The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

As demonstrated in this diverse collection of 21 alternate histories, dieselpunk updates the fashions of steampunk, replacing Victorian crinolines with the flapper’s short skirt, but maintaining all of the subversion of pulp fiction conventions (including airships). Thrilling battle stories are converted into more realistic and gritty accounts of the toll that war takes on its heroes, as in Laurie Tom’s depiction of the cyborg resurrection of the Red Baron in “The Wings the Lungs, the Engine the Heart,” or the political necessities that undercut genre staples such as having the cavalry come over the hill just in time in Carrie Vaughan’s Spanish Civil War tragedy, “Don Quixote.” Noir crimes are solved without fistfights, and by characters normally considered victims, in A.C. Wise’s “The Double Blind.” Genevieve Valentine’s “This Evening’s Performance” is a wonderful tribute to Walter M. Miller’s 1955 story “The Darfsteller.” The selections and the contributors span the globe, from China, where lovers float away during Sun Yat-sen’s revolution in Joseph Ng’s “Into the Sky,” to a Brazil that sends the last emperor’s clone into hiding to escape a military coup backed by an American robot soldier in Cirilo S. Lemos’s “Act of Extermination.” Readers unfamiliar with dieselpunk will find this an excellent introduction to a new but cohesive subgenre. (July)