The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk Read online

  Sean Wallace is the founder, publisher, and managing editor of Prime Books. In his spare time he has edited or co-edited a number of projects, including three magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Dark, and Fantasy Magazine, and a number of anthologies, including Best New Fantasy, Japanese Dreams, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, People of the Book, Robots: Recent A.I., and War & Space:Recent Combat. He has been nominated a number of times by both the Hugo Awards and the World Fantasy Awards, won three Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards, and has served as a World Fantasy Award judge. He lives in Germantown, MD, with his wife, Jennifer, and their twin daughters, Cordelia and Natalie.

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  The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

  Sean Wallace

  ROBINSON

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Robinson

  Copyright © Sean Wallace, 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-47211-875-2 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-47211-946-9 (ebook)

  Robinson

  is an imprint of

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London

  EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.constablerobinson.com

  Contents

  Introduction by Tobias S. Buckell

  “Rolling Steel: A Pre-Apocalyptic Love Story” by Jay Lake and Shannon Page

  “Don Quixote” by Carrie Vaughn

  “The Little Dog Ohori” by Anatoly Belilovsky

  “Vast Wings Across Felonious Skies” by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Instead of a Loving Heart” by Jeremiah Tolbert

  “Steel Dragons of a Luminous Sky” by Brian Trent

  “Tunnel Vision” by Rachel Nussbaum

  “Thief of Hearts” by Trent Hergenrader

  “In Lieu of a Thank You” by Gwynne Garfinkle

  “This Evening’s Performance” by Genevieve Valentine

  “Into the Sky” by Joseph Ng

  “The Double Blind” by A. C. Wise

  “Black Sunday” by Kim Lakin-Smith

  “We Never Sleep” by Nick Mamatas

  “Cosmobotica” by Costi Gurgu and Tony Pi

  “Act of Extermination” by Cirilo S. Lemos (translated by Christopher Kastensmidt)

  “Blood and Gold” by Erin M. Hartshorn

  “Floodgate” by Dan Rabarts

  “Dragonfire is Brighter than the Ten Thousand Stars” by Mark Robert Philps

  “Mountains of Green” by Catherine Schaff-Stump

  “The Wings The Lungs, The Engine The Heart” by Laurie Tom

  Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  Introduction

  Science-fiction editor Gardner Dozois popularized the word “cyberpunk” in the 1980s to define a new subgenre making waves. Ever since then, readers and critics have been fond of adding “punk” as a modifier to call out interesting subgenres. Bio-punk for the cloning and nanotechnology-focused 1990s, and in the late 2000s, and on, Steampunk became a catchall for a wider movement of fashion, cosplay, and literature taking aesthetics cues from Victorian and Edwardian periods.

  So it’s not a surprise to see the word “Dieselpunk” appear on the scene.

  But what is Dieselpunk?

  It certainly conjures up images of belching engines, massive crankshafts revving up, and the thunderous roar of fuel-powered machines the likes of which I could imagine my grandfather working on in his youth. This isn’t the hiss of steam and manners and corsets. It’s grease and noise and “We Can Do It” posters.

  One simple definition is that, while Steampunk normally uses a time period from the Victorian or Edwardian periods, Dieselpunk simply advances the clock forward to the interwar period. After World War I and before World War II (although, as with many categories, there are plenty of gray areas).

  This is the time of the Art Deco movement, an aesthetic that tried to wrap itself around the increasingly powerful impact of machinery, industry, and factories. It contained contradictions in that attempt; it married strong, clean rectilinear lines with aerodynamic shapes. But from that frisson came art that is still admired today: the Chrysler Building with its iconic arches and clean lines, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and the smooth flowing lines of the 1937 Delahaye Roadster, or any of the 1930s Cord automobiles. Even in cheap dollar stores, today, you can buy prints of jazz or governmental information posters from the era that are still striking in their marriage of simple form, economy, and composition.

  But what kind of science fiction does this almost brutalist aesthetic create? Is it fiction just trying to emulate a technology from a very specific time period and that’s it? Or is Dieselpunk trying to grapple with the same core problem that Art Deco was?

  Dieselpunk, with its science fictional roots married to an Art Deco inspiration, is a perfect fit. Science fiction has long spent time trying to understand the impact technology has on the human psyche, and on our future. Is it any surprise that a subgenre of science fiction would look to inspiration from an aesthetic that tried to incorporate the mechanically modern, the engineer, to modern art?

  While retro-futurist, Dieselpunk’s Art Deco roots expressed in fiction allow the writers you’ll find in this anthology to explore the length and breadth of the best genre fiction has to offer. The authors explore the impact of the factory on the people who are fed into it, or wonder what happens when technology can replace our very jobs – all too familiar concerns to those of us in the modern world . . . no matter which modern world it is we’re living in. But the optimism of the interwar period isn’t lost, as plenty of the stories here harken back to one of the defining moments of the literature of the time: pulp adventure, when magazines were filled with stories of derring-do and fantastic achievements. You’ll find a lot of high-octane, fast-revving fun here.

