SteamFUNK! Excitement, mediocrity, and some really ugly s**t

As I mentioned in my intro (you did read the intro, didn’t you?), I’ve got a crush on Afrofuturism, a mash-up of the 70s black power and space age aesthetics with any other futuristic, science fiction approach you can think of. So for my first review I picked a short story anthology that purposefully sets itself in that matrix, taking the current craze of Steampunk, with its dirigibles, steam-powered men, and corsets, and making it funky. That anthology is Steamfunk!, edited by Milton Davis and Balogun Ojatede. The anthology has 15 short stories in it of widely varying lengths, styles, and levels of quality. I can’t do them all justice, so I’m going to roughly group the stories into 3 categories. Category 1: Shaft on a steamtrain with Coffy as the engineer, conductor, and porter.

Some of the shorts in this anthology were exactly what I’d thought they’d be – a different take on all things Steampunk. Heroes and heroines save all-Black towns with steam-powered robots; they defend imagined black countries with dirigibles and mag guns; they fight mechanized Tsavo lions with a Masai spear in one hand and a flintlock pistol in the other; and they punch a lot of old, white men who are wearing re-designed Confederate States of America uniforms. If a black male spy working undercover on a plantation who drop-kicks the overseer (or ob’erseer, depending on how much dialect the author was into), then leads all the other slaves to the promised land currently ruled by President Frederick D…