Steampunk

Abstract: The purpose of this text is to reflect on the ways that science fiction allows criticism on the modern technology path. Imagination has allowed us to think of some ends of the world, but it has been a privileged space. Creating other possible futures for our relationship with energy is essential. Corporate renewable energy projects are emerging in corners of the planet where green capitalism has not yet reached. In this way, the creation of alternatives to centralized and corporate models of energy generation, distribution and consumption must go through new potentialities of inhabiting new possible futures. Science fiction is a literature genre that has inspired generations of people assembling art and techno-science as well as dystopia. Solarpunk has been consolidated as a space of counter-cultural hope to allow us to go beyond social-ecological injustices and growing epistemic and ontological violence. This genre is derived from other currents such as Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Dieselpunk, elucidating another relationship between technology, society and nature, nourished in turn by climate sci-fi, Indigenous and Afro-futurist science fiction. In this sense, a concept revision is made in three spheres: i) historical, based on its digital origins; ii) literary, based on the edited anthologies and iii) academic, of the reflections that it has raised. Finally, the Solarpunk Manifesto, revealed at the beginning of 2020, is shared in order to continue its co-creation.

Abstract: Introduction The publication of two dedicated anthologies of steampunk short stories (Extraordinary Engines, edited by Nick Gevers, and Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) in 2008 shows that steampunk fiction is alive and well, and far from being an exhausted mode, why have so many of our fantastic writers suddenly found in the last decade or two such a rich imaginative ground in the Victorian era? Certainly there is no simple answer to this question, but I believe that part of the answer lies in examining in detail the ways that steampunk fiction uses and represents history, we are all familiar with arguments that claim that when popular culture represents the past, it often gets it wrong, imposing present-day historicity on a past that serves mostly as a costume party we might look at steampunk as speculative fiction's revenge against such arguments, because steampunk is a fiction that places a premium on minutely accurate historical detail, within flamboyantly wrong imagined pasts, in order to explore the ways in which the conventional historical sensibility sometimes gets it wrong As Jacob burckhardt once said, history is "on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another" (171) Steampunk takes this impulse to heart in order to create an imaginative engagement between the present and the past that makes possible a challenge to the totalizing narrative of historical progress Up to now, academic discussion of steampunk fiction (see Clayton, Hantke, spencer, sussman, Tatsumi, and others) has been almost completely confined to discussion of william Gibson and bruce sterling's The Difference Engine, which is certainly a work of immense importance However, general conclusions about the sub-genre have been drawn based on this one text, and its idiosyncrasies have been imputed to the entire movement For example, Jay Clayton's Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, which explores many themes and theories close to the heart of steampunk, uses Gibson and sterling's novel as the sole example from the science fiction sub-genre Clayton condemns the novel on the basis of its gender politics and then gives no further mention of steampunk fiction It seems to me that, while sf writers need to be held accountable for the outdated gender constructs that still seem to plague our plots, this critique is not necessarily relevant to the question of steampunk's historical representation It also seems rather hasty to dismiss all steampunk fiction because of the gender politics of one novel If we look at the range offered by the thirteen stories in Extraordinary Engines, for example, we do not find too many of the damsels in distress or heroic shoot-'em-ups that Clayton justly laments--instead we have outraged and capable women destroying their tormentors ("Lady Witherspoon's Solution"; "Static"; "Machine Maid") and soft-spoken automatons quietly teaching their engineer-mechanics the meaning of heart and heroism ("American Cheetah"; "Steampunch") Clearly, it is a mistake to pass judgment on the role of gender in steampunk based on The Difference Engine alone, (1) and there might be other ways in which our critical perspective on steampunk has been skewed by this narrow focus on the one novel as well So as we turn to the question of assessing steampunk as postmodern historical representation, I want to set aside Gibson and Sterling, and take Gevers's Extraordinary Engines at the word of its jacket copy, and look at it as "The Definitive Steampunk Anthology," or at least consider it as a reasonably good sample of steampunk fiction, from a variety of different authors and approaches I will explore the stories of this anthology comparatively, rather than discussing individual stories in depth, to discover the strategies of historical representation that bring them together That said, four stories stand out for more lengthy treatment: "American Cheetah" by Robert Reed, "Lady Witherspoon's Solution" by James Morrow, "Steampunch" by James Lovegrove, and "Petrolpunk" by Adam Roberts …

Abstract: As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectros...