The Best of Spanish Steampunk by James Womack

Internationalising steampunk and making it more multicultural was also a part of my approach, but more about this later…ģ) Many authors included in this book are still young in their writing careers. The material contained in these two anthologies formed the core material for THE BEST OF SPANISH STEAMPUNK. This book, RETROFUTURSIMOS: ANTOLOGÍA STEAMPUNK, was the flipside to the original anthology, and both books ended up meeting somewhere in the middle of the literary continuum. What I did next was to edit a second volume in which I invited writers who were known for their speculative fiction to write slipstream steampunk stories, approaching their normal material from perhaps a slightly ‘higher’ literary perspective (I hate these terms, but they work if you don’t think of them as evaluative). This book functioned quite well, and showed that there was a lot of interest in the topic. Palma, commissioned stories from contemporary well-known authors (and a couple of debut writers) who were not necessarily people who dedicated themselves to ‘genre’ writing, but who were being hired to write in this genre. It was a project that came into existence at a time when steampunk was really quite little-known in Spain, and so the editor of the book (I was just the publisher), Félix J. The concept of STEAMPUNK: ANTOLOGÍA RETROFUTURISTA was slightly different. Is there anything you wanted to focus on or change when working on this new anthology project?

Also, one of my initial intentions, right from the start of the project, has been to interpret the term ‘steampunk’ as widely as possible.Ģ) You had previously edited a steampunk anthology STEAMPUNK: ANTOLOGÍA RETROFUTURISTA. Steampunk is currently a very popular genre within speculative fiction, especially in Spain, and so I thought that one of the ways in which I could carry out my more general project, which is to make people in the English-speaking world more aware of what is happening in Spanish writing, would be to create an anthology that was both popular, but also focussed, not simply a general introduction to Spanish speculative fiction (Where would you begin? Where would you end?), but a more focussed, more directed anthology that was in some senses able to give a view of speculative fiction in general as it is being written in Spain, but from a particular perspective. For Steampunk Hands Around the World, it’s my pleasure to chat with co-editor Marian Womack about her and James Womack’s newest anthology The Best of Spanish Steampunk.ġ) What was your motivating factor behind assembling the Best of Spanish Steampunk?

The Best of Spanish Steampunk by James Womack