Getting Steamed

10 thoughts on “Getting Steamed”

1. The article is almost as charming as the subgenre it explores. Thanks for sharing. The H.G. Wells numnum was worth the price of admission alone.Report

2. so if a person were wanting to read some good steampunk sci-fi/ fantasy, what should they choose?Report

   1. I’m afraid I have no idea. I wasn’t aware the genre existed until very recently.Report

   2. I’d recommend William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gate.Report

      1. I don’t see The Anubis Gates as steampunk, since it doesn’t combine a past setting with technology that belongs in that setting’s future, as The Difference Engine does. (The advanced technology is used to travel to the past, but isn’t used thereafter.) It’s an amazing book, though, and I recommend it without reservation.Report

         1. Yeah I wasn’t sure it counted either, but other people seem to. That’s a good strict definition for pure steampunk though, I like it!Report

   3. If you play computer games at all Sierra’s old Arcanum of Steamworks and Magic Arcana (usually just called Arcanum for short) is an awsome Steampunk world based game, very similar in play to Fallout.Report

   4. There are tons of comic books and graphic novels. As for film, start with Steamboy.

      Anything that gets people to dress a bit more classy…I’m all for it.Report

3. well that is a fine how do you do!!!!Report

4. Although not strictly ‘steampunk’, Neal Stephenson’s, The Diamond Age, imagines a near/far-ish future where a society of elites take on the social niceties and rigidly mannered etiquette and behavior structures of Victorian England, in an age where nanotechnology is the driving force in a post-nation state economic, political and social structure.

   It is mind-bending and a challenging read–I’ve seen a label describe it as ‘post-cyberpunk’, but the central ‘technology’ is a book that teaches and learns and grows with the protaganist. Check it out.

   (The author sides in favor of nanotechnology over AI as the more powerful and central force in human enterprise for the foreseeable future).Report

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