Extrait :
10 Things I Actually Do Love About Steampunk
1. The idea of speeding up technology, of having workable difference engines and things of that sort, setting the clock forward a hundred years. I love alternate history--though I am often just as frustrated by it--and the possibilities, especially the very grotesque possibilities of having that tech available for, say, WWI, fascinate me. I do wish it were a little more balanced--technological advances are not always ray guns, sometimes they are washing machines.
2. Ok, yeah, I dig the clothes. I especially dig when clothes matter in books (Gibson is one of my favorites for this, especially his recent novels) because they are so much of how we present ourselves to the world and how we perform our culture.
3. I love it when the inherent parallels are addressed head on, how very, very like the Victorians contemporary culture can be, (one of the things I love about The Diamond Age is that the culture in the book is obsessed with the Victorians, and so reflects the culture outside the book as well, though it pre-dates the current craze), how we use 19th c ideas to justify some ugly parts of our own culture, and when, subtly, the nostalgia of the genre is turned on its head, and we see the horror and sublimity of that world at the same time.
