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Steampunk

I've just found a reference to the Velocipede Shower Bath, invented in 1897. The Shower Bath was a combination bicycle and shower - you powered the shower by cycling. There is one in the Twain Museum in Virginia City.

Ebay's selling a reproduction of an old ad.

Not a bibliographical reference, but I thought you'd like to add it to your collection. ;)

[Edit]
The same ebayer is offering a reproduction of an ad for Electroplating the Dead - apparently invented by a Dr. Varlot, Parisian surgeon.
 
i've just reveived my copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and was ever so pleased to find references to Anthony Trollope.
 
For fiction I'd suggest Peter Ackroyd's 1994 novel, "Dan Leno & the Limehouse
Golem" over which Babbage's Difference Engines cast a baleful
shadow and are somehow implicated in a series of JTR-like crimes.

All a bit post-modern and over-playful for me but I managed to finish it.

Meanwhile, if you can face the truth, here is a page devoted to Victorian
Robots!

http://www.bigredhair.com/robots/

:eek!!!!:
 
Thanks, everyone. :)

I forgot to mention that since posting this request, and as a result of your recommendations, Santa brought me "Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem", "Perdido Street Station", and "Banvard's Folly". I'll be dipping into those after I've finished "The Dedalus Book of Absinthe" :)
 
perdido street station is pretty good.

the difference engine sucks arse.
 
Dark Detective said:
Thanks, everyone. :)

I forgot to mention that since posting this request, and as a result of your recommendations, Santa brought me "Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem", "Perdido Street Station", and "Banvard's Folly". I'll be dipping into those after I've finished "The Dedalus Book of Absinthe" :)

Excellent stuff.

Isn't "The Crimson Pirate" like the first (unintentionally) steampunk film?
 
The Nemesis The Warlock (2000AD) storyline about the Terminators attack on The Gothic Empire is pure steampunk. The Gothic empire was a group of planets populated by creatures who had copied their civilisation from Victorian England.
 
Inhabitant said:
The Nemesis The Warlock (2000AD) storyline about the Terminators attack on The Gothic Empire is pure steampunk. The Gothic empire was a group of planets populated by creatures who had copied their civilisation from Victorian England.

and quite recently in the last 6-12 months, 2000ad did a series very loosely based on hg wells "war of the worlds" when victorian society adapted martian technology for everyday use

(hope the above makes sense?)
 
How about `The Demon of Cawpore` by a certain Jules Verne??

(i wont spoil you by telling you what its about, but the fact that it is set in India will give a clue)
 
melf said:
and quite recently in the last 6-12 months, 2000ad did a series very loosely based on hg wells "war of the worlds" when victorian society adapted martian technology for everyday use
Eh? What? :eek: There weren't any giant robots the Kaiser had reverse-engineered from the Martian tripods battling it out against jet-engined biplanes armed with deathrays built by Tesla and Edison to defend Earth against future Martian attacks in that were there? :eek!!!!: (Reaches for phone number of lawyer just in case.)
 
it was a sort of "what if?" story line
i think?
 
K.W. Jeter's Infernal Devices is a fun "Steampunk" tale.
Try the Luther Arkwright comic series too.

Oh, and I quite liked the Difference Engine actually.
 
I don't know how you feel about graphic formats, but Phil Foglio has lots of Steampunk fun in his Girl Genius comic. The setting is a Europe dominated by stereotypical mad scientists, who put together clunky, but devastating, giant robots, airships, death rays, etc. They also do genetic work, though it's not clear how. One of the characters is an enhanced tom cat, gengineered to be King of the Cats so that the mad scientist could subvert domestic cats into a covert arm of his world-dominating army. Unfortunately (for him and the cat), he didn't take feline culture into account. I don't know how easy Foglio is to get on y'all's side of the water, but that's what the net is for. You can read the first issue for free at the website.

http://www.studiofoglio.com/

Unfortunately there was no easy way to jump to the end of the book to see if the hilarious abstracts from meetings of mad scientist societies are included. As I recall (the first issues are filed), in Issue 1 the topic was all the failed attempts to get to America by firing convicts on rockets, training whales, etc.

It's hard to make scientific progress when the standard way of proving your theories is to use them to kill the proponents of competing theories.
 
Scarlet Traces by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, printed by Dark Horse. Contains references to friends of Cooj and myself...
 
On the anime front, I reckon Kishin Heidan ('Kishin Corps') is kinda steampunk-ish and utterly brill: apparently based on a novel (dunno if it was a graphic novel or a text one tho'), the setting's an alternate WWII, where alien invaders from another dimension (like lumps of taffy with Cylon eyes, armed with machine guns) add a whole mess of complication to the conflict between Axis and Allies -and of course, it being anime, Earth is defended by a group of (beautifully realised) giant robot mecha that have been built using a combination of captured alien power sources and good old early 20th C. valve and hydraulic technology. (Much better series IMO than the more highly-acclaimed Giant Robo, which I simply found too noisy and irritating.)
 
This might be a stetch, but how about Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series? It centers on Mark Twain and a Riverboat in a strange new world.
 
i think this is the right place?

after reading the steampunk books thread. it got me thinking:-

how many steampunk style computer games are there?

cos i can only think of 2 (3 then) possible ones:-

arcanum. rpg (with humans, dwarfs, elves etc) for pc (mix of magic and technology)

technomage. rpg for ps1 (also a mix of m & t)

(wild, wild west. for the ps1)

or dont the 1st two count?
 
More fantasy but American McGee's Alice might just slide in there.

Steam power and an obsession with clockwork are recurrent themes, esp. later on, the Jabberwock is a cyborg with a furnace in it's chest and steam issuing from pipes in its back, and the Hatter is trying to turn the Dormouse and the March Hare into automata.
 
In that vein, Arcanum is an RPG hodgepodge of steampunk and high fantasy (steamengines, elves, dwarves, ancient curses, mechanical killer spiders, necromancers and Industrialist Philanthropists). Huge game map and promises of non-linear play that come to nothing if you do any buggering thing out of the sequence that the designers expect (Elven queen refuses you an audience if you've accidentally already completed the quest she's supposed to send you on, and the game can't advance from that point if she doesn't speak to you). And a hard-drive hog.

But very atmospheric nonetheless.
 
ta for letting me know, but ive only just started :(

please dont delete your post :D
 
I had a hand in designing one (for PCs) some time ago - it was never put into full production, alas! All that concept art for nothing!
 
The 'Thief' games on PC had a kind of steampunk vibe going on if I remember rightly ....
 
I had to stop myself buying a copy of a 'Myst' style game called, 'The Secret of The Nautilus', last week.

I bought a crap DVD instead, more fool me!
 
High fantasy as it is, Morrowind has a steampunk element to it in some places. Also, it looked like Planescape Torment did something similar, but I haven't really played that, so this doesn't count as informed commentary.

Certainly there is a gap in the market there...
 
I'm surprised no-one's yet mentioned Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful anime 'Castle in the Sky' (aka Laputa, the Flying Island). It's set in an alternative/parallel Victorian-era Europe and has airship battles, sky pirates as well as the obligatory giant robots. It was shown on UK TV one Christmas about 10 years ago; but has recently been released over here on DVD. Marvellous stuff.
 
Now why did I forget Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia?

From the blurb on the back.
In 1912 the world changes overnight. Europe and all its inhabitants disappear, replaced by a primeval continent which becomes known as Darwinia: a strange land in which evolution has followed a different path.


Not memorable, but maybe that's just my opinion.
 
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