The formatting of the ebook is, unfortunately, kind of rubbish. I’ve half a mind to reformat it and reconvert back to the Kindle format, but meh. But it really is rubbish. So much so that each story’s title isn’t formatted any differently from any other text (no bolding, no up-sizing), there is no table of contents, and sometimes there’s text that must have been meant to be italicized but… isn’t. It’s a shame. A crying shame.
It’s probably fair to disclose that I’m a) not a fan of steampunk (in that I have no real interest in it as a subject or sub-genre) and that b) I’m not generally into multi-authors anthologies due to their natural unevenness in quality, and I always prefer longer stories over short ones, which makes it a little tricky to appreciate many of the pieces in Steam-Powered 2 since some tend toward the shorter end of the scale. But despite all that, in the end I found many of the stories contained in this anthology amazing, moving, affirming. This is the kind of collections we need, the kind of material that should exist and be encouraged to thrive, and I can’t praise Joselle Vanderhooft enough for making it happen.
