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Our Love For Steampunk Is A Longing For Machines That Don't Suck
San Francisco, 5:58 AM
Fri Dec 11
26 posts in the last 24 hours
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Our Love For Steampunk Is A Longing For Machines That Don't Suck |
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05/28/09
Huh? I believe the attraction here is for machines who aren't necessarily reliable but clearly idiosyncratic.
05/28/09
05/28/09
Read them yourself, give them to your favorite tween and teens, esp. girls.
05/28/09
(i don't know if i am saying that as a bad thing or what)
05/28/09
05/28/09
Demos at 2:00 pm Tue-Sun, and also 1:00 pm Sat-Sun.
I present, crank, and maintain the Engine.
05/28/09
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05/28/09
If by atompunk, you mean nostalgic fiction for the era that molecular manufacturing broke, I think that's pretty soon after biopunk has played itself out. (Annalee may wanna correct me on this since she coined the term.)
Probably after some bioengineering disaster in the real world spreads a tweaked bamboo-kudzu plant that covers New York with useless grown houses or a super-algae, tweaked for food additives, that chokes the oceans to death.
05/28/09
As for Atompunk, the best example I can think of is Fallout 3. Very 1940's-1960's in nostalgia, complete with constant threat of The Bomb.
05/28/09
Tapepunk? Is that what we should classify all that 50's and 70's science fiction with big room sized computers that achieve sapience and rule the planet?
This would bring us full circle back to cyberpunk in the late 70's and early 80's where people thought that VR and networks were still a pretty neat idea.
05/28/09
05/28/09
As the steampunk aesthetic has become overstretched other eras have been mined, giving us dieselpunk and clockpunk. Is it too early for cyberpunkpunk - near-past nostalgia for a world in which the internet is an edgy meeting ground for new wavers in skinny ties gazing at CRT monitors?
05/28/09
05/28/09
I'm even more put-off by supposedly emerging bastard-child of steampunk, this '20s and '30s obsession. I understand that swing, cabaret and Fedoras are cool, but it's like they're completely forgetting that this is the era that led to a worldwide economic depression and the rise of some of the worst tyrants in human history.
05/28/09
I guess it's better than emo?
05/28/09
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05/28/09
I think they forget that the Weimar cabaret scene and the '60s hippie scene and protest movements were considered countercultures for a reason. The majority of the population did not support them. The modern fetishists want the good of the Weimar period, and not the parts that led to the rise of Hitler - or the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll of the '60s without the rampant sexism, racism, and Cold War politics that led to the counterculture. After all, any countercultural movement is, by definition, a backlash against elements in mainstream culture it opposes.
05/28/09
What's counterculture today? Or is our culture so fragmented that nothing's a majority any more, just a plurality? The only thing I can think of that isn't mainstream is thinking and being edumacated, but that's never been popular.
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05/28/09
attaching cogs to a plastic toy gun then giving it a bad paint job is not 'steampunk'....it's making something look like crap.
05/29/09
I can only think of four works of steampunk that I've read. The one that stands the best chance of being recognized is 20,000 Leagues. The other one with a world-famous author is the third Tom Sawyer book (can't remember the title, but it had Tom, Huck, and some old guy adventuring in some sort of flying machine). The one that's most likely to have been read by fellow io9 readers is the Gotham by Gaslight/Master of the Future pair of Elseworlds graphic novels. And the one that I enjoy the most is Girl Genius. Seriously, Krosp rocks.