This week, Tachyon Publications released Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s great new anthology of all things steampunk, which has a wealth of Victorian gadgets and devices, as well as fine stories by Jay Lake, Paul Filippo, and Ian R. MacLeod.

The editors’ introductions are relatively concise, obviously meant to be descriptive rather than scholarly. For the VanderMeers, classic steampunk describes a form that’s “primarily English, urban, static [and] melancholy,” a genre profoundly “aware of its own loss of innocence.” The first wave of steampunk authors envisioned Victorian dystopias, worlds in which technologies and inventions constantly threaten, like Frankenstein’s creature, to escape the control of the societies that produced them.

The VanderMeers’ selections in Steampunk are nicely varied, but a few stories might have found a better home in a horror anthology instead. (“The Steam Man,” a cannibalism-soaked tale by Joe R. Lansdale, was much too dark for me to get through.) I definitely preferred Jay Lake’s golem tale “The God-Clown is Near,” Paul Filippo’s sexy and twisty “Victoria,” and Molly Brown’s delicious descriptions of society ladies planning a garden on the moon.

My favorite work in the collection? “The Giving Mouth,” Ian R. MacLeod’s beautifully measured and moving story of a prince’s rites of passage, his forever-lost love, and a royal pharmakos whose sacrifice renews a blighted land.