Rhonda Parrish has the attention span of a magpie. Not only can she not focus on a single project at a time, but she also fails at sticking to one genre or even one type of writing (she does manage to stay true to one hockey team, though – Let's go Oilers!). Perhaps best known for her work as an anthology editor – the Ottawa Review of Books called her "Canada's best-known and most prolific speculative fiction anthologist" – Rhonda also works as a short story writer, novelist, game writer and a poet. She has been honoured to be included in a handful of 'Best of' anthologies, earn a coveted starred review from Publisher's Weekly and be shortlisted for several awards including the Rhysling Award, the Aurora Award, the Dwarf Stars Award and Alberta Book Publishing Awards.

Most of her work falls under the speculative fiction umbrella but she has also penned paranormal non-fiction and non-speculative work. Her recent long form releases include the Hauntings and Hoarfrost anthology, a fantasy novel entitled Silversong and a Norse mythology inspired cozy urban fantasy novel, One in the Hand. In an effort to impose some order in her chaos, these days most of her short fiction and poetry is published directly through her Patreon.

Clockwork, Curses, and Coal by Rhonda Parrish

Fairies threaten the world of artifice and technology, forcing the royal family to solve a riddle to stop their world from irrevocable change; a dishonest merchant uses automatons as vessels for his secrets and lies; a woman discovers the secret of three princesses whose shoes get scuffed while they sleep. These and so many other steampunk and gaslamp fairy tales await within the pages of Clockwork, Curses and Coal.

Retellings of Hansel and Gretel, The Princess and the Pea, Pinocchio, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and more are all showcased alongside some original fairy tale-like stories. Featuring stories by Melissa Bobe, Adam Brekenridge, Beth Cato, MLD Curelas, Joseph Halden, Reese Hogan, Diana Hurlburt, Christina Johnson, Alethea Kontis, Lex T. Lindsay, Wendy Nikel, Brian Trent, Laura VanArendonk Baugh and Sarah Van Goethem.

CURATOR'S NOTE

An anthology of Steampunk & Gaslamp fairy retellings? How could I resist? As an author who veers into Steampunk from time to time, I was so pleased when Rhonda agreed to include one of her acclaimed anthologies in this StoryBundle collection. – Anthea Sharp

 

REVIEWS

  • "The technological flights of fancy are always intriguing, and fairy tale lovers will enjoy deducing the inspiration for each tale. Readers will not be disappointed."

    – Publisher's Weekly

  • "Clockwork, Curses, and Coal accomplished something pretty special. For the first time in all of my years of reading, I adored every single story in an anthology."

    – Long and Short Reviews

  • "Rhonda Parrish is, in my estimation, THE curator par excellence of mystical, magical, other-worldly short fiction. And here is yet more proof – her collection of fourteen stories is incredible, irresistible, clever, imaginative, and (sometimes) outright terrifying. There's not a false note or a flat affect, only a new-to-me genre and a lingering itch to read more, more, MORE!"

    – Mel S. Amazon Reviewer
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Introduction

Inevitably when someone attempts to describe or define dieselpunk or decopunk they begin with, "It's like steampunk, except…" and I really wanted to avoid doing that, mostly to be different. But the thing is, steampunk is a genre that speculative fiction readers generally have a pretty good grasp of, so it actually does make the perfect jumping off point when explaining dieselpunk and decopunk. So I will ask you to forgive me for this, but…

Dieselpunk is like steampunk, except that where steampunk draws its aesthetics from Victorian and Edwardian times and features steam-powered technology, dieselpunk pulls from a later time period and is more about the roar of massive engines than bustles and parasols. Steampunk is brass and glass, dieselpunk is iron and grease. And I like to think of decopunk as dieselpunk's flapper sister. Similar time period, but all dolled up and ready for a night out on the town.

I've noticed a bit of wiggle room when it comes to the time period that defines dieselpunk, but mostly it seems to be the interwar period–the years between the first and second World Wars. For this anthology, though, I stretched that and asked for stories set between the start of WWI and the end of WWII… and then I blatantly broke my own rule and included a story from the Korean War.

I actually broke a couple rules, not just of dieselpunk and decopunk, but of fairy tales. Some of these fairy tales, you will find, are not actually fairy tales. They are fairy tale-ish. Or folkloric.

And there might be a couple 'dustpunk' stories in here too, so there's another rule bent.

But I'm not losing sleep over bending or breaking those rules, and the anthology is stronger for it.

I feel like, in some ways, this anthology has been inevitable. At the very least it is my childhood meshing together with my middle-age in a glorious storytastic way. I spent a great deal of my childhood and several years of my adult life living in Nanton, Alberta. Nanton is a small town that is best known for being home to a Lancaster bomber–one of only seventeen remaining in the world.

The bomber is now securely housed inside a museum there in Nanton, but when I was a kid it was just sort of parked outside right by a playground, and I spent a lot of time in that playground. My brother, cousins and I used to climb around the plane's wheels as much as we did the monkeybars. And then they one day there was a chain link fence around the bomber. And then a building…

But one day, one magical day, someone with some authority let us go through the Bomber. He'd pulled up a set of stairs to a door near the tail for some reason or another, and he gave us a quick and dirty tour through it. I don't know if this was a community event or if we just happened to be at the right place at the right time – my memory of that is fuzzy – but the inside of that bomber left a very definitely impression on me.

I think that might be where this anthology started. All those years ago when I was crawling through the belly of the bomber trying not to bump my head or catch myself on anything, and imagining how it must have been for the men who'd flown in it.

After that I had a low-key but persistent interest in WWI and WWII – in fact, interesting side note, the first ever time I made money writing was when I won second place in an essay contest about Remembrance Day that was sponsored by our local Legion (at that time I was living in Vulcan, Alberta so that was the Royal Canadian Legion Branch #21) – but that interest really came to head a few years ago when I transcribed my grandmother's autobiography.

Reading about my grandmother's experiences. About her father who fought during the Great War with the 50th Battalion, and eventually died from injuries sustained during a gas attack, and how profoundly and personally that affected her. Reading about her brothers who went on to fight in WWII. Seeing her bitterness spilled across the page that after her father sacrificed so much in the 'war to end all wars' and yet there was another war before the memory of the first had even lost its rough edges… well it personalized it for me in a way that nothing else had before, and re-ignited my interest in it.

And then I discovered dieselpunk and I was like, "Are you kidding me?" It was awesome. And then dieselpunk introduced me to decopunk and I knew I wanted to create something within those genres. Combining them with another lifelong fascination of mine–fairy tales and their retellings–just seemed like a perfect fit. And the timing couldn't be better.

I proposed this anthology to my publisher, Sarena, right about the same time as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A time when it seemed like the world could possibly benefit from a reminder that Nazis are bad and fascism must be stopped wherever they may be found.

And now we're releasing it in 2019 – the perfect time for the Nazi-fighting of dieselpunk, the subversive spirit of decopunk, and the hope and happily ever afters of fairy tales.

Rhonda Parrish

Edmonton

2/2/2019