Exhibition Hall

May 2024
It's only been five years, so pipe down!

My life has changed a couple of times and now I find

myself staring down the barrel of fifty and wanting to get back
to one of my true loves: Steampunk.
It's been a good five years (well, four years and
change…) which sounds weird considering there was an en-
tire pandemic in the middle, but it saw me get a new, marvel-
ous job, create a bunch of really fun zines, start painting, pub-
lish a book, see my kids get into wrestling, and finally FINALLY
perfect a version of Lamejun, an Armenian flatbread with
meat dish. Yes, I've had health issues, notably diabetes and
hypertension, and most recently gout, but it hasn't been that
bad...though I miss buffets. Sigh.
Well, I wanted to do an issue again for a while, and this
seemed like a good time, and I found a really good story to
start with, and going through my old files, I found that great
image from a Steampunk calendar I commissioned back in
2006 by J. Kathryn Feinberg.
Elseworld, I've been collecting all the 2000ad comics
of the first ten years or so, with the incredibly generous help
of James Bacon, Steve Dean, Michael Carroll, and various
others in the UK. It's an amazing comic, and there are so
many great stories. I love Judge Dredd, but things like Stonti-
um Dog and RoboHunter and various others are really incredi-
ble too.
The art this issue, other than that cover, is from Shut-
terstock. I've got a subscription that'll cost me 40 bucks if I try
to cancel it so I'm damn well gonna use it!
If you've got an itch to write something, or you just
wanna send a comment, feel free to let us know through
johnnyeponymous@gmail.com
Enough is enough - On with the show!!!

Noel Nichols
 My New Favorite Steampunk
Short Story

Kelly Link is right up

there with Rachel Swirsky,
Ted Chiang, and Cat
Valente as one of my favor-
ite writers in short form.
She's also a fine editor,
and in 2011, Link and
Gavin J. Grant teamed up
to release the anthology
Steampunk! which I be-
lieve I bought the day it was released.
I, sadly, have never read it.
Reading is hard for me these days, but as I was think-
ing about starting up this here rag again, I figured I should at
least try, and then I noticed it was on Audible, so I bought it
and fired it up, the listening being far easier for me these days
than reading. I'm so glad I did, because the second story was
the finest piece of short form steampunk I've ever encoun-
tered -
"The Last Ride of the Glory Girls" by Libba Bray.
First off, let me talk about presentation. I listened to
this, which for me is an entirely different from reading be-
cause there's always the performance, the presentation.
There are some stories that don't work spoken (I've heard
House of Leaves read, and other than the portion of that Dido
turned into a song, it don't work) and there are some that
work incredibly well.
"The Last Ride of the Glory Girls" is exactly the kind of
story that works best in spoken form.
 It's not just be-
cause the narrator is
speaking directly to the
reader and telling the
story, but because the
way the narrator
speaks is so thorough
that it could easily be
lost when trusted to
the reader's mind.
OK, it's hard to get the voice lost in a piece where
terms like 'cottoned to' and 'a-feart' are used, but still, when
voiced by a good voice actor, it comes so much more to life.
And that is not to say that this is a story of all voice and
no substance. It's a beautiful and super-smart story. The ba-
sis is this - a Pinkerton Agent, Adelaide Jones, who is a whiz of
a watchmaker. She's only 16, but she's sharp as a whip. The
Pinkertons want her to infiltrate a group of thieves, the Glory
Girls, and she ends up inserted in the group as a mechanic to
fix their Enigma device, which allows for pausing time. She
fixes it, but ends up falling in with them, partly due to their
shared difficult lives.
The story itself is great, but it's the world-building,
characterizations, and non-plot-driving elements that settle
everything into brilliance.
The first point is that the story takes place on a differ-
ent planet, one which has reached a state of similar to the
Wild West, but also where religion is very-much ingrained in
the existence of the world. The religion of the One God is per-
vasive, and you can tell that thought Adelaide is no longer an
adherent, it has soaked into her bones and informs her every
move and thought. There's a tremendously sad, and breath-
takingly written, scene of a young man going through their
baptism rite that is an absolute torturous highlight of the
piece.
 The characters are solid, and that's a trickier bit than it
sounds. Too often, especially in YA, the tendency is to make
every group of young women into Foxfire, or The Craft. There's
a reason why, it just works, but here we're not necessarily
presented with a series of archetypes, but with more rounded
characters. Yes, there seem to be roles played within the
gang, but they are not so prescriptive that they feel as if the
characters are simply there to fill the role. That's tricky, and I
really liked that view. The voice acting also doesn't go over the
top in presenting these characters are separate entities,
which can also draw me out. Yes, you can tell who's who, but
you don't need so much separation to make it work.
The story's treatment of the religion is dark, and the
connection to 'poppy', a drug used for religious rites and one
that seems to be an epidemic across the planet. This is a real-
ly nice touch, and it makes the world far more relatable to the
Wild West we know of here (many throwing their lives away on
Opium or laudnum) and today's world of opiate addiction. The
use in religious rites is fascinating, and actually seems to
harken back not only to ancient traditions around the world
where hallucinogens have been used to bring on altered
states of consciousness, but also modern cults and alterna-
tive religions which fuse drugs and religious practice. If you
want good examples of that, look at groups like the Manson
family or various groups that have popped up in the Santa
Cruz mountains.
The story moves perfectly, and the voice, my god the
voice, of Adelaide is just so right. More than anything they de-
scribe in the setting, her speech pattern, accept, and world
choice makes the setting breathe. It's an incredible piece of
voice-acting, and I really want to seek out more from the
reader (it might be Sarah Coomes, but the book doesn't credit
the specific reader) because they do such an incredible job.
"The Last Ride of the Glory Girls" is 100% the best
short story steampunk piece I've ever read, and it's among a
bunch of really good pieces in the anthology, especially a
wonderful Cory Doctorow work that I really need to listen to
again. There's a Cassandra Clare piece that isn't bad either,
and the way it presents young love and talking dolls is fun, es-
pecially when mixed with time-travel. I might need to get me
more Libba Bray...though first I'll have to wait for my Audible
credits to renew.
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