Tuesday, July 01, 2008

One of my spam messages yesterday had the subject line of "oyster perpetual cosmograph." Sounds vaguely steampunkish, doesn't it? And off we go...

I was reading details of William Gibson's induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and noticed that steampunk was mentioned as a literary genre. I poked around a bit and found that the Hall even lists a steampunk bibliography. I guess the term really has made it! However, the genre discussions continue, as detailed in this post on Futurismic. An excerpt that caught my eye:

For example, Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) might be dismissed as needlessly fantastical if seen as a detective story, but if seen as a work of steampunk cinema, it takes on a whole new set of meanings - despite the fact that it is rather unlikely that the writer or director had even heard of the term at the time.

(I have a deep and abiding love for this film, as anyone who knows me can attest, and seeing it listed as "steampunk cinema" does my heart good.)

The steampunk portals are arriving, slowly but surely! The Steampunk Feed is open for business, and the brand new SteamList aims to catalog the steampunky stuff available on Etsy. Another source of inspiration is the Steampunk Lab, which shows off items from all over the web. And Coilhouse, which has all sorts of great bits to it, has a steampunk category.

From Cassandra: Gogbot looks like a steampunk-oriented festival taking place this fall in the Netherlands. The site is in Dutch, but I did see that one of the bands performing is named Singing Tesla Coils, so you know it's going to be an interesting time!

Marconi News specializes in collages of "visual fabrications, chronological confusion and technological deception." Of course, I love it.

I also love the Process Indicator. It's for indicating processes, it is!

And lastly, space westerns may be a bit of a tangential interest, but many a steampunk story has a space and/or a western angle to it. It's a great site, regardless of your leanings.

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