This review is a few years old, and was originally posted on my Tumblr blog. It’s being reposted here with no modification, but my feelings towards the book remain the same.
Steampunk is one of those aesthetics and settings I’ve always loved, but never quite been in love with. It wasn’t steampunk itself – it was the sheer repetitiveness of it. Sure, the dresses were glorious and the inventions looked cool, but nobody ever made anything that worked, and every year I went to con, the steampunk community got smaller and whiter and less queer. In fact, it’s a wonder it still has ‘punk’ in the name at all, with all the glorification of the British Empire at its height. Steampunk fiction has always avoided the worst pitfalls of the cosplay and design communities (Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy is a fond memory of mine) but the need for something different has always been an underlying drive in my reading quest.
Clockwork Canada, then, is not just a beautiful, dazzling surprise. It feels, actually, a lot like coming home. Edited by Dominik Parisien and published by Exile Editions, Clockwork Canada’s mission is simple – Canadian steampunk, representing Canada in all its flawed, diverse, sometimes gory glory. There are stories here featuring First Nations characters and inventions; Chinese immigrants; explicitly queer women existing within historical confines with no apology offered; disabled characters with prosthetics that aren’t perfect replacements, trans characters whose transness is an aside to the drive of the story, and more. It’s a dizzying quilt of representation, and well-written representation at that.
Another thing I really enjoy about this collection is that it ventures out of the standard science fiction/steampunk setting and into the realm of gaslamp fantasy. The first story, ‘La Clochemar’ (Charlotte Ashley) brings Native myth to life through the giant spirits that wander their own paths through the great Canadian expanse, and ‘The Seven O’ Clock Man’ has a terrible device implied to run more on magic than science. It’s another way in which Clockwork Canada subverts the common steampunk tropes in its stories, while still being clearly, absolutely steampunk.
Of course, the collection isn’t without its flaws. While the racial representation is amazing, and there is more LGBT+ and disabled representation than I’ve come to expect when picking up any book, I would have liked to have seen a little more of it. There’s certainly a rich queer history in Canada, and it’s saddening that only one of the stories included is explicitly about LGBT+ characters. (As wonderfully as it does it.) There’s no shortage of romance and romantic asides, but it seems to be exclusively heterosexual. The disabled representation is a similar issue – ‘Crew 255′ by Claire Humphrey engages directly with disability, but it isn’t casually included, despite the opportunities of steampunk. (Although I feel a little like a kid in a candy shop – any disabled representation that isn’t condescending or created for the ‘abled gaze’ is an absolute gift.)
In addition, some stories fall a little flat. Many of the last few stories – ‘Equus’, ‘Gold Mountain’ and ‘Bones like Bronze, Limbs like Iron’ have excellent ideas behind them that don’t quite get fleshed out or given the room to breathe. (’Bones like Bronze, Limbs like Iron’ especially feels like a story that should be a novel, but as a short story it doesn’t engage emotionally.)
Favourite Story: Ahhhhh, choosing is so hard! I think my personal favourite is ‘Let Slip the Sluicegates of War, Hydro-Girl’ by Terri Favro. It has everything – an interesting framing device, a retelling of a historical event (and it only becomes completely clear which near the end), a genuinely sweet if tragic love story, and raw, unflinching depictions of abuse and institutional racism. It’s excellently balanced, and the narrator’s voice brings it all together into a narrative that doesn’t whitewash its serious topics while still being immensely entertaining.
Thank you once more to J. Deo (@JDeoWrites) for their fantastic sensitivity reading!
TW: violence, threats towards a child, sexual harassment, emotional abuse, attack on/near a place of worship, trauma, reality distortion
I opened the gurdwara doors with both hands, walk turning into a march across the asphalt as I approached her. My feet ached with each spike of the asphalt, but I could ignore that – what I couldn’t ignore was the bile in my mouth, the blood welling from my tongue where my teeth were digging into it, the salt from – I don’t know where.