  So I hope you’ll join me in flipping past these diesel-tinged pages to dig deeper into the all-too-human stories at their heart, and I also hope that you’ll find thes
e stories as fascinating and full of flair as I have.

  Tobias S. Buckell

  Rolling Steel:

  A Pre-Apocalyptic Love Story

  Jay Lake and Shannon Page

  Rough Beast slouched toward the Bethlehem steel mill. Tons of fresh hot metal in there, every cobber and new chum from the Allegheny to the Delaware knew that. Even Topper, the old cat-eyed bastard with steel cables for fingers and a brain stewed in barium-laced æther, knew which way the good stuff lay, for all that he couldn’t tell up from down on days ending with a /y/.

  He’s a bad man, our Topper. Used to run child-soldiers over the St Lawrence to the Froggies during the Quebec-and-Michigan War. La troisième mutinerie, the Quebecoise called it in one of their endless prayers to St Jude, for if ever a cause was lost surely it is theirs. Wolfe had put paid to their ambitions at the Plains of Abraham two centuries earlier, but no Frenchman ever born minded much dying for the romance of a shattered heart.

  And there was no heart so shattered as that of a patriot whose country has been brought to ground.

  And so we have Topper, driven bird-mad in the trenches of the Somme when it would have been kinder for him to have just died. Came home he did to the quack attentions of the New Friends of Sweet Reason, got caught up in the Technocracy movement as exhibit A, and finally fell apart as the country itself did in Roosevelt’s dying days.

  Now there’s Wehrmacht units on the loose from Nova Scotia to New Jersey, the South has risen again (and again), the Federals are barely hanging on in the Mississippi basin, issuing wireless dispatches from Washington-on-the-Rails while the Great Madness takes anyone stupid enough to be caught outside at night anywhere between the Wabash and Pamlico Sound.

  Only those who started mad can stand the stuff, and move faster by night than any prayerful man might by day. Especially Topper in his Rough Beast, which once upon a time was a machine meant to kill other machines before he made so much more of it, oh so much more.

  “Metal, my pretty,” he whispered, patting with a clattering crackle of steel the crawler’s upholstered dashboard between the engraving of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the platinum-dipped weasel skull with the rhinestone eyes. Only one of those two had he killed, Topper, and some days he knew the difference. He squinted into the depths of night through the prism that made up Rough Beast’s forward vision block, watching for the mill which loomed close, its fires never banked.

  Fate and fortune walked on the greased knuckles of Topper’s war machine, as never they had since Poland’s borders collapsed in the first of the lightning wars.

  I patrolled the unquiet streets south of the steel mill, cussing as I walked back and forth in my own precious allotted square block of turf, practically wearing channels in the concrete with my steel-heeled stilettos. “Bastards,” I muttered, thinking of the Best Sister and her Little Chums. Well, “bitches”, technically, but I didn’t fancy using such a term of endearment when referring to their ilk.

  “Bastards,” I growled, as I turned the corner for the seventeen-thousand-and-thirty-second time, only this time I was thinking of my crib mates, the ones who had sniffed out some sort of rupture in my soul and handed me this godforsaken turf as my undue reward.

  “Bastard!” I screamed, jamming to a halt as the ferocious machine loomed before me. Hadn’t heard the fucker coming at all. My NKVD surplus large-bore riot gun was already raised and trained on the madman coming up from a top hatch, red-lacquered nail rattling against the trigger as my finger trembled with desire. Then I saw it was Topper.

  Which didn’t change my assessment of the situation, or my epithet. But I did lower the gun, and hike up my leather miniskirt an inch or two.

  The gibbering fool grinned down at me, leaning over the console in a halo of actinic light to stare down the front of my corset. I set my shoulders back to improve his view and leered right back up at him.

  “Going my way, big boy?” I called out.

  “Bethlehem, Bethlehem, Bethlehem!” he chanted, his eyes rolling in his head.

  Oops, there went the tiny whisper of sanity I’d detected a moment ago. I danced back a step, just in case the worms in his brain told him to gas up that monstrous vehicle and put paid to the sexiest thing he was likely to see all day – any day.

  My heels tapped on the sidewalk as I leaned against the wall of the foundry behind me. “And what are you going to do when you get there, hmm?”

  “Steal,” Topper said, letting the word do its double duty. “Stable.” Another word doing double duty. He stared down at the woman. Someone from another lifetime, Topper knows with animal cunning and vestiges of functional memory.

