Short Story Club: “A Serpent in the Gears” by Margaret Ronald

I do intend to keep reading and commenting on the stories for Torque Control’s Short Story Club, but I missed last week’s because I couldn’t really think of anything to say about it. The story was nicely written, and all, but it’s just kind of… there.

This week’s post was delayed by my annual day of blog silence, so it will probably miss inclusion in the discussion post, but that’s okay, as this is another one where my reaction will be dominated by my own idiosyncratic reactions. This is the type of story where the real point is just to introduce the richly detailed world in which it takes place, and it contains a bunch of really skillful incluing and infodumping. As a display of technical writing skill, it’s very impressive.

The problem with it is, it’s magic-powered steampunk. Which I realize lots of people find utterly fascinating, but the whole subgenre/ aesthetic movement/ fetish leaves me cold. I’m not particularly interested in British culture of the relevant time period (I can’t even be bothered to keep straight whether it’s Victorian or Edwardian), I’m not especially enthralled by airships, and I don’t see the appeal of goggles. So, you know, Not My Thing.

I can read steampunk-y things, but they need to have something else going for them– James Blaylock’s Homunculus is staring at me from a nearby shelf, for example, and the general tone of zaniness he brings to those books gets them past my aversion to the setting, while something like Cheris Priest’s Boneshaker has enough action to carry the plot along. It’s not enough to just say “Look! Airships and corsets and rigid class structures!”, though– I’m not interested enough in the steampunk aesthetic for that to really work.

And the problem is, there’s not much to this beyond “Look at my cool setting!” It’s very nicely done, mind, and set out well in the story, but beyond that, the plot doesn’t do much for me. The idea of steampunk cyborgs is clever, but it’s just introduced, and not much is done with it. There’s an implication toward the end that the mechanization of people is somehow dehumanizing, and thus part of the apparently stifling society that has grown up in the hidden mountain kingdom, but that comes 90% of the way through, and isn’t really explored in any detail. It’s not clear why or how this would be the case, either, given the narrator’s nature.

To some degree, this feels like the prologue to a novel that would actually do something with the setting. As it is, though, it just introduces a lot of nifty scenery– Merged humans and serpents, disembodied academics, magical airships– and doesn’t do much with it.

Again, though, this reaction is largely due to the moderate antipathy I have for steampunk in general. Somebody who’s more receptive to that approach might find this more compelling reading than I did.