“How dare you? How dare you?” My vision swam, and for a moment, I thought it was the Mercury affecting me even more. Then I dragged the back of my hand over my face, and it came away wet. I was crying. That was just – that was pathetic. I knew why – it was because for all her horror, I’d hoped that Kiera – that anybody – would be better than this. I didn’t feel that way often. “This is his funeral.”
“I figured you’d be here,” she said, sweeping hair out of her face. It was slightly longer than before, messier, less elegant than it had been. Her coat was tattered at the edges, too, although I knew I couldn’t trust what I saw. “I didn’t take you for the sentimental type, though.”
“There’s sentimentality, and then there’s not being a shit excuse for a human being. I’m not giving you what you want.” It stung. I knew it was meant to, but sentimental was just another word for weak.
“Even if I were to, say…” She unsheathed her sword, balancing it by its tip on the pavement, “give you some incentive?”
“Nice try. I’m not delivering some poor innocent kid to you so you can… god, I don’t think I want to know what you want with her.”
“Uh huh.” Kiera cocked her head. “What if I just asked you to spend time with me?” She lifted her eyebrows questioningly.
“You’re threatening to attack a place of worship so I’ll go on a date with you? That’s new levels of disgusting.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I have no intentions of attacking the temple. There’s enough gods I have to deal with on their own. I’m not adding another one to the mix.”
I couldn’t get my head around that statement. I knew Kiera wasn’t exactly sane but also, I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt with the idea of actual, real gods being a thing. “Good. I was hoping you still had some humanity.”
Kiera’s eyes grew very cold. “You don’t know anything about me.” She lifted her sword from the ground and raised it to my neck.
I gulped, trying not to think about how sharp it was. Or the fact that Kiera was stone cold enough to threaten somebody with a sword in the first place. “Alright. You got me. I don’t.”
“There’s nothing human about me. Nothing at all,” she spat.
I raised my hands. “Then what are you?”
“Didn’t your mother read you any fairytales?” she asked mockingly, and if the sword had been anywhere else than hovering against my jugular, I would have punched her in the face. That had to be deliberate. I didn’t know how, but it had to be. “I am Aes Sidhe. One of the thousand hidden people.”
“A-and for those who don’t speak anything that isn’t English?” I asked. My voice had gotten all funny and high pitched again.
“The monster under your bed,” she crooned. “The darkness in the light. The children of the new moon.” She was getting closer and closer to me, and something sparked on my skin like fire. Then she was so close that I could feel the static between our bodies. Her long coat was swishing against my legs. I could feel her breath on my cheekbone, full of malice. “I’m a faerie. And you are nothing.”
“Then why are you so close to me?”
Her hand rose to my chin. “Because I know you,” she said, her voice full of astonishment. “You’re nothing, because you’re human. But…” She let it hang in the air, inviting me to read into the quiet speech, to feel the longing in her touch.
She was going to kiss me.
“Where’d you get a sword?” came the voice from behind me, and I suppressed the urge to cry. What had Chandra been saying earlier? I’d ignored it. It hadn’t been relevant. “It’s cool! I want one.”
Kiera lowered the sword from my neck, hatred simmering from her eyes. I glanced over my shoulder, wincing as the bronze blade bit into my skin. A little boy, maybe six years old, stood there staring at us. In one of his hands was a samosa he must have nabbed from the temple kitchen. He had Gurjas’s eyes, and my brain filled in the name. Ruben.
“A child.” Kiera’s mouth twisted, and then she smiled again, her teeth turning black. “Another of you. Everywhere I turn around.”
She raised the sword, and several things happened at once. I saw Ruben’s eyes widen. Behind him, Chandra was hammering on the lobby door, held back by some other congregation members. The door swung open, and Kiera raised the sword over Ruben, who stuttered, fell backwards and stared up at her with growing horror.
I swung out at Kiera, my fist landing against her face. She stumbled back, and Ruben began to crawl backwards, looking back over his shoulder at his mother. Then the claws came raking out of her sleeve, sharp and cruel, and I felt then lash across my face. I barely felt it.
