The Unlikeliest Weapon: It appeared to be nothing, really. The first Union sailor to spot it mistook it for a tidal ripple in the water of Charleston harbor. By the time one of his more astute fellows realized what was coming at them and ordered the ship’s guns brought to bear, the sleek steel tube was planting its torpedo into the ship’s hull and retreating. Seconds later an explosion rocked the ship, followed by a couple more. The ship immediately listed and began to sink, and the crew of the USS Housatonic quickly realized that, on Feb. 17, 1864, they had passed into history as the first vessel ever to be sunk by a submarine. The sub was the H. L. Hunley, a private vessel in Confederate service, and as it slipped away into the darkness, it would not be seen again for another 135 years.

While the idea of the submarine had been kicking around since da Vinci, and many attempts had been made to realize that idea (including steamboat inventor Robert Fulton’s ill-fated Nautilus, which lent its name to Jules Verne’s famed fictional craft), the Hunley was the first underwater boat to engage in active combat, ushering in what was, arguably, the greatest revolution in warfare since the invention of gunpowder. That and the Hunley’s subsequent disappearance have made it a source of fascination and speculation for Civil War buffs and naval enthusiasts for decades. In 1995 a group of shipwreck hunters, bankrolled by adventure author Clive Cussler, located the sub, and its remains now reside in a laboratory in Charleston, where forensic experts work painstakingly to extract its secrets.

The story of the Hunley has been explored in articles, books, and TV movies, but historian Tom Chaffin has produced what may be considered the most exhaustive and accurate account of the submarine and the men who built her in his new book The H. L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy (Hill and Wang, 2008). Given the iron-fisted control the Confederacy exerted over the media to preserve its military secrets and a dearth of official or personal correspondence on the matter, Chaffin faced a daunting task in piecing together his history, but his hard work pays off here in a rich and lively book about visionaries, mercenaries and a technological marvel.

Union General Winfield Scott’s Operation Anaconda, the North’s strategy of choking the economic life out of the Rebel states through overland excursions and naval obstruction, had proven damnably successful. The desperate Confederacy turned to privateering, offering letters of marque and bounties to anyone who could do damage to the Federal Navy’s blockades. Horace L. Hunley, a lawyer and customs inspector in New Orleans and what they used to call “an idea man,” wanted in on that action and conceived a radical plan to accomplish by stealth what the Confederate Navy could not do by force: he assembled a team of engineers to build a submersible craft capable of planting a torpedo (what we would now call a mine) on enemy ships. The concept was greeted with skepticism and outright hostility by the military establishment, who regarded such tactics as unchivalrous combat conducted by “infernal devices.” Nonetheless Hunley and his partners managed to build three such devices, the CSS Pioneer (scuttled when the Union took New Orleans), the American Diver (lost in Mobile Bay) and Hunley’s namesake, which was deployed to challenge the blockade of Charleston.

Chaffin’s painstaking history of the Confederate submarine initiative is rich in character studies, from Hunley’s friends and family, deeply divided over the rightness of the cause of secession, to the generals and admirals of the Rebel forces. Such flamboyant personages include General P. T. Beauregard, the dashing commander of the Charleston redoubt, and Lt. George E. Dixon, the gambler and dandy who was the skipper on the Hunley’s Pyrrhic victory over the Housatonic. But the centerpiece of the book is the boat itself, an elegant 40-foot knife in the water, manned by a crew laboring within its cramped interior to power the boat by hand and a captain guiding the craft virtually blind. Chaffin’s prose is vivid as it evokes the claustrophobia and terror the sub’s crew experienced and the fervent hopes of the Confederacy to turn back, by any possible means, the Union forces moving in inexorably on all sides.

The Hunley was more than a mere footnote to the Civil War. It was a metaphor for the doomed Confederacy itself, an idea Chaffin puts across well. Though not perfect - Chaffin has an often irritating way of repeating himself in successive paragraphs - The H. L. Hunley is ultimately a detailed and fascinating account of an idea far ahead of its time and of the rogues and heroes who fought and died to make it a reality.

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On the Fiction Side of Things: Tom Chaffin’s book came across my desk at just the right time, as it happens that stories about Victorian-era technology have been much on my mind these days. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier column, I’ve been a fan of the science fiction subgenre called steampunk for a long time, and in the last couple of years it’s enjoyed a surge of popularity that has put a lot of good books on the market. Basically, steampunk posits the conceit that the gear-and-piston-driven technologies of the 19th century went a lot further than they did in our world, and the resulting milieu is one of automatons and dirigibles, steam-powered guns and Babbage computers illuminated by gaslight - the world of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne writ large. The resulting fiction is a joyful return to the gee-whiz days of early SF, romantic and daring and rife with the scent of High Adventure.

Recently, coteries of steampunk fans began acting out their fantasies in the real world through cosplay (venturing forth in costume and character), blending Victorian dress, vintage militaria, and healthy doses of DIY goth and punk into a style that has crossed over into street fashion. The New York Times has done a couple of stories on steampunk style, the topic ranking high on Google searches, and elements of steampunk have reportedly entered the new lines of designers like Dolce & Gabbana and Alexander McQueen. Not surprisingly, there have been some neo-Victorians spotted around Athens recently - we are Coolsville, after all.

First and foremost, however, is the fiction, and interested parties who’d like to dip their toes into steampunk could do much worse than editor Nick Gevers’ new collection Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology (BL Publishing, 2008). While it’s something of a stretch to call this collection “definitive,” especially as the genre hasn’t peaked yet, Gevers has culled together a solid bunch of stories incorporating steampunk’s major theme: the tension between Old-World notions of humanity and the incredible rush of possiblilities and dangers of a new technological age.

The collection opens with James Lovegrove’s melancholy tale of a steam-driven mechanical boxer named Steampunch and his proud inventors, who run afoul of the Marquis of Queenberry and his crusade to keep the art of fisticuffs a purely human affair, and plows forward from there. The lonely and unwilling bride of an Australian homesteader discovers that her husband has retrofitted the clockwork housekeeper for quite a different set of duties in Margo Lanahan’s “Machine Maid.” James Morrow’s harrowing “Lady Witherspoon’s Solution” tells of a society of high-born ladies dedicated to advancing proto-feminism through a horrible scientific process. Some of the genre’s superstars are in this collection, like Jay Lake (author of the seminal steampunk novel Mainspring) with his story of a tribe of Lost Boys struggling to hold onto their patch of turf within a city enclosed entirely within a sky-spanning copper pipe, and Jeff Vandemeer, who relates the story of an inventor in exile whose idyllic new life among an island tribe is wrecked when a dangerous artifact from his past washes ashore.

The best stories in the anthology come from Kage Baker, whose “Speed, Speed the Cable” tells of a war of tech-enhanced spies and saboteurs fighting a shadow war over the laying of the new transatlantic cable from America to Britain, Robert Reed, who pits the last of Abraham Lincoln’s robot doubles against the coal-driven, unstoppable James Gang on the Minnesota frontier in “American Cheetah,” and genre hero Ian R. MacLeod, who gives us “Elementals,” a tale of the new gods of the Industrial Age - the ones who will be replacing humanity one soul at a time.

There are a few misses in the collection, but the stories that work do so powerfully and elegantly. Extraordinary Engines is an extraordinary anthology and a fine addition to the growing body of steampunk fiction, and this is a very good thing. Given the cynicism and cool-at-all-costs aesthetic that’s run through science fiction over the last 30 years or so, we could use all the wonder, awe and High Adventure we can get.

John G. Nettles