The exclamation mark in the title of this collection suggests an announcement, a new arrival. In fact, the term was coined in 1987 to denote a burgeoning sub-genre of fantasy in which the principles of Gibsonian cyberpunk are projected backwards on to a wildly reimagined 19th century.

I can only guess at what yearnings underlie this weird historical revisionism, but I find myself drawn to it. Perhaps this is because steampunk, despite its obsession with kit, boasts a great many feisty heroines who are handy with a wrench or a temporal displacement occulator. On the strength of this anthology, it is no boys-only genre.

Or perhaps I'm attracted because steampunk has no truck with the semi-conductor, preferring a world without i-things and e-things; it eschews social networking and mobile phones, those pesky nuisances when it comes to suspenseful plotting. Instead, it rejoices in steam-driven automata, coal-fired dirigibles, leather flying helmets and goggles, clockwork, and anything made of brass, including hair and prostheses. Steampunk loves brass.

There are computational machines, but they are by Charles Babbage, not Steve Jobs, and are powered by (brass) rods and pistons which occasionally trap limbs and rip them off. In visual terms, steampunk is Heath Robinson on peyote, or Bladerunner directed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The narrative voice is frequently cod-Victorian, sometimes juicily inventive, sometimes plain silly. This book's editors identify Jules Verne as the granddaddy of steampunk, but I think HG Wells is its main man; time-warping (brass) devices are a leitmotif.

Steampunk! is a plump and handsome book consisting of 14 stories, two in comic-strip form, by American and Australasian writers, eight of whom are women. It's a delicious buffet for anarchic teenagers whose minds strain at the leash of teen fiction. But, as with any smorgasbord, there are bland as well as tasty items. Cassandra Clare's "Some Fortunate Future Day" is as wan as any of her pallid heroes.

Garth Nix's "Peace in Our Time" is not much more than a sketched-out chapter of a book about imaginary weapons. You can't avoid the feeling that both writers knocked these pieces out for a favour on a spare afternoon. Then there are the dishes that trouble the palate. In Christopher Rowe's "Nowhere Fast", set in a green future (or past), the hero reinvents the gas-guzzling internal combustion engine; contentiously  or just maybe ironically  the writer seems to propose that the burning of carbon fuels is the same thing as freedom.

"Gethsemane" by Elizabeth Cox is a somewhat foggy Christian parable, redeemed by a brilliant description of an airship escaping a volcanic eruption. Cory Doctorow's "Clockwork Fagin" is a joyfully gruesome account of an insurrection in a home for crippled children.

Oddly, and interestingly, the two outstanding stories already transcend the conventions of this new genre. Kelly Link's "The Summer People" is an elegant, sinister and hallucinatory fairytale, reminiscent of Angela Carter and Margo Lanagan, in which a girl escapes from an apparently benign enchantment into a harsher world. MT Anderson's "The Oracle Engine", multilayered with irony and full of sly jokes, takes us, via Plutarch, to ancient Rome. A vengeful Artificer builds a prototype computer (out of metal, probably brass) and rigs it to bring about the downfall and death of the plutocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus in 53BC. A team of cloistered youths works the Oracle; its creator believing that "an order of male virgins who never see the light of day would be ideal for the operation of a computing machine such as this". And, of course, there are dirigible triremes. Steampunkum est!

 Mal Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram is published by Walker.