Jeff VanderMeer (www.jeffvandermeer.com) lives with his wife and sometime co-editor, Ann (fiction editor of Weird Tales), in Tallahassee, Florida. For years he was the publisher/editor of Ministry of Whimsy, a small press, and later an imprint, that produced a number of excellent books, and co-editor of Leviathan, an original anthology series of speculative fiction and the fantastic. He has been a leading figure in the field in favor of transgressing genre boundaries for at least a decade. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, the B&N Review, the Huffington Post, and many others. His several surreal/magic realist novels and story collections include City of Saints & Madmen, Veniss Underground, and Shriek: An Afterword. Recently, he has begun to edit and co-edit more anthologies, including The New Weird (Tachyon), Steampunk (Tachyon), the annual Best American Fantasy series, and the pirate anthology, Fast Ships, Black Sails.
“Fixing Hanover” was published in the original anthology, Extraordinary Engines, edited by Nick Gevers. We think it transcends the somewhat limiting theme or marketing hook of the anthology (steampunk). It’s a first class SF story. A man who can fix anything is shipwrecked in a fishing village on some planet. He wants to stay and works hard to avoid becoming a slave and traded. After a time, a strange broken robot washes up on the beach.