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About to become passe? About to? If I hear one more goddam story on freakin steampunk, my brass cranium plate with leather earstraps and fillagree claps is gonna pop off, the hiss of escaping pressurized water vapour drowning out the clanking of my recumbent velocipede!! SFF is so desperate for anything that sells, that ever since the success of VanDermeer's "Steampuke" antho (and maybe the attention generated by some boingboing posts showing some brass goggles or such), we have been subjected to an endless stream of victorian whizbangery. Stop all ready! Besides everyone knows steampunk is a fashion movement, not a literary movement...

Hmm.....Wondering if my brass retro pipe will pass as a steampunk item?

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Heath Robinson was perhaps the instigator of Steampunk in 1912, where he looked back to a golden age before petrol, well before the Doctor Who 1970s. If you're a steam-lover Heath Robinson provided plenty of it. Let's go back there.

It was over 20 years ago that I first stood in the center of a display of operating steam and internal combustion engines and I was floored by the cacaphonous symphony surrounding me.

Simplicity of design and an operating pace that made each movement discrete and observable.

So, other people think this stuff is cool too. How about that.

In the mid-1960s, a number of well-educated young people in the San Francisco Bay Area started taking a very serious interest in "old-fashioned" endeavors such as gardening, wine-, cheese-, and bread-making, and in cooking using simple, fresh, ingredients.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a great many young French people made their way to small villages throughout France to learn all sorts of traditional skills such as cheese-making and meat curing.

This collective longing for craftsmanship, for a life grounded in a practical aesthetic that emphasized patience over shortcuts, produced a revolution that changed the way that almost everyone in Western Europe and North America now eats.

For example, nowadays in even small American towns, it's possible to buy decent bread...but by the late 1950s, fluffy mass-produced white bread was the only kind available and small bakeries had become a thing of the past.

Even though I'm quite old and fat and my hands and feet ache with arthritis, I very much understand the young people drawn to "Steampunk."

I, too, am weary of a world where it seems we're surrounded by things designed and produced for only short-term use, where the absolutely newest state-of-the-art cell phone is replaced only one year later by another that's supposedly somehow better.

I think it's wonderful that young people are taking an interest in craftsmanship, in learning how to make useful, beautiful things by hand.

Perhaps "Steampunk" will gain enough momentum to produce another revolution in our quality of life, such as the one that changed, very much for the better, what we eat and drink.

Thank you for this thoughtful comment. Well said.

In the age of increasing abstraction, specialization, and complexity, steampunk perhaps is motivated as a counter-balancing desire for elegant simplicity, and the immediate satisfactions of individual physical effort.

The steampunk movement has made it onto the stage set of the rock band Rush's Time Machine tour which is in full swing right now. It's all there: flying machine, old-fashioned typewriters, clocks, steam engines...it was quite a spectacle. Drummer Neil Peart's new kit, in particular, looks like something out of Jules Verne. We were calling him Nemo Peart at the end of the evening of their show in Sarnia, Ontario.

Wow, you're like really plugged in and stuff. Congrats

Steampunk is the avant-retarde. My theory is that when Modernism died we stopped moving forward and started moving backward. Our society will go through recent stages backward through time

Steampunk features in recent science fiction by writers such as China Mieville and, with a neo-Gothic tinge, in Alastair Reynolds as well. It might not necessarily be a cohesive literary movement, but its fingers reach into a variety of literary genres.

And what about the tired, clapped-out technology of the Rebel Alliance, clashing with the sleek chrome magnificence of the Empire in 'Star Wars ?' Something of steampunk's veneration of dated technology there as well, perhaps.

1985. Terry Guilliam. Brazil. or just about any other movie of his. Excellent examples of steam punk.

since the 60's. It is, to me, about fun, fashion, retro craft and theater. I was a bit steampunk without knowing it when I dressed to go to the theater in a top hat and opera cape. That was 36 (whew!) years ago. I LOVE the Steampunk movement or whatever it is.

The movie "Dune", and the book(s) before it. Frank Herbert put together an alternate universe that was at once part of the future and rooted in the past. Aside from the delicious steampunk sets in the movie, the known civilized universe disavowed the use of "thinking machines", like the one this e-mail was composed on. And weirding boxes? Don't even get me started!

Steampunk features in recent science fiction by writers such as China Mieville and, with a neo-Gothic tinge, in Alastair Reynolds as well. It might not necessarily be a cohesive literary movement, but its fingers reach into a variety of literary genres.
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