Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion brings together tales from the light and dark sides of steampunk. Living ghosts, walking ferns and ingenious androids populate visions of the city of Bristol at once familiar and peculiar. Above them soar magnificent men, and women, in their flying machines. Whether they are seeking release, revenge or adventure, the characters in these stories will draw you down the side-streets of Bristol to the brass and steam-filled worlds you never dreamed were there.
Take a walk around Bristol, and history seeps from the walls. The city can claim more than its fair share of firsts, including the first iron-hulled steamship, the first female doctor, the first chocolate bar and the first use of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic, the invention of the Plimsoll line, the first undersea telegraph cable, the world’s first test tube baby and the first transplant organ grown from stem cells, and a large share of the world’s first supersonic airliner. Now, from this fertile ground comes an anthology charting other realities and alternate histories, in a collection as rich and varied as the true history of this great British city.
— Gareth L. Powell