Download or read book The Machine Anxieties of Steampunk written by Kathe Hicks Albrecht and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is steampunk and why are people across the globe eagerly embracing its neo-Victorian aesthetic? Old-fashioned eye goggles, lace corsets, leather vests, brass gears and gadgets, mechanical clocks, the look appears across popular culture, in movies, art, fashion, and literature. But steampunk is both an aesthetic program and a way-of-life and its underlying philosophy is the key to its broad appeal. Steampunk champions a new autonomy for the individual caught up in today's technology-driven society. It expresses optimism for the future but it also delivers a note of caution about our human role in a world of ever more ubiquitous and powerful machines. Thus, despite adopting an aesthetic and lifestyle straight out of the Victorian scientific romance, steampunk addresses significant 21st-century concerns about what lies ahead for humankind. The movement recovers autonomy from prevailing trends even as it challenges us to ask what it is to be human today.
Download or read book The Machine Anxieties of Steampunk written by Kathe Hicks Albrecht and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is steampunk and why are people across the globe eagerly embracing its neo-Victorian aesthetic? Old-fashioned eye goggles, lace corsets, leather vests, brass gears and gadgets, mechanical clocks, the look appears across popular culture, in movies, art, fashion, and literature. But steampunk is both an aesthetic program and a way-of-life and its underlying philosophy is the key to its broad appeal. Steampunk champions a new autonomy for the individual caught up in today's technology-driven society. It expresses optimism for the future but it also delivers a note of caution about our human role in a world of ever more ubiquitous and powerful machines. Thus, despite adopting an aesthetic and lifestyle straight out of the Victorian scientific romance, steampunk addresses significant 21st-century concerns about what lies ahead for humankind. The movement recovers autonomy from prevailing trends even as it challenges us to ask what it is to be human today.
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 Steampunk and Nineteenth Century Digital Humanities written by Roger Whitson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China. Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzón into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.
Download or read book The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect written by Nancy Wellington Bookhart and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect: Visual Arts Series' introduces the audience to philosophical concepts that broach the beginning of the history of Western thought in Plato and Aristotle to that of more modern thought in the theoretician Jacques Rancière in which the main conceptual framework of this anthology is predicated. The introduction is mainly concerned with Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, which is the arrangement of things accessible to our senses, what we experience in real-time and space— compartmentalization and categorization of all things. These things do not just involve tangible items, but audible speech, written language, and visibilities. Rancière’s theory of the regimes of art is undertaken as the unfolding of the distribution. Such is evoked in the various genres of visual art forms, from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional sculptures and architectures. Understanding the aesthetic regime of art is crucial for grasping how art performs time travel. One way of understanding this phenomenon is in terms of embodied philosophy imbued vis-à-vis art forms, which are subsequently challenged by contemporary artists. The contributing essays examine these reiterations, reevaluations—performances. Aesthetics is a term deriving from the 18th-century European Enlightenment. It is here that aesthetics as the study of beauty is probed for its political potential after the failure of the French Revolution. Many major thinkers during this period signed on to the aesthetic moment, recognizing that Reason in its present state failed to develop humankind beyond barbarism. J.E.B. Stuart's statue is part of an equestrian theme that approximates the Western canon of power and class in the pursuit of domination. But such power and domination will be dethroned in the restaging of history and the redistribution of said canon. This reimagining of the form not only alters perception but constitutes a new narrative.
Download or read book The Real World of Victorian Steampunk written by Simon Webb and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the surprising nineteenth-century technology that inspires this literary and cultural movement: “I was very impressed by this book.” —SF Crowsnest In recent decades, steampunk has grown from a rather obscure subgenre of science fiction into a striking and distinctive style of fashion, art, design, and even music. It is in the written word, however, that steampunk has its roots—and in this book Simon Webb explores and examines the real inventions that underpin the fantasy. In doing so, he reveals a world unknown to most people today. Webb reveals the Victorian era as a surprising place: one of steam-powered airplanes, fax machines linking Moscow and St Petersburg, steam cars traveling at over 100 mph, electric taxis, and wireless telephones. It is, in short, the nineteenth century as you’ve never before seen it—a steampunk extravaganza of anachronistic technology and unfamiliar gadgets. Imagine Europe spanned by a mechanical internet, a telecommunication system of clattering semaphore towers capable of transmitting information across the continent in a matter of minutes. Consider too, the fact that a steam plane the size of a modern airliner took off in England in 1894. Drawing entirely on contemporary sources, we see how little-known developments in technology have been used as the basis for so many steampunk narratives. From seminal novels such as The Difference Engine to the steampunk fantasy of Terry Pratchett’s later works, this book shows that steampunk is at least as much solid fact as it is whimsical fiction.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic written by Jerrold E. Hogle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion explores the many ways in which the Gothic has dispersed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in particular how it has come to offer a focus for the tensions inherent in modernity. Fourteen essays by world-class experts show how the Gothic in numerous forms - including literature, film, television, and cyberspace - helps audiences both to distance themselves from and to deal with some of the key underlying problems of modern life. Topics discussed include the norms and shifting boundaries of sex and gender, the explosion of different forms of media and technology, the mixture of cultures across the western world, the problem of identity for the modern individual, what people continue to see as evil, and the very nature of modernity. Also including a chronology and guide to further reading, this volume offers a comprehensive account of the importance of Gothic to modern life and thought.
