I recently discovered a magazine on the genre of steampunk, which looks really interesting:
<> http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/
I’ve had a vague interest in steampunk for some years–probably when I first read William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, which is a mystery that takes place in an alternate history of 1885 when a computer age hits the steam age.
In any case, you can buy a print copy of the magazine for only $3 (one reason I’m sure why it’s called a magazine and not a ‘zine), or download it for free. The introduction to the second edition is really interesting…
… Others referred to how technology, as is currently applied, serves as a buffer between us and wonder: monocropped farms, car culture, omnipresent air-conditioning and heat, etc. The homogenization of technology is indeed a travesty, a pox of our own infliction.
Of course, it is a false claim that technology itself is “unnatural.†We must think only of the lens that allows us to peer into the heavens—or at the chaotic dance of single celled critters—to realize that invention need not be evil. But if technology, as it is applied, has separated the vast majority of us from the natural world, then it is time that we misapply it. Let us be diverse and inefficient! …
BoingBoing often has new articles about people having developed some “new” steampunk item, such as a guitar, a computer, or drawings of Star Wars in a steampunk setting. (One of my favorites.)
A new genre in fiction is emerging called “clockpunk”, and I’m kind of excited about this one. It’s in the setting the Renaissance, specifically from the mind and creations of Leonardo da Vinci’s time and place. That’s a theme I plan on exploring in some of my own writing, especially as I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
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