Fantastic offer

Jake von Slatt makes this sensational offer public:

Publishing house Tachyon Publications and editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have agreed to make their new fiction anthology, Steampunk, available for pre-order at a discounted price! This volume, priced at $14.95, is being offered at $12.00, including free shipping within the United States. Shipping outside the United States will be by Global Priority Mail: $9.50 to Canada and $11.00 to our friends in Europe.

In addition, books ordered through this offer will arrive signed by the editors. Signed and personalized…they will even draw little zeppelins!

And yet, even little zeppelins may not be enough to entice you. This is understandable. Therefore, I am quite pleased to announce that the first 10 people who order this anthology via this offer shall also receive a signed copy of author Jay Lake's Mainspring, heralded as "an instant steampunk classic" by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. In addition, the first three people will also get a copy of Lake's follow-up novel Escapement when it is released in June!

More details...

On top of the fiction featuring air ships and metal men by Michael Chabon, Neal Stephenson, James P. Blaylock, Joe R. Lansdale, Mary Gentle, Ted Chiang, Michael Moorcock, Jay Lake, Molly Brown, Stepan Chapman, Ian R. MacLeod, Rachel Pollack, and Paul Di Filippo and original essays by Bill Baker (on steampunk in comics) and Jess Nevins (19th century origins of steampunk!), I contributed "The Steam-Driven Time Machine," a survey of steampunk in popular culture.

Steampunk: The Anthology

On his blog, Jeff Vandermeer released a rough of the cover to his (co-edited with his wife Ann) forthcoming anthology Steampunk. Contributors include Michael Moorcock, Joe R. Lansdale, Neal Stephenson, Michael Chabon, Mary Gentle, and others. Actually one of the others happens to me. I've contributed an essay about pop culture and steampunk.

Table of contents:

• “Preface,” Jeff and Ann VanderMeer

• “Introduction: The Nineteenth Century Roots of Steampunk,” Jess Nevins

• “Steampunk in Pop Culture,” Rick Klaw

• “Steampunk in the Comics,” Bill Baker

• “Benediction: Warlord of the Air” excerpt, Michael Moorcock

• “Lord Kelvin’s Machine,” James Blaylock

• “The Giving Mouth,” Ian MacLeod

• “A Sun in the Attic,” Mary Gentle

• “The God-Clown Is Near,” Jay Lake

• “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down,” Joe Lansdale

• “The Selene Gardening Society,” Molly Brown

• “Seventy-Two Letters,” Ted Chiang

• “The Martian Agent: An Interplanetary Romance,” Michael Chabon

• “Victoria,” Paul Di Filippo

• “Reflected Light,” Rachel E. Pollack

• “Minutes of the Last Meeting,” Stepan Chapman

• “Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of the Tribes of the Pacific Coast,” Neal Stephenson

I'm jazzed about this book. Especially after seeing the cover and the people that are in the anthology. The piece I most look forward to is Jess Nevin's "The Nineteenth Century Roots of Steampunk." For the uninitiated, Jess produced the two amazing League of Extraordinary Gentleman companions (Heroes and Monsters and A Blazing World) plus the incredible The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. Needless to say, Jess knows his stuff.

Look for the book in May, 2008.