Word: victorians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...Wells' The Time Machine in which the Morlocks travel back in time to invade 1890s London. Steampunk--Jeter coined the name--was already an established subgenre by 1990, when William Gibson and Bruce Sterling introduced a wider audience to it in The Difference Engine, a novel set in a Victorian England running Babbage's hardware and ruled by Lord Byron, who had escaped death in Greece...
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...
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...
...novel, I understood the virtue of having titles that readers-at-large could recognize so that they'd know you had a next book out. I was reading an Edward Gorey cartoon book called The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and his book is a series of pen-and-ink drawings of Victorian children being done in various ways. If you have not read it, it is truly amusing. His book goes, "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who [wasted away]," on down the alphabet. And I thought...