Download or read book The Steampunk Bible written by Jeff VanderMeer and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wonderful essays on everything steampunk, written by well-known names in the movement who are living steampunk every day” (Wired.com). Steampunk—a grafting of Victorian aesthetic and punk rock attitude onto various forms of science-fiction culture—is a phenomenon that has come to influence film, literature, art, music, fashion, and more. The Steampunk Bible is the first compendium about the movement, tracing its roots in the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells through its most recent expression in movies such as Sherlock Holmes. Its adherents celebrate the inventor as an artist and hero, re-envisioning and crafting retro technologies including antiquated airships and robots. A burgeoning DIY community has brought a distinctive Victorian-fantasy style to their crafts and art. Steampunk evokes a sense of adventure and discovery, and embraces extinct technologies as a way of talking about the future. This ultimate manual will appeal to aficionados and novices alike as author Jeff VanderMeer takes the reader on a wild ride through the clockwork corridors of Steampunk history. Praise for The Steampunk Bible “An informed, informative and beautifully illustrated survey of the subject.” —The Financial Times “The Steampunk Bible is far and away the most intriguing catalog of all things steam yet written.” —The Austin Chronicle
Download or read book Like Clockwork written by Rachel A. Bowser and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture Once a small subculture, the steampunk phenomenon exploded in visibility during the first years of the twenty-first century, its influence and prominence increasing ever since. From its Victorian and literary roots to film and television, video games, music, and even fashion, this subgenre of science fiction reaches far and wide within current culture. Here Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall present cutting-edge essays on steampunk: its rise in popularity, its many manifestations, and why we should pay attention. Like Clockwork offers wide-ranging perspectives on steampunk’s history and its place in contemporary culture, all while speaking to the “why” and “why now” of the genre. In her essay, Catherine Siemann draws on authors such as William Gibson and China Miéville to analyze steampunk cities; Kathryn Crowther turns to disability studies to examine the role of prosthetics within steampunk as well as the contemporary culture of access; and Diana M. Pho reviews the racial and national identities of steampunk, bringing in discussions of British chap-hop artists, African American steamfunk practitioners, and multicultural steampunk fan cultures. From disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities, Like Clockwork explores the intriguing history of steampunk to evaluate the influence of the genre from the 1970s through the twenty-first century. Contributors: Kathryn Crowther, Perimeter College at Georgia State University; Shaun Duke, University of Florida; Stefania Forlini, University of Calgary (Canada); Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin–Waukesha; Mike Perschon, MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta; Diana M. Pho; David Pike, American University; Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Joseph Weakland, Georgia Institute of Technology; Roger Whitson, Washington State University.
Download or read book Steampunk FAQ written by Mike Perschon and published by Backbeat Books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (FAQ). "What is steampunk?" Going beyond the standard default definitions of "Victorian science fiction," "yesterday's tomorrow today," or some other equally vague or limited description, Steampunk FAQ provides a historical exploration of its literary and cinematic origins. The journey begins with a look at steampunk's genesis in the novels and short stories of three Californians who hung out a lot with Philip K. Dick, before moving on to the inspirations and antecedents of steampunk. Contrary to what many articles and books say, steampunk's direct inspiration is arguably far more cinematic than literary, a likely reaction to the many film adaptations, pastiches, and knockoffs of the scientific romances of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. While Verne, Wells, and a host of other Victorian and Edwardian writers have influenced steampunk fiction, cinematic elements from films such as Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and George Pal's Time Machine (1960) show up more often as immediate influences on the style we call steampunk. In offering a celebration of steampunk's style and cultural aesthetic, Steampunk FAQ also explores its connection to cyberpunk, the world of fashion, comics, and culture around the world.
Download or read book Neo Victorianism and the Memory of Empire written by Elizabeth Ho and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the global dimensions of Neo-Victorianism, this book explores how the appropriation of Victorian images in contemporary literature and culture has emerged as a critical response to the crises of decolonization and Imperial collapse. Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire explores the phenomenon by reading a range of popular and literary Anglophone neo-Victorian texts, including Alan Moore's Graphic Novel From Hell, works by Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood, the films of Jackie Chan and contemporary 'Steampunk' science fiction. Through these readings Elizabeth Ho explores how constructions of popular memory and fictionalisations of the past reflect political and psychological engagements with our contemporary post-Imperial circumstances.
