The Steampunk Trilogy

by Paul Di Filippo

Overview

An outrageous trio of novellas that twist the Victorian era out of shape, by a master of alternate history: “Spooky, haunting, hilarious” (William Gibson).

Welcome to the world of steampunk, a nineteenth century outrageously reconfigured through weird science. With his magnificent trilogy, acclaimed author Paul Di Filippo demonstrates how this unique subgenre of science fiction is done to perfection—reinventing a mannered age of corsets and industrial revolution with odd technologies born of a truly twisted imagination.

In “Victoria,” the inexplicable disappearance of the British monarch-to-be prompts a scientist to place a human-lizard hybrid clone on the throne during the search for the missing royal. But the doppelgänger queen comes with a most troubling flaw: an insatiable sexual appetite. The somewhat Lovecraftian “Hottentots” chronicles the very unusual adventure of Swiss naturalist and confirmed bigot Louis Agassiz as his determined search for a rather grisly fetish plunges him into a world of black magic and monsters. Finally, in “Walt and Emily,” the hitherto secret and quite steamy love affair between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman is revealed in all its sensuous glory—as are their subsequent interdimensional travels aboard a singular ship that transcends the boundaries of time and reality.

Ingenious, hilarious, ribald, and utterly remarkable, Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy is a one-of-a-kind literary journey to destinations at once strangely familiar and profoundly strange.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497626584
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Publication date:	07/08/2014
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Paul Di Filippo is a prolific science fiction, fantasy, and horror short story writer with multiple collections to his credit, among them The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories, Fractal Paisleys, The Steampunk Trilogy, and many more. He has written a number of novels as well, including Joe’s Liver and Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken. 

Di Filippo is also a highly regarded critic and reviewer, appearing regularly in Asimov’s Science Fiction and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A recent publication, coedited with Damien Broderick, is Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985–2010.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Victoria
  • 1. Politics at Midnight
  • 2. A Train Straight to China
  • 3. The Man with the Silver Nose
  • 4. A Woman Called Otto
  • 5. The Fatal Dance
  • 6. Treachery at Carking Fardels
  • 7. What Everyone Else Knew
• Hottentots
  • 1. The Face of an Ape
  • 2. Sinus Pudoris
  • 3. Whale Bones
  • 4. What the Postman Brought
  • 5. A Sticky Situation
  • 6. One or One Hundred?
  • 7. Sewing on a Button
  • 8. A Fish’s Story
  • 9. Moby Dagon
• Walt and Emily
  • 1. “Morning Means Just Risk—to the Lover”
  • 2. “Death Is the Supple Suitor”
  • 3. “The Soul Selects Her Own Society”
  • 4. “Inebriate of Air—Am I—”
  • 5. “Microscopes Are Prudent in an Emergency”
  • 6. “By What Mystic Mooring She Is Held Today”
  • 7. “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers”
  • 8. “The Spirit Looks Down on the Dust”
  • 9. “Land Ho! Eternity!”
  • 10. “Dropped Into the Ether Acre—Wearing the Sod Gown”
  • 11. “The Grass So Little Has to Do, I Wish I Were a Hay”
  • 12. “How Odd the Girl’s Life Looks Behind This Soft Eclipse”
  • 13. “There Was a Little Figure Plump for Every Little Knoll”
  • 14. “An Ear Can Break a Human Heart as Quickly as a Spear”
• About the Author

What People are Saying About This

William Gibson

"Taul Di Filippo's 'Steampunk Trilogy' is the literary equivalent of M. Ernst's collages of 19th-century real-versions; silky, haunting, hillarious."

Editorial Reviews

"Paul Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy is the literary equivalent of Max Ernst’s collages of 19th-century steel-engravings; spooky, haunting, hilarious.” —William Gibson

“Di Filippo stirs up a funky stew of puns, literature, natural history and sex, and serves it up in an elaborate Victorian dish—300-odd pages of juicy reading pleasure. . . . From Dickens to the cutting edge of the avant-garde, Di Filippo’s got it covered, in a spunky synthesis that manages to be at once raunchy and well-read.” —SF Site

“With this superb trilogy, Di Filippo can lay claim to being [steampunk’s] supreme practitioner. . . . Di Filippo brilliantly combines authentic Victorian language with choice, outlandish premises to produce a variety of wry, inventive storytelling that is unlike anything else in science fiction.” —Booklist 

From the Publisher

The term ``steampunk'' has come to intimate a subgenre of work set in a fantastic 19th century characterized by the inhumanity wrought by bogus science and a fanatical embrace of scientific method. Di Filippo's first book is a collection of three novellas that jumbles science and pseudoscience into an interesting, if not always completely successful, mlange. The narratives are united not only by their reliance on the occult-mysticism dominates ``Walt and Emily'' while Lovecraft's monsters appear in the previously published ``Hottentots''-but also by their focus on female sexuality. ``Victoria'' replaces the Queen of England with a licentious salamander, while ``Walt and Emily'' features a robust poetic encounter between Ms. Dickinson and Mr. Whitman. Even the weakest of the pieces here-``Hottentots,'' in which nothing is learned while much credulity is stretched-features amusing faux-Victorian prose worthy of Anne Rice (``Like a Maine sawmill, like an asthmatic platypus... like a Michigan beaver... uneasily winter-dreaming of Ojibway hunters led by a wild Chief Snapping Turtle, Mister Dogberry roughly rasped and snorted through the night, making it nigh impossible for Agassiz to get any rest'') and enough ``scientific'' pasquinades to satisfy the Luddite in anyone. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Raunchy, uproarious silliness in the time-honored sf tradition of alternative history. In the first novella, young Queen Victoria has disappeared, and the prime minister has called on inventor Cosmo Cowperthwait for temporary use of his recent creation: a nymphomaniacal, insect-eating queen-clone made from "newt and human growth factors, fresh cadavers." The next story finds Swiss naturalist and blustering racist Louis Agassiz to the Underground Railroad in search of the pickled, bottled genitals of a woman known as the Hottentot Venus. A potentially dangerous fetiche, it is also being sought by a Polish messianic cadre and a medieval sect, the Teutonic Knights. The final piece, "Walt and Emily," opens on a spring morn in 1860 as Emily Dickinson espies Walt Whitman "laving his muscled," naked body at a rain barrel outside her window. They join her brother, Austin, on a Spiritualist journey beyond the flesh in search of the souls of his regrettably aborted children. They set sail on the Bay of Seven Souls, aboard the Thanatopsis, Di Fillippo's poorly written dialog adds to the general goofiness. Recommended.-Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc., Ohio

Library Journal