I grabbed at her arm, but she tore it away, then went for Ruben again. It was like slow-motion, watching her ready the point, ready to kill him where he stood for some crime I couldn’t understand…
A splintering crash shattered the air, and something wooden flew through the air from the lobby, shedding shards of broken glass as it came. Kiera saw it coming, and turned away, but not fast enough – it hit her lengthways with a sick ‘thud’, and continued the length of the parking lot.
I stared at it, then turned my head to look back at the shattered lobby. Chandra was running out of the temple, her feet bleeding from the shattered glass, her eyes wild and hair coming out of her veil. She crouched over Ruben, gathering him into her arms. “Shh, shh, it’s okay…”
The wooden bench – torn out of the floor, I realized, looking at the pieces of carpet still embedded to its legs – began to move, and Kiera emerged from underneath it. I’d resisted whatever she did to the world before, but now it was getting worse. The parking lot asphalt was shattering, blooming with flowers that disappeared once I tried to clutch them. The sky was dropping.
I plunged my hand into my pocket. I hadn’t brought most of my stuff with me, but funeral or not, I was always paranoid, I was always ready for something to happen. My wallet, my keys – I tossed them aside for later. And then, there it was. My knife.
Kiera ignored me, setting a beeline for Chandra and Ruben. She passed by me, and I lunged forward, burying the steel knife into her thigh.
The howl of pain that came from her mouth proved to me that she wasn’t human at all. She sounded more like a wolf, or a panther. I was too dazed to make much sense of it, why my knife had worked so well. She collapsed to her knees, turning on me with a seething expression.
Then the earth began to shake. I looked away from her, searching around for the source of it – I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that a random earthquake had just happened. When I looked back, she was gone. But the ground was still trembling.
I looked over at Chandra, who had Ruben held tight to her chest and was murmuring something under her breath. Then I remembered what Will had said about Salts. Why I was so important. How we got our powers. It all clicked into place.
I stumbled over towards her, and wrapped my arms around both her and Ruben.
“Is she gone?” Chandra whispered.
“She’s gone,” I murmured in reply. And I could feel it – the tension easing out of her arms, the heartbeat beginning to slow, the breaths evening out. The quaking stopped, finally, and Chandra began to cry. Not the desperate but still restrained crying she’d done when she first came to my office – instead, these were heartbroken sobs, tearing out of her throat like knives.
“Not my children, please, not my babies, not this time, please…”
“You’re safe. Ruben’s safe.”
“I miss him,” Chandra sobbed. “I miss him so much.”
“I know.”
She took more and more deep breaths, then reluctantly released Ruben as Hushaima came over to us. The ground below us really was shattered – it wasn’t one of Kiera’s tricks. Chandra had caused a real earthquake – just a small one, but a real one nonetheless.
Finally, she turned to me, eyes red and sore. “What’s happening to me?” she whispered. She’d been scared for her kids before, and for her husband, when she’d first come to me. Now she was scared for herself.
“I can’t tell you. Or at least not very well. But I know somebody who can.”
My hands were tingling. I didn’t know if it was from adrenaline or from calming Chandra down. But the anger, the fury at Kiera for her destructive presence – that was still there.
Fuck being protected and looked after. To hell with it.
Kiera was going to need protection from me.
And that’s all for now, folks! Ghosts in Quicksilver WILL return in June with Book 2; in the meantime, learn more about the universe on the @AlkimiaFables twitter.
Something I may have mentioned before is that I’m very, very bad at e-reading. I can do it for short works, and I edit on a computer, but Kindles, Kobos, ebooks – they’re not something that I use often. However, from a practical standpoint, physical books are more expensive, they’re often unwieldy, and they take up space. So more than once, I’ve tried to train myself to read ebooks – and failed, horribly. I’m attempting once more, and realized that I have quite a few books forgotten on my Kindle account. Robins in the Night by Dajo Jago is one of these, and I am so glad I remembered it!
