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Steampunk

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Anonymous

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Can anyone recommend me any "Steampunk" reading... it's a term I've only recently come across and realised it describes one of my interests perfectly (over-elaborate Victorian era technology). I'm mostly interested in non-fiction, but any quality fiction (apart from the obvious) would be welcome. The kinds of things I'm thinking of are:

- Questionable/mad inventions (similar style to "Patent of the Week" website material)
- Mechanical/electrical medical quackery
- Great failures
- Victorian paranormal equipment

.etc.etc.

Thanks :)
 
I don't know if this is what you mean, but there's the Dead Media Project website.

There's also a Medical Quackery website - I posted the link somewhere else, I'll dig it up if you want.

[Edit]
Oooh, there's several. On this thread started by... DD! ;)
 
'Banvards Folly'- Paul Collins, might be of use. I have read it and I'm sure there's a couple of Victorian questionable inventions in there.
 
Sally said:
Oooh, there's several. On this thread started by... DD! ;)
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Thank you, smartarse :p I was thinking more of the paperback/hardback variety. Though any other interesting links are always appreciated.
 
Oh yes, I forgot about Banvard's Folly. I've got it here - "13 tales of renowned obscurity, famous anonymity and rotten luck".

Among those that might fit DD's bill:
Symmes Hole - concentric Earth theorist.
The man with N-ray eyes - Rene Blondot, who thought he'd discovered a new form of radiation.
If only geniuses knew how to scheme - Jean Francois Sudre's Solresol system.
The pneumatic underground - unveiled in New York in 1870.
AJ Pleasonton's blue light special - medical quackery.

And he gives further reading too.


Happy now? :p
 
Not quite.... the last two in your list:

The pneumatic underground - unveiled in New York in 1870.
AJ Pleasonton's blue light special - medical quackery.

Are these books, publications....?

Ta.
 
The only steampunk I ever read was Gibson's The Difference Engine, which IMO is goddam lousy.
 
S.M. Stirling's "The Peshawar Lancers" was pretty good, although it read like the middle book in a trilogy that I'm still waiting for him to put out. And I thought The Difference Engine was pretty good, but I'll admit, it was for technical details that I found fascinating... Guess I'm just a geek to the bone.
 
On the fictional side:

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Philip Jose Farmer (The 'real story' behind Around the World in 80 Days)

Queen Victoria's Bomb by Ronald Clark (invention of the atomic bomb during the Crimean War)
 
If you can find it, Anti-Ice by Stephen Baxter (Victorian scientist discovers cache of anti-matter frozen inside a magnetic meteor found in IIRC Antartica and uses it to build first an anti-matter bomb to end the Crimean War, and then a steam-powered spaceship to go to the moon. Terrific fun.) :)

Avoid Captain Nemo by KJ Anderson. (Tries to be a biography of Nemo re-imagined as a boyhood friend of Verne's, and whose life is the 'real-life' model upon which all of Verne's novels were based: goes round the world in a balloon, experiments with diving equipment, discovers a vast cave network below the earth, etc. Barely readable prose and unutterably dull, and ultimately, when you think about it, a monumental insult to Verne -so he was a failed playwright whose greatest works were all simply novelizations of fragments of his best mate's diary? Pfui.) :rolleyes:
 
Oh, Well. On To The Fiction Section

There's always, 'A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!' (1972), by Harry Harrison. A World where the US never won the 'War of Independence' so North America is still one of the jewels in Brittania's crown. The World being all the happier for it of course!

Steam powered aircraft powered by powdered coal, gargantuan 'Babbige Engines,' a brave 'Kingdom Brunel' style engineer struggling alongside his plucky Irish navvies, in atomic powered subs, to lay down the sections of a Trans-Atlantic tunnel to carry a highspeed 'atmospheric railway.'

Well ahead of the craze, I can recommend that one.

Then there's the exquisite, 'fin de everything' decadence of Michael Moorcock's, 'Dancers At The End Of Time' series, where the action takes place between the end of the Universe (where the last representative descendants of humanity are able to do anything their imagination can conceive of, by expending the last dregs of cosmic energy, thus bringing the Universe to a close) and late Victorian London.

Odd, funny and worth checking out. ;)
 
Christopher Priest’s ‘The Space Machine’ (circa 1976, but included in a recent omnibus edition of Priest’s work) a sort of HG Wells pastiche were the machine takes our protagonist to what Wells’s version of Mars might have looked.

Though not quite steampunk Christopher Priest The Prestige (1995) about a late Victorian magician century who commissions Nikola Tesla to build him a teleportation device in as part of a bitter rivalry with another magician.
 
I we are talking about Michael moorcock then the Oswald Bastabe trilogy (The War Lord of the Air, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar) might also fit in the genre.

