Word: clockwork
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...imagine if Babbage hadn't abandoned it. Fork the timeline. Imagine if computing technology had developed along the lines of Babbage's vision: brass and steel instead of silicon and plastic; clockwork instead of electronics. In fact, imagine if all the great technological revolutions of the past 100 years hadn't happened. Our world would run on Victorian tech--it would be a handmade, steam-powered world, finished in leather and mahogany. It's an elegant, romantic vision. And it has a name: steampunk...
Ever since then, steampunk has been bubbling under: in role-playing games and anime, video games like Myst and Thief and comic books like Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Look at the dirigibles and clockwork mechanisms in Philip Pullman's alt-Victorian The Golden Compass. Recall the steam-driven, Kenneth Branagh--piloted arachnid colossus in Will Smith's Wild Wild West...
Things didn't always go like clockwork, though. The Shanghai World Financial Center, the 101-story building that houses the hotel, launched in 1997 and promptly stalled in the Asian financial crisis. A series of restarts and halts followed. Shanghai officials also fretted over the design, which called for a large circular hole to be cut through the top of the building to relieve the force of strong winds. The feature would too much resemble the rising sun of the Japanese flag, they argued. Architect David Malott concocted a trapezoidal cutout instead, giving the building a striking resemblance...
Alternative futures call for alternative language. “1984” had Newspeak, “A Clockwork Orange” had Nadsat—each distorted, disorienting vocabulary a warning of possible ills. In “The Year of the Flood,” her most recent novel and the second in a series of three, Margaret Atwood similarly invents a dictionary for her post-apocalyptic world. But her words are amusing than ominous—the lexicon for a dystopian vision at once entertaining and insubstantial. Atwood’s way with words should come...
...dawn of the 21st century, America is, if nothing else, the land of the bargain. Big-box stores like Wal-Mart dominate the retail landscape, peddling middling goods at rock-bottom prices. Higher-end stores put their merchandise on sale like clockwork; if you wait a little longer, you can get it even cheaper at a factory outlet. Afterward, you can fill up on all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster for $15 - truly, the American Dream...