I really enjoyed this. And I'm glad I did, because otherwise I might be complaining that this was more sf than Fantasy.
(In my opinion, it
was more sf than fantasy, but since I enjoyed it, that's not a complaint. Besides, EP ran Dave's fantasy story for Hallowe'en, so why not the occasional fantasy-like SF here?)
The one element that I
did feel was Fantastical - or at least
really stretched the bounds of credibility - was that the humans could (presumably correctly) interpret the facial expressions of the (presumably) alien metal monsters because they matched ours so much. First of all, it seems unlikely. Second of all, even if it were possible (i.e. the monsters were clever enough to do so), why would they give humans the ability to outguess them like that?
Happily, though, I didn't think of that point while actually listening to the story, but when I was thinking it over afterwards.
And really, it's just a quibble. The story itself, I really quite enjoyed.
I don't consider this story to be especially Steampunk, because it doesn't posit an alternate history in which Steam devices (computers, etc.) precede/replace the mechanical/electronic ones we have. Instead, it gives Steampunk (or something Steampunk-like) to the ancient Egyptians as an explanation for the technology we
did get. So, sort of an alternate/secret/steampunk-history. Wow, is that a whole new sub-sub-subgenre Abraham has invented?
I really like Paul Jenkins's reading, though maybe it hasn't been quite long enough since the
Carnacki The Ghost Hunter story; it was several minutes into
this story before I was able to convince myself I wasn't still in that world.