Word: steampunk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Instead of fading away, steampunk has gotten increasingly intense and relevant, and right now it seems to be rising to the surface. Scores of steampunk novels were published this year. There are steampunk housewares and steampunk bands and Victorian-inflected steampunk fashions. There are 27 steampunk iPhone apps available on iTunes. Magazines like Steampunk and blogs like Brass Goggles and the Heliograph track the scene. A museum in Oxford, England, is currently holding an exhibition of steampunk art. The steampunk meet-up at last summer's Comic-Con in San Diego was mobbed. In late October, Seattle hosted Steamcon...
Scott Westerfeld, whose Uglies novels are huge best sellers, chose a steampunk setting for his new young-adult series. Leviathan, published in October, tells the story of two teenagers--an Austrian prince and an English girl passing as a boy--in a Europe divided between the Austro-Hungarian Clankers, who are technologists, and the British Darwinists, who are bioengineers. "Leviathan takes place as World War I begins, which is the end of the early era of technological romance," Westerfeld explains. "Those first tanks and other machines of war look almost comical to us now, but to the first soldiers...
...read the steampunk movement as a response to the realities of modern consumer technology. Take the iPhone: its form gives no clue as to its function or who made it or where it came from. There are no screws. You can't hack it. It's perfect, but it might as well have been made by aliens and fallen to Earth in an asteroid...
...same way punk took back music, steampunk reclaims technology for the masses. It substitutes metal gears for silicon, pneumatic tubes for 3G and wi-fi. It maximizes what was miniaturized and makes visible what was hidden. Where the iPhone is all stainless steel and high-gloss plastic, steampunk is brass and wood and leather. Steampunk isn't mass-produced; it's bespoke and unique, and if you don't like it, you can tinker with it till...
...Steampunk is like a snapshot from the last moment in human history when technology was intelligible to the layman. "The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects," Westerfeld says. "Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine...