Resurrection Engines in the FT • 21 January 2013 • The SnowBlog

Resurrection Engines in the FT

          There's a cracking review of Resurrection Engines in the FT this week! RESURRECTION ENGINES


edited by Scott Harrison


Snowbooks £7.99 534 pages 


Resurrection Engines sees an assortment of authors re-envision literary classics through the prism of steampunk (the subgenre of SF which celebrates Victorian invention and technology in a knowing, retro-futuristic style). Robots abound. Dr Jekyll’s monstrous alter ego is a sentient military exoskeleton, Peter Pan creates his own scrap-metal Lost Boys, and Silas Marner, in a moving tale by Alison Littlewood, adopts an artificial Eppie. Another common steampunk trope, the airship, features in Alan K. Baker’s high-concept Verne/Wells mash-up ‘A Journey To The Centre Of The Moon’ and in Jonathan Green’s swashbuckling sky-borne take on Moby-Dick, ‘There Leviathan’. The contributors who stray furthest from the brief bring back the richest rewards. Juliet E. McKenna’s feminist rewrite of She is cunning and funny, and Philip Palmer adds aliens to The Woman In White to great effect. Adam Roberts’s delirious ‘The Crime Of The Ancient Mariner’ replaces Coleridge’s sea voyage with time travel, and works a treat. A foreword from the editor, contextualising the stories, would have been welcome. Nonetheless, this anthology is both varied and consistently entertaining.


 – James Lovegrove