Download or read book Clockwork Futures The Science of Steampunk and the Reinvention of the Modern World written by Brandy Schillace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Airships and electric submarines, automatons and mesmerists?welcome to the wild world of steampunk. It is all speculative?or is it? Meet the intrepid souls who pushed Victorian technology to its limits and paved the way for our present age. The gear turns, the whistle blows, and the billows expand with electro-mechanical whirring. The shimmering halo of Victorian technology lures us with the stuff of dreams, of nostalgia, of alternate pasts and futures that entice with the suave of James Bond and the savvy of Sherlock Holmes. Fiction, surely. But what if the unusual gadgetry so often depicted as “steampunk” actually made an appearance in history? Zeppelins and steam-trains; arc-lights and magnetic rays: these fascinating (and sometimes doomed) inventions bounded from the tireless minds of unlikely heroes. Such men and women served no secret societies and fought no super-villains, but they did build engines, craft automatons, and engineer a future they hoped would run like clockwork. Along the way, however, these same inventors ushered in a contest between desire and dread. From Newton to Tesla, from candle and clockwork to the age of electricity and manufactured power, technology teetered between the bright dials of fantastic futures and the dark alleyways of industrial catastrophe. In the mesmerizing Clockwork Futures, Brandy Schillace reveals the science behind steampunk, which is every bit as extraordinary as what we might find in the work of Jules Verne, and sometimes, just as fearful. These stories spring from the scientific framework we have inherited. They shed light on how we pursue science, and how we grapple with our destiny—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Download or read book Clockwork Futures written by Brandy Schillace and published by Pegasus Books. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gear turns, the whistle blows, and the billows expand with electro-mechanical whirring. Fiction, surely. But what if the unusual gadgetry so often depicted as “steampunk” actually made an appearance in history? Zeppelins and steam-trains; arc-lights and magnetic rays: these fascinating (and sometimes doomed) inventions bounded from the tireless minds of unlikely heroes. Such men and women served no secret societies and fought no super-villains, but they did build engines, craft automatons, and engineer a future they hoped would run like clockwork.Along the way, however, these same inventors ushered in a contest between desire and dread. From Newton to Tesla, from candle and clockwork to the age of electricity and manufactured power, technology teetered between the bright dials of fantastic futures and the dark alleyways of industrial catastrophe.In the mesmerizing Clockwork Futures, Brandy Schillace reveals the science behind steampunk, which is every bit as extraordinary as what we might find in the work of Jules Verne, and sometimes, just as fearful. These stories spring from the scientific framework we have inherited. They shed light on how we pursue science, and how we grapple with our destiny—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Download or read book Jules Verne Lives written by Gary Westfahl and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-07-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a fresh examination of the works of Jules Verne, the pioneering and enduringly popular science fiction writer. Essays study Verne's various novels--including Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Included essays offer analyses of literary responses to Verne's work, assessments of film adaptations of his novels and discussions of steampunk, the Verne-inspired science fiction subgenre that has influenced writers like Philip Jose Farmer, Caleb Carr and Adam Roberts.
Download or read book How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon written by Iwan Rhys Morus and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '[An] insightful analysis of 19th-century futurism ... Morus's account is as much a cautionary tale as a flag-waving celebration.' - DUNCAN BELL, NEW STATESMAN '[ How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon] rattles thrillingly through such developments as the Transatlantic telegraph cable, the steam locomotive and electric power and recalls the excitable predictions of the fiction of the time.' KATY GUEST, THE GUARDIAN 'Excellent ... A terrific insight into why the Victorian era was a golden age of engineering.' - NICK SMITH, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE By the end of the Victorian era, the world had changed irrevocably. The speed of the technological development brought about between 1800 and 1900 was completely unprecedented in human history. And as the Victorians looked to the skies and beyond as the next frontier to be explored and conquered, they were inventing, shaping and moulding the very idea of the future. To get us to this future, the Victorians created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilisation of the resources of Empire - and they revolutionised science in the process. In this rich and absorbing book, distinguished historian of science Iwan Rhys Morus tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage's dream of mechanising mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel's tunnel beneath the Thames, from George Cayley's fantasies of powered flight to Nikola Tesla's visions of an electrical world, this is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures - a vibrant tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world and ultimately took us to the Moon.
