Neo-Victorian magic in short form
Aug. 17th, 2022 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI have, rather frustratingly, been doing a lot of partial books reading lately so it has been far too many weeks since I have been able to finish a book and write a review of it. It was due to this trend that I decided to pick up one of my many unread short story anthologies so that I at least wouldn’t be too frustrated trying to keep track of too many goings-on if for some reason this book was also interrupted before I finished it. Fortunately, I was able to polish off Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy in about four days, without having to read anything else in between except a few entries of Dracula Daily.
I believe I picked up this book in a Readercon dealers’ room a few years ago, and even if I don’t remember picking it up precisely it’s a good guess because I know I have lots of books that were picked up in fugue states in various Readercon dealers’ rooms over the years. The author list is about half names I recognize (many from their attendance at Readercon) and half I don’t. The anthology has 18 stories in it, which I will not be reviewing individually even though I feel like I should.
The stories vary wildly in mood and subject matter. Perhaps I’m dour and burnt out but I found that I seem to have somewhat gone off the fluffy, indulgent meta-fantasy type of stories a bit–both the Catherynne M. Valente story (an earlier version of The Glass Town Game) and the Theodora Goss story ended up not holding my interest quite as much as either of those authors’ other writings directly geared toward fans of nineteenth-century fiction have in the past. Probably my favorite story in the whole anthology was “Phosphorus” by Veronica Schanoes, an author I’d never heard of before, which is about a match worker dying of phossy jaw (the cancer you get when you ingest a lot of white phosphorus because you work at the match factory and have to eat lunch at your workstation) and the matchgirls’ strike of 1888. That one nearly made me cry.
Overall I think this was a really strong anthology–even the stories that personally gripped me less were pretty good, and they showcase a range of different approaches to writing fantasy about nineteenth century Britain.
I believe I picked up this book in a Readercon dealers’ room a few years ago, and even if I don’t remember picking it up precisely it’s a good guess because I know I have lots of books that were picked up in fugue states in various Readercon dealers’ rooms over the years. The author list is about half names I recognize (many from their attendance at Readercon) and half I don’t. The anthology has 18 stories in it, which I will not be reviewing individually even though I feel like I should.
The stories vary wildly in mood and subject matter. Perhaps I’m dour and burnt out but I found that I seem to have somewhat gone off the fluffy, indulgent meta-fantasy type of stories a bit–both the Catherynne M. Valente story (an earlier version of The Glass Town Game) and the Theodora Goss story ended up not holding my interest quite as much as either of those authors’ other writings directly geared toward fans of nineteenth-century fiction have in the past. Probably my favorite story in the whole anthology was “Phosphorus” by Veronica Schanoes, an author I’d never heard of before, which is about a match worker dying of phossy jaw (the cancer you get when you ingest a lot of white phosphorus because you work at the match factory and have to eat lunch at your workstation) and the matchgirls’ strike of 1888. That one nearly made me cry.
Overall I think this was a really strong anthology–even the stories that personally gripped me less were pretty good, and they showcase a range of different approaches to writing fantasy about nineteenth century Britain.