"I want to destroy steampunk," Amal El-Mohtar declares in her essay for Steampunk III. It's a sentiment common to many of the contributions, both fiction and nonfiction, to this anthology, but it's not intended in a hostile way. Instead, she's dreaming of "steampunk divorced from the necessity of steam," liberated from the superficial trappings of its cogs and gears--and, for that matter, the imperialist assumptions of Victorian England. Jaymee Goh also discusses how non-white fans engage with the genre's aesthetic, emphasizing its possibilities as an alternative social discourse. As Austin Sirkin says, it's a movement well suited to "the disillusioned and the dissatisfied."
The 27 stories in Steampunk III similarly push the genre in interesting new directions. Carrie Vaughn introduces us to an Indiana Jones-like adventuress in a world where an alien spacecraft crashed in England in 1869, giving the British technological superiority over the rest of the world, while Nick Mamatas speculates as to how Friedrich Engels might have developed Marxism in a world where workers are turned into cyborgs and become literal tools of production. Leow Hui Min Annabeth transports Ada Lovelace to imperial China, and Lavie Tidhar sends Bram Stoker on a mission to Transylvania--but the mysterious figure he'll find there isn't who you might expect it to be. And Bruce Sterling's contribution is about a 21st-century architect rebuilding his corner of collapsed Europe in order to provide for his son. Sterling calls his story "salvagepunk"--but, as Ann VanderMeer notes in her introduction, breaking a genre's most cherished conventions is about as punk as you can get. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com