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 161 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 Steampunk III Steampunk Revolution written by Ann VanderMeer and published by Tachyon Publications. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playfully mashing up the romantic elegance of the Victorian era with whimsically modernized technology, the wildly popular steampunk genre is here to stay. Now...long live the revolution! Steampunk Revolution features a renegade collective of writers and artists, including steampunk legends and hot, new talents rebooting the steam-driven past and powering it into the future. Lev Grossman’s “Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham, GBE, a.k.a. Roboticus the All-Knowing” is the Six-Million-Dollar Steampunk Man, possessing appendages and workings recycled from metal parts, yet also fully human, resilient, and determined. Bruce Sterling’s “White Fungus” introduces steampunk’s younger cousin, salvage-punk, speculating on how cities will be built in the future using preexisting materials. Cat Valente’s “Mother Is a Machine” explores the merging of man and machine and a whole new form of parenting. In Jeff VanderMeer’s anti-steampunk story “Fixing Hanover,” a creator must turn his back on his creation because it is so utterly destructive. And Cherie Priest presents “The Clockroach,” a new and very unsettling mode of transportation. Going far beyond corsets and goggles, Steampunk Revolution is not just your granddad’s zeppelin—it’s an even wilder ride.
Download or read book Steampunk d written by Jean Rabe and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steampunk can be defined as a subgenre of science fiction that is typically set in an anachronistic Victorian or quasi-Victorian setting, where steam power is prevalent. Consider the slogan: "What the past would look like if the future had come along earlier." The stories in this all-original anthology explore alternate timelines and have been set all over the world, running the gamut from science fiction to mystery to horror to a melding of these genres.
Download or read book The Steampunk User s Manual written by Jeff VanderMeer and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive guide to Steampunk creations of all kinds offers inspiration and practical tips for bringing your own retro-futuristic visions to life. Whether you’re a newbie to the world of Steampunk, or a long-time enthusiast of airships, goggles, and mad scientists, The Steampunk User’s Manual is essential reading. The popular subgenre of science fiction has grown into a cultural movement; one that invites fans to let their imaginations go wild. In this volume, Jeff VanderMeer—the renowned expert in all things Steampunk—presents a practical and inspirational guidance for finding your own path into this realm. Including sections on art, fashion, architecture, crafts, music, performance, and storytelling, The Steampunk User's Manual provides a conceptual how-to guide on everything from the utterly doable to the completely over-the-top.
Download or read book Clockwork Futures written by Brandy Schillace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 390 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 Machine of God written by D. A. Metrov and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Steampunk Fantasy Novel—The story of a Leonardo da Vinci airship that could have changed history! AUTHOR'S PREFACE In 2011, in the Swiss Alpine village of Appenzell, a local banker, Messr. Didier Allenbach, inherited the meager estate of his uncle, Peter Gunld Gensler. The “estate” consisted of little more than a moldering trunk full of antique books which had been found in the old man's attic. Among these works was a small antique diary belonging to a distant relative by the name of Lukas Fluck. Apparently Messr. Gensler had never bothered to read the diary as it was scripted in a long forgotten, Italian provincial dialect. Didier Allenbach, however (working on a hunch), took the diary to a linguistic specialist who proceeded to translate one of the most astounding tales in history. Essentially, the story was a firsthand account by first mate Lukas Fluck that may be summarized as follows: In 1478 King Louis XI of France commissioned 26 year old Leonardo da Vinci to build a trade vehicle capable of traveling the quickest and most direct route from Naples to Paris—a machine not only capable of traversing land, sea, and air, but also able to withstand assault from marauding armies, pernicious sorcerers, and nature's fury. In light of existing technology, it was an impossible task. Leonardo however—desperate to establish his fame and fortune—accepted the challenge with youthful vigor. He not only built the craft, but set out to prove its merit by commanding its crew the entire length of the designated route. The whole affair ended in utter disaster. Still, the trade vehicle Leonardo invented was arguably his most brilliant creation. It was described in minute detail in one of his acclaimed notebooks. Unfortunately, this notebook is one of the many which failed to survive the ravages of time. Nonetheless, historians now agree, had this invention not been completely destroyed, it would have propelled the 15th Century directly into the 20th. Lukas Fluck wrote that those involved in Leonardo's mind-staggering journey dubbed his vessel “The Machine of God.” Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Fluck tells us Leonardo partook in several such enterprises during his lifetime. Historians, to date, know little of any of them. It is this author's stated mission to unearth and publish said tales beginning with this, Book One, which has been composed from Fluck's diary and known historical data. ~ D.A. MetrovJANUARY 6, 2012 Machinepunk for the New Renaissance--A Steampunk Fantasy AdventureThis rollicking, yet intelligent yarn will appeal to boys (of all ages), and the women who love them. Readers looking for the best Young Adult Fantasy and particularly Steampunk fiction books will want to take note: D. A. Metrov not only writes with passion and sensual detail, but with a wink to current day issues. His heroic characters are defenders of Mother Nature. On a deeper level, they have an innate alliance with a mysterious, Spiritual Force—the same Force that created the Universe. Metrov's unique blend of epic fantasy, steampunk, fantastic Renaissance inventions, and metaphysics draws the reader ever deeper into a remarkable new realm of historical fantasy literature. His background as a film director, screenwriter, and fine arts painter adds fresh cinematic scope to his unique brand of young adult storytelling. If you love anything Renaissance, or historical fiction, J.R.R. Tolkein, LORD OF THE RINGS, dragon stories, steampunk, compelling characters, strong female counterparts, and wicked, mechanical inventions, you will very likely add MACHINE OF GOD to your best young adult fiction list.