  He has had many lifetimes, our Topper. Lived them all together inside one much-mended head, until his name has become legion because he is many. Swine out of Garaden could not be more multiplicitous than this man. But even through the palimpsest of his personality, this woman emerges like a slave ship out of an African fog bank.

  “Coming with?” Topper asked. He gunned his twinned diesels for emphasis. Rough Beast shivered like a dog about to piss. The woman looked scared but determined, a combination which even Topper cannot ignore.

  He locked down the upper hatch, set the brakes, pegged the clutches, disarmed the antipersonnel charges on the outer hull, and crawled back between the ammo cans and the fuel bags to undog the ventral hatch. As he twisted the clamps, Topper hoped the woman hadn’t run away or been jumped or something. He can’t protect her from up here. Rough Beast is made for salvage runs and fighting heavy metal, not personnel escort.

  Topper is confused about a lot of things, but he’s not confused about what his crawler does.

  The woman was still outside, armed and dangerous. And that was just her looks. Dark hair swept back from an aristocratic face. Pretty teeth, which Topper remembers from white rooms full of screams. She had a big gun, too, a riot weapon meant for stopping dogs or people caught in the Great Madness.

  “You’re going to the plant,” she said.

  It was not a question.

  “In,” Topper ordered by way of a non-answer.

  Indecision flicked across her face like a trout in a mountain stream, then she climbed the metal steps he’d dropped down for her. Rough Beast had ground clearance that would give an arborist’s ladder a bad case of envy.

  Distant gunfire echoed as Topper dogged the hatch, but the incoming wasn’t to their address. He wormed back up to the driver’s station, leaving the woman to follow or not as she chose.

  The crawler got moving with a shuddering lurch which foretold trouble for the portside throw bearings. He could rebuild. He just needed some high-grade ingots to trade out for the finished parts. That was how he took care of everything on this monster.

  A single man wasn’t meant to maintain and operate something like Rough Beast. Not even a single man as profoundly unalone as Topper.

  The woman squirmed into the radio operator’s seat behind him. That surprised Topper, he’d already forgotten about her. No radio, never had been one, but there was part of a sandwich rack out of an automat right in front of her face, as if she could plot their course in egg salad and bologna and trimmed crusts.

  “So.” Her gun thumped briefly against the floor. He noted she was smart enough to clip it to the seat pedestal. “When did they let you out?”

  Topper had to think that one over for a while. Finally he said, “Ain’t sure they have yet.”

  Call it boredom if you like. I won’t dispute it if you do, not at all. Boredom, ennui, a sense of adventure left unaddressed for far too long – any of that could explain why I left my post and crawled up into that oil-dripping beastie with the lunatic pilot.

  When I’m summoned before Best Friend and her bitches to explain myself, though – and you know I will be – we won’t be talking about any ennui bullshit. No, I’ll be spinning some tale about surveillance and undercover and getting on the inside of the enemy camp and all that sort of yak.

  To support this notion, and also
because I was damned curious, I slithered up the ladder at the behest of the grisly creature. (Hey, don’t let it be said I never plan ahead.) I’d known Topper before, of course; knew him before he was the raving lunatic we’d all come to know and love in the Madness. Not that he was ever entirely sane.

  Who is, anymore?

  I knew him because I’d been part of the crew that had taken him down, during the last round of the world-shifting adventures. We’d taken him hard, real hard, even before handing him over to the New Friends for, shall we say, readjustment therapy. I’d never expected to see him again. Which was shame, in its way.

  So here he was, grinding up my street on his way to god-knows-what kind of tomfoolery down at the plant. Didn’t even bother to deny it. Invited me aboard.

  How could I resist?

  I settled in behind him, looking around everywhere, trying to take it all in before he came to whatever shred of senses might have been left him by the New Friends and booted me out of there. Because, right, surveillance. Remember? I kept my right hand close to the NKVD riot gun in case Mr Topper decided to get cute. But he had already started the monster rolling again, ignoring me completely.

  He answered my question well enough, I suppose. All things being equal, you never really do get out, do you?

  I fell silent after that, wishing the asylum refugee had thought to put windows back at my seat. What was I supposed to do with A-4 and D-0? I’d had a lovely lunch already, thank you very much. The rats are fat and sassy, this part of town.

  Oh, Jesus, just kidding. What do I look like? I don’t eat rats. You think this figure comes from eating street sludge like rats?

  Feral cats, now: that’s where it’s at. Yum yum, meow yum. Excellent diced and stir-fried, with tree ears and a sprinkling of hoisin sauce right at the end.

  After a particularly difficult highway crossing, Topper’s mind wanders back to the woman. She was muttering under her breath now. Something about rats and cats and someone named Hawser Ann. He could smell her breath even in the diesel-and-metal reek of the crawler.