We were blown away by the second volume of Strahan's Eclipse series, not least because of Ted Chiang's Hugo-winning story "Exhalation." (At WisCon, I'm afraid I cornered Chiang and babbled inanely at him for five minutes about how great that story was.) But the table of contents for volume three actually sounds even more fantastic:

• The Pelican Bar, Karen Joy Fowler
• Lotion, Ellen Klages
• Don't Mention Madagascar, Pat Cadigan
• On the Road, Nnedi Okorafor
• Swell, Elizabeth Bear
• Useless Things, Maureen F. McHugh
• The Coral Heart, Jeffrey Ford
• It Takes Two, Nicola Griffith
• Sleight of Hand, Peter S. Beagle
• The Pretender's Tourney, Daniel Abraham
• Yes We Have No Bananas, Paul Di Filippo
• Mesopotamian Fire, Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple
• The Visited Man, Molly Gloss
• Galápagos, Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Dolce Domum, Ellen Kushner

That's a pretty incredible list of names right there. And yes, there do happen to be a lot of women on that list, including Karen Joy Fowler and Nicola Griffith — two authors we were just imploring to come back to science fiction.

Meanwhile, io9 contributors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer announced the table of contents for Last Drink Bird Head, their new anthology of flash fiction raising money for literacy charities, which will be available in time for the World Fantasy Convention. And befitting a book of flash fiction, there's a huge list of contributors, but it includes Gene Wolfe, Leslie What, Keith Brooke, Paul Di Filippo, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee, Jay Lake, and many others.

And finally, if you're tired of anthologies about vampires or zombies, then rejoice! Ekaterina Sedia, author of the masterful Alchemy Of Stone, is putting out an anthology of werewolf tales called Running With The Pack.

Here's the back cover blurb:

Remember the werewolves of old stories and films, those bloodthirsty monsters that transformed under the full moon, reminding us of the terrible nature that lives within all of us? Today's werewolves are much more suave and even sexy, and they moved from British moors to New York City lofts, shaved, and got jobs. But as the tales of these writers will show you, they remained no less wild and passionate, and they still tug at the part of our being where a wild animal used to be. RUNNING WITH THE PACK includes stories from Carrie Vaughn, Laura Anne Gilman and C.E. Murphy, and they will convince you that despite their newfound gentility, werewolves remain as fascinating and terrifying as ever.

io9: One thing that makes Alchemy of Stone different from many other books about robots is that Mattie is more vulnerable than the humans around her. She doesn't have superpowers, and is in fact quite breakable. Why did you choose to take her character in that direction? Along those same lines, what abilities does Mattie have that humans don't? You mention at one point that her eyes are much better than humans' — are there other super-human abilities she has?

Ekaterina Sedia: I noticed that in much of SF, written or visual, machines are portrayed as benign or menacing, but almost always as more powerful than people. To me it seems like a bad case of hubris, where we believe that we are capable of creating something more perfect than us, even if it will destroy us in the end. Of course, anyone who had ever owned a computer, driven a car or operated a toaster knows that it's not true — machines break a lot, redundancies fail, and basically without constant repair and upkeep, machines do not fare too well.

Mattie was in part a reaction to the myth of superpowered machines (Terminator or Six Million Dollar Man or HAL) as a more realistic alternative, but also as a more interesting protagonist. Plus, I believe that we care about characters not because of their perfection but because of their vulnerabilities. Mattie cannot heal, she needs to be repaired constantly — and this is really the crux of her existence, because she wants to be able to survive on her own. Even her eyes, which were made to SEE better are still glass, breakable, and can be taken away from her at any time. As for other superpowers — she is a very good alchemist. And she is strong when working properly. That's about it.

io9: Though Mattie is an outcast among humans, her life has been privileged enough that she doesn't fit in with the proletarian revolutionaries either. Do you think Mattie has a political position of her own?

ES: You are absolutely right. Despite her being fairly wealthy, her wealth can be easily taken away from her, by whoever is in power — bourgeoisie or proletariat or aristocracy. Everything she has, she has because of someone else's kindness. So in that sense, she is in her own camp, simply because people around her are unlikely to accept her as anything other than an inanimate object with no rights. If you were to ask her position, I don't think she would have a very defined or politically astute one — except for believing that people ought to be allowed to live the way they see fit, and that she ought to be allowed the same.

io9: Despite the fact that you set this novel in a semi-magical world, the chemistry that Mattie does feels very realistic. She does a lot of repetitive tasks to isolate elements, and generally acts as if she's working in a typical chemistry lab. Do you think there is magic in Mattie's world, or just events that don't have a scientific explanation yet?

