Synopsis
Three stories are set in an offbeat and very alternative nineteenth century in which historical and fictional characters blend with hilarious results and include the titles, "Victoria," "Hottentots," and "Walt and Emily." IP.
Reviews
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, melange. 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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The word steampunk is a mildly tongue-in-cheek label for a recent offshoot of cyberpunk that transplants that sf subgenre's grittiness and some of its technology to alternative history settings. With this superb trilogy, Di Filippo can lay claim to being its supreme practitioner. In Victoria, a nineteenth-century British scientist breeds a sex-craving newt-human clone that bears such a strong resemblance to Queen Victoria that when the real queen disappears, the newt becomes her stand-in. Hottentots recounts an absurd episode from the career of Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz in which he must locate the magically potent sexual organs of a deceased Hottentot. Walt and Emily follows the poets Whitman and Dickinson's romantic tryst (!) into an afterworld realm called Summerland. In all three tales, 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. Carl Hays
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
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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