Emps
 
Emperor Zombie: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh - I only have the individual books.

Emps
 
Emperor said:
I we are talking about Michael moorcock then the Oswald Bastabe trilogy (The War Lord of the Air, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar) might also fit in the genre.

Emps
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Yes, boggle at the giant airships with their hardened, 'boron fibre' hulls and the mighty land dreadnoughts. Great stuff!

Oswald Bastable being, originally, a knickerbockered lad in several books by E.E. Nesbitt and unfortunate enough, as an adult, to become an accidental time traveller, visiting several neo-Victorian parallel realities. :)
 
Wow i never realised there was a name for this stuff, i'm so happy i'll have to check these books out.
 
Alan Moore's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" comic book very steampunk - don't be put off by the film - the comic is the stuff of genius.
 
How did we get so far without anyone mentioning China Mieville? Perdido Street Station and The Scar are both modern classics and I would definitely define them as Steampunk although they are not set in this world.

The Bastable Books are really good - I wouldn't classify Dancers at the End of Time as Steampunk, though- more obscure fin-de-siecle comedy. Well worth reading, though- they are among Moorcock's best - in places they are as funny as anything I have read.
 
is hte film bad? i will have to hunt the original down
any onegive me any info on it?
 
Dark Detective said:
Not quite.... the last two in your list:

The pneumatic underground - unveiled in New York in 1870.
AJ Pleasonton's blue light special - medical quackery.

Are these books, publications....?

Ta.
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Sorry, I wasn't very clear. They're chapters in Banvard's Folly.

The pneumatic underground was invented by Alfred Ely Beach. His illustrated 1868 volume The Pneumatic Dispatch can be found at the Science and Business branch of the New York Public Library, according to Paul Collins, as can the General Description of the Broadway Underground Railway and To the Friends of Rapid City Transit, both 1871. For the opposition, see Unanswerable Objections to the Broadway Underground Railway (1873).
Other references include James Blaine Walker's Fifty Years of Rapid Transit (1917), the July 12 1877 issue of Nature, Charles Hadfield's Atmospheric Railways: A Victorian Venture in Silent Speed (1967), and the 1867-1872 issues of Scientific American (he was the owner of the mag). And apparently, pics of the railway are to be found on the walls of any Subway...

A.J. Pleasanton published The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and the Blue Colour of the Sky in 1876 & 1877, and there are copies in the Library of Congress, NY Public Library and major research libraries like Berkeley and San Francisco. There are more publications on blue light mentionned in the book.
 
AndroMan said:
Yes, boggle at the giant airships with their hardened, 'boron fibre' hulls and the mighty land dreadnoughts. Great stuff!
Click to expand...

It's years since I read any of these. Thanks for reminding me Androman, I'll dig them out and enjoy them again! :)
 
So Dark Detective asks for the less obvious choices. Could i have someof hte obvious ones please? having discovered a genre i didn't know really existed but is what i am alsways looking for.
They tried to d othe Steampunk thing in Wild Wild West 9and mostly failed) with hte result that the gadget train stole the show. (although Kevin Kline was close but hats just my weird old bloke thing coming through)
 
Mischa said:
They tried to d othe Steampunk thing in Wild Wild West 9and mostly failed) with hte result that the gadget train stole the show. (although Kevin Kline was close but hats just my weird old bloke thing coming through)
Click to expand...

I love that movie! (Yes, I'm sad). I think it was very Steampunk, like some aspects of the original show, in a gimmicky gadgety way.
 
I have made purchase of The Time Stream trilogy and the first volume of hte league of extraordinary Gentlemen. i wait with baited breath
 
Steampunk RPGs

Hi There

Some RPG recommendations if you are looking for Steampunk:

Deadlands RPG published by Pinnacle. An alternative history Wild West where LA has broken up and half of it has fallen into the sea leading to the discovery of ghost rock. A kind of coal that burns with extreme intensity and drives wonderful machines and crazy inventions.

Castle Falkenstein - Never played or read this but I've been told that it is steampunk.

Good luck with the search

All The Best

Jon
 
Castle Falkenstein is magical steampunk. Basically, all of the fantastic ideas that people came up with which wouldn't have worked with the technology of the time are made possible by the existence of magic within the setting. It's a fantastic game, with plenty of ideas spurred by the setting material.

I would recommend that you look for a book called "EurekAAARRGH!!" by Adam Hart-Davies, which is essentially a collection of wacky Victorian inventions, most of which never got off the ground. Not exactly steampunk, but closely related.

And one of the books of Nemesis the Warlock from 2000AD was set on an alien world modelled on a steampunk Victorian England - fabulous stuff. I think that had the same illustrator (Kevin O'Neill?) as "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".
 
Adam Hart-Davis is the best, i always watch his programmes. i will perhaps ask for that book for Xmas.
 
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