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San Francisco, 7:05 PM
Tue Dec 15
26 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/13/09
Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" short story involving a Lovecraftian Queen Victoria and Sherlock Holmes is probably the best example of what i find myself looking for in this genre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Emerald
08/12/09
Have you read any Philip Reeve, Grey? He's produced both steampunk (Larklight) and a series dealing with "Municipal Darwinism" (The Hungry City Chronicles).
Start with Mortal Engines - a bit frantic (much like The Court of the Air IMHO), but entertaining and a nice bit of world building to boot.
08/12/09
I have so given up on the concept of a "to read" list.
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It's like saying the Ramones wasn't really the first punk band because Chris Monetz recorded "Let's Dance" in 1962.
K. W. Jeter jokingly coined the term to describe the type of stories that he and his pals were writing. They did have some new twists to the old conventions and the label stuck.
08/12/09
While the scenes where the characters do things are somewhat interesting, about %75 of the book is the most boring dialogue possible.
Imagine Sherlock Holmes if he had been dropped repeatedly as a baby.
The author was definitly trying for the Holmes feel, but it just comes out as a cheap knockoff.
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[www.amazon.com]
It has a nice mixture of mythology into a steampunk world.
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I think I might have to choose words with only one connotation next time.
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I absolutely love the Virga series though, especially the first one.
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Nothing serious, just a wee case of overexposure.
08/12/09
Steampunk ideas but in space? What's not to love?
08/12/09
It seems that the inclusion of any pre-atomic tech in a futuristic setting or vice versa gets tossed on the steampunk pile. Maybe it's the term that needs to be tossed. It's all stretched out of shape now, hardly recognizable anymore.
08/12/09
Steampunk is an artful revisioning of the world that used to be. It's very purposeful and very outlandish, and essentially is a modern genre applying modern conventions in a retro-fashionable way.
Verne himself was a straight-forward, Victorian-era science fiction writer who looked towards the future from his perspective. I don't think it's in any way sensible to appropriate his work just to pump up the "steampunk" name.
08/12/09
Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Kurd Lasswitz and their contempararies ARE NOT STEAMPUNK. They were the real deal, the originators of ALL Science Fiction. Steampunk references, parodies, or even worse, ineptly apes the worlds that these men imagined. /rant
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Jeter, Powers, and the rest of the gang sneered at the utopia through technology that the Victorian writers dreamt of. Steampunk originally called to the carpet the gross social inequalities that rampant industrialization and colonization brought about and could be seen today.
Nowadays steampunk has reverted to the 19th Century outlook that the First gen, was attacking. Today it's often "Oooh lookit! Brass is shiny!" We're seeing some works with some real edge to them such as Julian Comstock* and too an extent, Stephen Hunt and Philip Pullman. Oddly, the most socially critical semi-steampunk books lean more to Fantasy than Science. Looking forward to the current crop of steamkids to mature and see the soot in the air, hear the cries in the workhouses, and remember where the term "gunboat diplomacy" came from.
Utopias are worse than boring, they are the product of lazy thinking.
*Haven't read this yet, Annalee liked it a bunch.
08/12/09
Retro-Victorian Sci-Fi films grew parallel to the literature but not out of it, so one is more likely to find a nostalgic kind of vision in them. I'm speaking of everything from direct adaptations like 20,000 Leagues and The Time Machine to imitators like Wild Wild West and Island at the Top of the World. It has only been very recently, with The Prestige, that works of literary Steampunk have begun to be adapted to film.
There is a good chance that, at least to the fan of Steampunk pre-2007, that attraction to the Victorian-Edwardian Era, its aesthetics and romantic myth fuelled an interest in any kind of retro-Victorian Sci-Fi, be it Dinotopia, Sakura Wars, Jules Verne, Wild Wild West, League of Extrordinary Gentlemen, Space: 1889 or whatever. Post-2007, when Steampunk became a new subset of Goth-Industrial pop-culture, I couldn't really tell you what fuels that.
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08/12/09
Of course, there is the question of whether or not this ethos simply mollifies Steampunks into thinking they're being progressive and revolutionary when really all they're doing is playing the rich people's game of dressing up in neat costumes. That's simply the rub of "y'know what addresses social problems better than Sci-Fi? Actually doing something about social problems." Suffice it to say though, I don't think there's a real lack of seeing what sucked about the Victorian Era and, as a consequence, what sucks about our own.
Should there be more though? I saw one recent, salient comment on a Steampunk board where one person was making similar comments about how we should interject more reality into Steampunk and someone replied "why would I want to do that? I get enough reality in my reality." In an age where we're glutted with information on what sucks with the world, it's not as though liking highly mythologized retro-Victorian Sci-Fi is making one lack for anything except a desire to be entertained by problems they could actually be going out and doing something about. It goes back to that rub about Sci-Fi... All the "commentary" in the world is nice, but we're WAY past needing commentary now. Calling for more commentary in retro-Victorian Sci-Fi seems... I dunno'...
08/13/09
Now please excuse me as I work on my Tusken Raider costume.
08/13/09
No arguments from me there except that, in my experience, there tends to be a distinction between the people who enjoy the genre and the people who think that Steampunk is a really important lifestyle.
The former are definitely genre savvy, literate, and if they wear costumes at all, tend to be aware that they're just cosplaying for a little bit. A lot of them also tend to be the people who were into Steampunk before the 2007 cast-iron singularity.
The latter "Living Steampunks" tend to look down their noses at the genre and use how little they've read to gain street cred. "I'm not just some nerd wearing a costume... I haven't even read Verne or Gibson... I'm 100% real, no fiction here!" These tend to be the people who "were into it all their lives and suddenly discovered there was a label for it!"
Personally, ignoring the folks who don't even read because it takes time away from gluing gears to things, I don't think that Steampunk or retro-Victorian Sci-Fi or whatever is really suffering for lack of grim n' gritty... It's suffering more for lack of new ideas.
08/12/09
It's great to see familiar faces at io9. Thank you, io9, for spending a bit of wisps on the aethernet for Steampunk.
08/12/09
hahaha...awesome...
A good subject for future post would be the strange preference for bows and crossbows among the women of sci-fi/fantasy...
it's actually really weird.
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@goldfarb: what should really be looked at is the number to images of the backside of a woman/girl as she looks over her shoulder. see Harley on the cover of GCSirens #1 or this:
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Also, I have a friend who signs official documents with a flexible-nib fountain pen, with perfect Copperplate script. Amazing to watch him work.
08/12/09
(I, PrintGeek)
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