I have to admit, I don’t know much about steampunk, it became popular roughly at the same time when I got a multi-year hiatus from reading fiction at all. However, I’ve read a few old speculative fiction books (1900-1950s) so it was not totally novel for me. The anthology collects texts from the early 1900s, often prior to radio invention or Wright brothers flight. Therefore, it shows future quite different from the one in even 1920s books. As Yogi Berra said “The future is not what it used to be”
The texts maybe a bit too unsophisticated and there are quite a few minor errors (text was OCRed from old magazines and not fully cleared), but they are still a very unusual read.
( )

The collection is a sample of SF from popular magazines 1900-1910, a generation before Gernsbach and the age of American SF pulp fiction. The stories and writing are not good. ( )

I enjoyed this book, but it is not one that reads smoothly. STEAMPUNK is a collection of short stories written in the Victorian Era about the ideas and mechanization of the future. While this can be a bit dry, you must take into account the time in which it was written.
Something that I really enjoy about the book is that before each new short story, the compiler/editor/author(?)writes a small blurb about the original author as well as the time is was written, which leads to a better understanding as to how and why the story came about.
It is a hard book to get into as there is no flow between any of the stories. That being said, it is good for starting and stopping whenever it strikes your fancy.
It is a very interesting literary reference to have on hand. ( )

3 stars for an interesting look into pre-pulp science fiction, 2 (or less) for quality of writing. For those who've never read (or even heard of) Moskowitz's Science Fiction by Gaslight, which covers the same time period, this could be a real eye-opener. Ashley's intent was to pick steampunk-ish stories written in steampunk's Victorian era. This conceit works well for a few stories at the beginning and end, but IMO pretty much fades away in the middle stories. Even more interesting to me were some of the final stories, that presaged not steampunk but hard-core space opera.

Running down the stories: "Mr Broadbent's Information" tale of an intelligent automaton fleeing from a cruel inventor is more satirical fantasy than SF. "The Automaton" -- a chess-playing automaton -- is a cheat. It turns out not to be an SF story at all. "The Abduction of Alexandra Seine" is full-on steampunk with an aerocar chase dominating most of the story. It's the first of many stories with a damsel in distress and/or painful romantic exchanges. Bad romance appears again in "The Gibraltar Tunnel," but the story of a perilous train trip beneath the Straits of Gibraltar has its moments. Romance once again in "From Pole to Pole," but this is a moderately readable fantastic journey in the mode of Verne than a potboiler with steamdriven SF. "In the Deep of Time" is one of those awful tours of the far future where what little bad plot there is is forgotten for pages on end. Supposedly the ideas were provided by Thomas Edison. Not steampunk to me. "The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings" is very weak tale in the Fu Manchu mode, with a technological resolution. Not steampunk. "The Plague of Lights" is a fantastical invasion tale where mysterious dots of light fall to earth and take over the minds of those they attach to. Interesting but hurt by the passivity of all the characters. It's one of several tales that begin "while the formal reports have been published, as one of the few survivors who actually experienced the events reported..." Not steampunk, nor is "What the Rats Brought," an odd catastrophe tale of giant bats and unbearable ennui. Another tale told by a survivor is "The Great Catastrophe" where electricity turns on mankind. "Within an Ace of the End of the World" is straight SF speculation, as a miracle invention that can turn nitrogen into food leads to an excess of atmospheric oxygen and what entails. "An Interplanetary Rupture" finally returns to some level of steampunkishness as Mercury's warlord invades Earth. The tale is pure space opera as 1000's of ships battle each other in Earth's skies, as witness sentences like "Within the hour 883 might engines of destruction rose like gigantic birds, and for an instant steeped the city in a dim twilight as they hung suspended over it; then forming in parallel columns they were swallowed up in space" and "The huge engines of destruction rushed at each other with terrific speed, to recoil from the shock battered and stunned and helpless, to reel and turn and sink in hideous gyrations from the dizzy height, crusining themselves into unrecognizable shapes on the ground beneath." "The Last Days of Earth" is a dumb bad romance about the last couple at the end of Earth's days. Steampunk returns with "The Plunge," a bad romance, that begins with a long boring conversation onboard a gigantic aero-liner about how perfect life has become. Then a meteor strikes and the tale becomes pure disaster movie, with so many scenes of people falling to their death, you wonder if Cameron used this as his template for Titanic. There's also one element of space opera hyperbole: at one point it's mentioned how the aero-liner flies above a 300 mile an hour hurricane, a hurricane created by the aero-liner! ( )

Most of the stories were very good.
And since they were all written between 1880 and 1914 it was interesting to compare what they were writing about with what has actually come to pass since then. ( )