ES: Souls and the Soul-Smoker [a character who can absorb other people's souls] are the only explicitly magical things in this book; at least, this was my intent. The rest of it is based on the supposition that alchemy and the Doctrine of Signatures actually work — which are not quite magic, those are just theories that had been demonstrated wrong in our world. So they just have different laws of the natural world, which doesn't really count as magic, does it? Even the gargoyles appear, to me at least, as creatures that are different but not supernatural.

io9: There were a lot of moments in this novel where it felt like Mattie's struggles to be accepted as an alchemist mirror the struggles of a lot of women who want to be accepted as scientists (especially in male-dominated fields). Were you trying to touch on those issues, or more broadly on the issue of inequality between men and women?

ES: I am a scientist in real life, so yes, of course I am aware of discrimination and inequality that still exists in most scientific fields, and it colored my depiction of Mattie. At the same time, I did try to talk about inequality and oppression in their many forms — not just gender, but also class, ethnicity, and, in Mattie's case, chemical composition. Each of those is an added burden, and yes, I think women who work in male-dominated fields will be able to relate to that sense of constant swimming upstream and the simplest things being a chore when you just want to do your job and not to be challenged every time you take a breath. Most of us could do with a bit less overcoming, I think.

io9: What are you working on right now? Any new novels in the works?

ES: Oh my, yes. I have another one coming out in 2009, The House of Discarded Dreams. I also just finished a Victorian Gothic YA based in real-world alchemy; it is about a girl and her salamander. I am currently working on an alternate history/steampunk novel taking place in Russia just before the Crimean War, in which the British and the Ottoman Empires team up against Russian-Chinese alliance. So it's basically Russian steampunk with wuxia. And British spies.

Ekaterina Sedia [official website]

Mattie's creator Loharri has fashioned his automaton out of whalebone, metal, and porcelain, building the corset shape of nineteenth century fashion into the very structure of her body. Instead of sex organs, she has a keyhole in her chest. Her creator has the only key, which he uses to keep her powered up but also to bestow pleasure on her. He's also wired her to be obedient and come to him when she is distressed, and punishes her disobedience by forcing her to overheat or by removing her eyes. So the emancipated Mattie is well-aware that her freedom and even her very life are completely under Loharri's control unless he gives her the key.

While the idea of a man owning the key to Mattie's heart verges on twee, Sedia generally makes good use of the metaphor. This is no simple fairy tale about a woman wanting freedom. It's about a woman who knows she's been molded (literally) for servitude, who knows she cannot ever completely escape her programming, and who therefore throws herself into a vast and complicated alchemy project that might give others the freedom she can never have. Most of the novel is about Mattie's attempt to perfect "the alchemy of stone," a project that will prevent a race of creatures called the Gargoyles from dying of a disease that turns them to stone.

Though Mattie's chemistry experiments are fantastical, they have a kind of hyper-realistic feel to them: There are no incantations, instead there are simply repetitious experiments on stone, testing to see what elements it contains. Sedia is a plant biologist, and it shows: There is plenty of genuine biogeekery here among the spirits and mechanical dolls and mythological creatures.

As Mattie nears a breakthrough on her Gargoyle project, the city's coal miners and other proletarians stage a revolution that leaves huge parts of the city in smoking ruins. As the creation of an upper-class Mechanic, who is part of the ruling Mechanic party, Mattie finds herself in a strange position. She's a non-entity as an automaton, unable to vote and considered mere scrap by most people, and yet she has the education and income of what many of the revolutionaries would consider a bourgeois oppressor. To make matters more complicated, she's fallen in love with a man who turns out to be one of the lead revolutionaries.

Swept up in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary conspiracies, locked into a tragic battle of wills with her creator, Mattie has to figure out where her loyalties lie. And all the while she never knows for sure whether the people she's helping see her as their equal, or just as a very finely-crafted tool. There are a number of brilliant moments when Sedia completely nails Mattie's strange ambivalence, managing to tell a profound story about femininity as well as what it's like to be mechanical. Here Mattie wonders about Sebastian, the revolutionary leader who made love to her:

Was it a fetish of a mechanic enamored with intricate devices and easily prompted to express his affection the moment a device resembled a girl, or was it something else?

While it's action-packed, The Alchemy of Stone is most properly understood as a character study. Mournful and romantic, Mattie is the mechanical, wind-up doll so many gothy teenage girls imagine themselves to be. And her vulnerability haunts many adult women too: We may not have whalebone corsets embedded in our skin, but we all struggle to be perceived as something more than pretty little tools. It's that struggle that makes Mattie such a vivid, memorable, and ultimately human character.

The Alchemy of Stone [Amazon]