Download or read book Mr Humble and Dr Butcher written by Brandy Schillace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “delightfully macabre” (The New York Times) true tale of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon…and his quest to transplant the human soul. In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain? Dr. Robert White was a friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican’s Commission on Bioethics. He developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques still used in hospitals today and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But like Dr. Jekyll before him, Dr. White had another identity. In his lab, he was waging a battle against the limits of science and against mortality itself—working to perfect a surgery that would allow the soul to live on after the human body had died. This “fascinating” (The Wall Street Journal), “provocative” (The Washington Post) tale follows his decades-long quest into tangled matters of science, Cold War politics, and faith, revealing the complex (and often murky) ethics of experimentation and remarkable innovations that today save patients from certain death. It’s a “masterful” (Science) look at our greatest fears and our greatest hopes—and the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact.
Download or read book Death s Summer Coat written by Brandy Schillace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death is something we all confront—it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances.We are living at a unique point in human history. People are living longer than ever, yet the longer we live, the more taboo and alien our mortality becomes. Yet we, and our loved ones, still remain mortal. People today still struggle with this fact, as we have done throughout our entire history. What led us to this point? What drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar?Schillace shows how talking about death, and the rituals associated with it, can help provide answers. It also brings us closer together—conversation and community are just as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal much about the present—and about ourselves.
Download or read book Steaming into a Victorian Future written by Julie Anne Taddeo and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A popular sub-genre of fantasy and science fiction, steampunk re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. While often considered solely through the lens of literature, steampunk is, in fact, a complex phenomenon that also affects, transforms, and unites a wide range of disciplines, such as art, music, film, television, fashion, new media, and material culture. In Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology, Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller have assembled a collection of essays that consider the social and cultural aspects of this multi-faceted genre. The essays included in this volume examine various manifestations of steampunk—both separately and in relation to each other—in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on—and interrelationship with—popular culture and the wider society. This volume expands and extends existing scholarship on steampunk in order to explore many previously unconsidered questions about cultural creativity, social networking, fandom, appropriation, and the creation of meaning. With a foreword by popular culture scholar Ken Dvorak, and an afterword by steampunk expert Jeff VanderMeer, Steaming into a Victorian Future offers a wide ranging look at the impact of steampunk, as well as the individuals who create, interpret, and consume it.
Download or read book Steampunk written by Paul Roland and published by Oldacastle Books. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Credited with cofounding the movement with his Edwardian/Victorian themed albums, Paul Roland traces the history of the genre, drawing on exclusive quotes from leading writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers in the fieldWhat began in the late 1980s as an underground community of science fiction and fantasy aficionados with a fetish for Victoriana now pervades almost every aspect of popular culture from music and movies to comics and computer games. Written by one of the godfathers of steampunk, this cultural history includes exclusive interviews with key figures including Cherie Priest, Mark Hodder, Kris Kukski, Chaz Kemp, Professor Elemental, and Abney Park. This account demonstrates that steampunk is much more than a retro-futuristic fashion statement or a subgenre of science fiction. On the surface its adherents profess a penchant for neo-Victorian fashion, fanciful clockwork accessories, and have a desire to live in an alternative reality inhabited by airships and eccentric inventions. But the literature, art, music, and movies of this burgeoning community offer a radical and irreverent reimagining of society the way it might have evolved had history taken a sharp detour prior to the industrial revolution giving us a world without electricity, the infernal (sic) combustion engine, and the technology that we take for granted today. The world of steampunk as explored here is the elegant gas lit world of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, of Michael Moorcock and their literary antecedents for whom the digital age never dawned.
Download or read book Clockwork Twist written by Emily Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-17 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the tenth book of 12, in a long series of steampunk adventure books. Set in a magical fantasy version of the Victorian era, the Clockwork Twist series follows an unassuming and introverted clockmaker from London, named Twist. When a clockwork princess needs his help, Twist find himself on an adventures around the world surrounded by airship pirates, secret societies, treasure hunters, vampires, dragons, magical kitsune, and even a genie or two. Are you all caught up? Jonas warned Twist that he would meet his father someday, and that day has finally arrived. Meeting the man, however, was only the first surprise. Now Twist might have a chance to bring his mother back to life, as well. Twist grew up thinking that he was a forgotten and abandoned orphan. If his parents had wanted him, surely they would have kept him. Twist told himself that they both must be long dead, to save himself from farther pain. That, however, was all an illusion specially designed to protect him from evil fairies that wanted his ruin. His mother gave her life to protect Twist, and his father hid him away only because he had no other choice. When Twist's fate catches up to him unexpectedly, he finds himself face to face with the father who abandoned him, and to Twist's shock he finds nothing but remorse in the other man. More than simply wishing that things had been different, that he could have kept and raised Twist himself, Twist's father tells him that he's been working for years to build a time machine with the express intent to bring Twist's mother back from death. Dabbling in the fabric of time, however, is not very straight forward. In preparation to reach into the past and steal Twist's mother away to the present, he accidentally brings an unknown man from the far away future of 1946, into the streets of present day London. Now Twist and his friends have to travel to his father's hidden time machine to set things right.