Robins in the Night begins with a poem (A Snail’s Point of View) and then a foreword, which sets up the premise of the book with a tantalizing few pages about how the legends of Robin Hood are fundamentally wrong. The three women in the foreword are unnamed, and nothing much happens, but the setup for Robin Hood pays off almost immediately. In Chapter One, we are introduced to Marian Stoke, who we’re expected to instantly recognize as a variant of Maid Marian… while she is midway through robbing a grave.
I’m invested.
I particularly enjoy that when Marian gets caught (you knew she would) the priestess is the most upset about how the dead are being disrespected – and tells her to go do something useful. It’s such an obvious hook that it makes me smile.
This will be a fun read – and according to the blurbs/marketing, it’s a WLW romance featuring a trans girl! So I am Thoroughly Ready.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so for folks who don’t know, this is where I discuss the first chapter of a novel and make some predictions about what it’s going to be like!
I bought a copy of Orope: The White Snake from the author at Can*Con, and so far, I am really, really impressed. Orope is a Bronze Age-styled fantasy, and from the first page, the difference in tone and feeling from a medieval or Victorian fantasy is amazing. The first chapter follows one of the Rhagepe, whisperers to the gods, as they perform a divination ceremony. As a Bronze Age scholar, it’s fascinating to see how much historical and archaeological thought has been put into this; the ritual to my understanding is fictional, but all the factors of it – divination through the selection of bones, predictions from dreams, matriarchal religion – are influenced by studies of the Bronze Age Aegean. More than anything, too, the sense of fear and helplessness in the face of the gods and nature is very true to the time period.
I also appreciate so far that while the influences are clear, the Gogepe and Rhagepe don’t seem to be direct analogues for anything. It would be easy to simply make analogues for Crete, Egypt, Greece, etc. but there’s clearly been a lot more work put into the worldbuilding than that.
From a character perspective, I found myself attached to Rashma rather quickly. It’s a shame that she doesn’t seem to be prominent past the first chapter, but if this is how richly every character in Orope will be characterized, I’m sold.
The downsides: while there’s a learning curve to any secondary-world epic fantasy, the one for Orope is a little higher than most. Between keeping up with the rituals of the Rhagepe, keeping track of the seven or so characters in the first chapter and figuring out what exactly is going on, it can be a little confusing. The emotional importance of each factor of the ritual is made clear, though, which helps carry the feeling of the chapter even if some of the details are hard to follow.
I am super excited to read the rest of this, and while I miss Rashma already (RIP, Death lady) I can’t wait to see where this goes.
You really can’t go wrong with a poet who has a good sense of humour. Ian Martin is one of my favourite poets, and his 2016 chapbook Climbing Out of Other People’s Hands just proves that I’m right. Martin’s work always treads the careful line between pathos and dry humour, bringing the surreal just that little too close to home.
Really, I don’t know anybody else who could make me smile so much at a poem called “Archive of Google Searches From August 2013”.
is there anything inside my body worth keeping safe
utilitarian body modifications
heart shaped box site:amazon.ca
literal heart-shaped box site:amazon.ca -nirvana
It’s the kind of poem that relates directly to the current mismatch we’re living in; technology that can give us anything we want in a rapidly destabilizing world where ‘what we want’ is never so simple. Also, it’s funny.
Climbing out of Other People’s Hands is almost all poetry, except for one flash fiction in the middle, a short and strange story about a princess dreaming of a 2010 Honda Accord. I think my favourite piece, however, has to be ‘Beauty in The Hand of the Beholder’. It’s the centerpiece of the chapbook, and with good reason – it unfolds over a full page spread, printed sideways, narrowing to a wasp-thin waist at the crease before expanding outwards again. It’s a simple but incredibly effective use of the chapbook format and image poetry, and the verse itself is piercingly honest.
your hands were cupped together; a globe
with holes. i crawled inside, because you
made it seem soo inviting. i think i was
maybe drunk. i use that excuse a lot.
Ian Martin’s poetry is always a joy, and this is one of my favourites, one that I keep returning to or remembering. This chapbook and others are available at his website!
Elliott Dunstan 