period of history” a valid definition. Regardless, it’s hard to complain about a story that’s so famous and so excellent. Another example of a great story that seems to be at best peripheral to steampunk is Stephen Baxter’s “The Unblinking Eye,” which feels more like an elaborate alternate history that happens to have airships in it. Similarly, “The Unbecoming of Virgil Smythe” by Ramsey Shehadeh is a quirky and highly entertaining story that mixes Murder on the Orient Express with trans-dimensional aliens, but if it didn’t happen to be set on a steam train, I doubt anyone would even consider it as steampunk. Still, all three of these stories are excellent, whatever subgenre you stick them in.

Other highlights of the collection that feel more authentically steampunk are Jeffrey Ford’s “Dr. Lash Remembers,” about a steam-borne plague affecting the sufferers’ perception of reality, and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “The Steam Dancer (1896),” a beautifully written, melancholy tale about a dancer made whole by steam-driven technology.

My single favorite story in this collection is Margo Lanagan’s “Machine Maid,” a steampunk story that feels like a true period piece aside from the steam-powered automata. It features an awkward but unforgettable protagonist and some of the best writing in the collection.

Another excellent story is “As Recorded on Brass Cylinders: Adagio for Two Dancers” by James L. Grant and Lisa Mantchev, describing the meeting of two relics of the steam age in a modern mall. It almost feels like a steampunk version of Kage Baker’s COMPANY universe. While it lays on the emotion a bit too heavily at times, it’s a gorgeous, touching story that employs many of the standard themes and devices of the genre but still comes out looking and feeling original.

A true gem, appearing towards the end of the collection, is Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Anachronist’s Cookbook.” Its protagonist — who puts the “punk” back in steampunk in a big way — resembles a Victorian version of Richard K. Morgan’s Quellcrist Falconer. Also riffing on the political side of steampunk, but entirely on the opposite end of the scale in terms of seriousness, is G.D. Falksen’s “The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday,” a fun story about a steampunk version of the blogosphere and an intrepid detective trying to catch a suspected socialist dissident.

Cherie Priest contributes “Tanglefoot,” a story set in the same world as her CLOCKWORK CENTURY books, but despite its charm, the story unfortunately goes on a bit too long for my taste. More successfully, Daniel Abraham delivers “The Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance”, a solid and entertaining story about Balfour and Meriwether, two agents of the British Empire attempting to stop a curse from the past.

Closing out the fiction portion of the anthology is one of the strangest stories I’ve read in years, “A Secret History of Steampunk” by a collection of writers and artists working under the pseudonym “The Mecha-Ostrich.” It reads somewhat as if Jeff VanderMeer were being remixed by a handful of authors, or possibly vice versa. It cleverly connects to several other stories in the collection, and while it’s not entirely successful, it’s definitely innovative and unique.

The final section of the collection offers two non-fiction pieces about the non-literary side of steampunk (about fashion and the DIY/Maker culture, respectively) and a brief “Roundtable” interview about the future of steampunk. This section makes the anthology relevant not just as collection of stories but as a snapshot of an entire subculture, as does the artwork, which is one of the only aspects where Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded has the upper hand over its otherwise stronger predecessor. There are a few neat Terry Gilliam-circa-1970-style illustrations mixed into the book, and the Mecha-Ostrich story features some especially gorgeous artwork.

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded is another strong collection of stories from a subgenre that seems to be gaining in popularity every single day. If not for a handful of entries that bring the overall quality of the collection down, this would be another unqualified winner. If you’re new to the genre, I’d still recommend picking up the earlier Steampunk anthology first, but this second collection contains enough excellent stories to make it worth your time if you want to dig a little deeper. —Stefan Raets 

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists — (2011)
Publisher: All-new stories and art from the doctor's wondrous collection. After the death of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead at his house in Wimpering-on-the-Brook, England, a remarkable discovery was unearthed: the remains of an astonishing cabinet of curiosities. Many of these artifacts, curios, and wonders related to anecdotes and stories in the doctor's personal journals. Others, when shown to the doctor's friends, elicited further tales from a life like no other. Thus, in keeping with the bold spirit exemplified by Dr. Lambs­head and his exploits, we now proudly present highlights from the doctor's cabinet, reconstructed not only through visual representations but also through exciting stories of intrigue and adventure. A carefully selected group of popular artists and acclaimed, bestselling authors has been assembled to bring this cabinet of curiosities to life.