Download or read book The History of Science Fiction written by A. Roberts and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-11-28 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece up to the present day. The author is both an academic literary critic and acclaimed creative writer of the genre. Written in lively, accessible prose it is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and SF fandom.
Download or read book Mr Humble and Dr Butcher written by Brandy Schillace and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mesmerizing biography of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon and his quest to transplant the human soul. In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain? Dr. Robert White was a friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican’s Commission on Bioethics. He developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques still used in hospitals today and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But like Dr. Jekyll before him, Dr. White had another identity. In his lab, he was waging a battle against the limits of science, and against mortality itself—working to perfect a surgery that would allow the soul to live on after the human body had died. Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher follows his decades-long quest into tangled matters of science, global politics, and faith, revealing the complex (and often murky) ethics of experimentation and remarkable innovations that today save patients from certain death. It’s an enthralling tale that offers a window into our greatest fears and our greatest hopes—and the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact.
Download or read book Cyberpunk Cyberculture written by Dani Cavallaro and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cyberpunk and Cyberculture explores the work of a wide range of writers- Acker, Cadigan, Rucker, Shierley, Sterling, Williams and, of course, Gibson - setting their work in the context of science fiction, other literary genres, genre cinema - from Metropolis to Terminator to The Matrix - and contemporary work on the culture of technology.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Science Fiction written by Gerry Canavan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.
Download or read book Clockwork Lives written by Kevin J. Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Clockwork Angels, Kevin J. Anderson and Rush drummer Neil Peart created a steampunk world to accompany the Rush album of the same name. Now they return to the world they created. Marinda Peake leads a quiet life; she gave up on her ambitions to take care of her ailing alchemist father. When he dies, he gives Marinda a mysterious blank book that she must fill with other people's stories - and her own. Clockwork Lives is a steampunk Canterbury Tales, and much more, as Marinda strives to change her life from a mere 'sentence or two' to a true epic.
Download or read book Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America written by Edward King and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4
Download or read book Ghosts of My Life written by Mark Fisher and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.
Download or read book Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity The Birth of the Monster in Literature Film and Media written by Andrea Wood and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written about gender and the monstrous, but sustained engagement with textual manifestations of cultural and unconscious fears and anxieties about "unnatural" reproduction has been limited. This book expands the current discourse on the monstrous reproductive potential of bodies-as well as minds-from a more interdisciplinary and transhistorical framework. While scholarly interest in monsters and the monstrous is certainly not new, studies on monstrous reproduction and birth have tended to be either discipline or period specific, and many are now dated. Drawing from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives in film and media studies, literary studies, history, medicine and women's and gender studies, Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity builds upon pre-existing work while engaging more directly with monstrous progeny, as well as with unnatural reproduction(s), which threaten to eclipse the future, cast uncertainty on the present, and reimagine the past. Ultimately, then, the primary contribution of this book lies not only with its extensive treatment of reproductive monstrosity and unnatural parturition, but with the breadth and intriguing continuity that only a wide lens can provide. This book does not attempt to provide a complete historical assessment or catalog of the enduring cultural fascination with the reproductive origins and potential of monsters. Rather, it provides diverse interdisciplinary and transhistorical perspectives with single unifying theme of unnatural reproduction(s), which is unique to the collection, remaining central to the concept of monstrosity and its evolving narrative incarnations. This interdisciplinary collection spanning the areas of history, literature, medical humanities, and film and media studies explores the transhistorical textual fascination with reproductive monstrosity and unnatural parturition. The collection's four sections provide perspective on hyperbolic and monstrous representations of reproduction and birth that speak to anxieties and fears about gender and sexuality, codified through "unnatural" manifestations and their progeny. By focusing not only on the effect of the monstrous, but also on its reproduction in a variety of genres and modes from science to cinema, the essays in this collection offer critical insight into enduring questions about the genesis of monsters and their reproductive potential that have long haunted the world and continue to shape many fears about the future. This book analyzes how fears about unnatural reproduction and monstrous offspring-and their frequent connections to the feminine-have proliferated and propagated across the very texts which are repetitively created and consumed. Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity is an important interdisciplinary book for university library collections and scholars working in women's and gender studies, film and media studies, history, literature, and medical humanities.
