Fourteen authors contributed to this collection of short stories that all play within the boundaries of Steampunk even as they stretch them. While reimagining our relationship to machines, the authors move well beyond the typical setting of Victorian England to a wide-ranging list of genres and times. Past, present, and future are all re-cast with Steampunk fittings among this impressive group of stories. The array shines with Cory Doctorow’s cast of unforgettable empowered orphans, Libba Bray’s wild women of the American Wild West, and Kelly Link’s faerie of contemporary Appalachia, among others. Steampunk aficionados and neophytes will both find much to enjoy in this compelling and consistently strong collection of short stories. (Age 12 and older)

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.