Includes bibliographical references (pages 366-373)

Steampunk : "it's a clockwork universe, Victoria" / Ann & Jeff VanderMeer -- The 19th-century roots of steampunk / Jess Nevins -- Benediction : excerpt from The warlord of the air / Michael Moorcock -- Lord Kelvin's machine / James P. Blaylock -- The giving mouth / Ian R. MacLeod -- A sun in the attic / Mary Gentle -- The god-clown is near / Jay Lake -- The steam man of the prairie and the dark rider get down : a dime novel / Joe R. Lansdale -- The Selene Gardening Society / Molly Brown -- Seventy-two letters / Ted Chiang -- The Martian agent, a planetary romance / Michael Chabon -- Victoria / Paul Di Filippo -- Reflected light / Rachel E. Pollock -- Minutes of the last meeting / Stepan Chapman -- Excerpt from the third and last volume of Tribes of the Pacific coast / Neal Stephenson -- The steam-driven time machine : a pop culture survey / Rick Klaw -- The essential sequential steampunk : a modest survey of the genre within the comic book medium / Bill Baker.

Features stories in which the Victorian era is reimagined to include Martian technology, steam-powered robots, airships, alchemy, and various anachronistic technologies.