Venture into New York City’s Lower East Side in the late 19th century with the incorrigible miscreants of the Catastrophone Orchestra. Drug-addled, pugilistic, and benevolent, they run a free clinic and experiment with the music of machines. The underside of the city is laid bare in this collection. The Orchestra itself provides only the bookends for five seasonals, a distinctly Victorian genre of short fiction that has been given new life in these pages. Street brawls and gangs, mechanical mothers, slaughterhouses and circuses, magicians and orphanages, laborers and strikes, the Catastrophone Orchestra has seen it all. Five seasonals, a backstory, and two groundbreaking steampunk essays are herein collected.