Re:Whatever Happened to Steampunk?
by paggle on Thursday October 03, 2019 @04:03PM
(#21151486)
Can you try to give me a sense of what "steampunk" means in a literary sense? When I think of "steampunk" I think of brass machinery, tubes and pipes, oversized hardware, needle pressure gauges, etc... and I struggle to see how that kind of aesthetic would be captured in a literary genre. I would love to know.
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Re:Whatever Happened to Steampunk?
by smacktoward on Thursday October 03, 2019 @04:11PM
(#21151584)
For an HN reader, I'd just suggest picking up a copy of the 1990 William Gibson/Bruce Sterling collaboration The Difference Engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine). It's hit or miss from a literary perspective, but it'll get you aimed in the general direction you're asking about.
It is not 'hit or miss'.
It is the first, and still the best, steampunk novel.
It defined the genre.
That is not correct. Blaylock's the Digging Leviathan predates it by several years.
I usually see it in a retro-futurist parallel universe. Depending on the definition of "literature", Wild Wild West was a movie set in The Old West, but exhibits technologies that definitely didn't exist at the time. Those technologies seem to aesthetically fit in the movie's semi-fictional era.