steampunkin'head

So I have recently discovered that Fiction Clemens has a niche. That this came as a surprise to me should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my propensity for locking myself in bubbles and clouds, and dreaming thinking wishing (ridiculously) to be absolutely unique.

Anyway, it's called "steampunk" if you haven't heard of it, and a bit of research assures me that I am proud to be a part of such a killer sub-genre. I found the list of titles belonging to the niche familiar and adored, and clearly influential on what I do. I hadn't thought about my influences as part of a unified whole before, and it was fun to see them grouped together. The idea of "steampunk" is that of advanced technology in a Victorian-era world. I have often described the world of Fiction Clemens as "what people in the late 1800's thought the Future might look like". Twelve Monkeys, Howl's Moving Castle, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc... are some of my favorite stories fitting this niche. Catch-words like "clockwork", "steam-power", "pneumatic tubes" describe the style of this flavor of science-fiction, although it doesn't seem that the western element has been too-often capitalized (other than in that wretched film, "Wild Wild West"). This, of course, is Fic's particular stamp. It has always amazed me how the "Western" genre continually ignores the fascinating "non-Western" realities going on simultaneously in the late 1800's. True the "old-West" is marked by a certain isolationism, but that does not mean certain things, styles, news, rumors would not seep through and have an influence. Think of it. Cowboys hanging at high noon, pistols at dawn, train robberies, injuns, all of this going down when? Around the same time as the second industrial revolution, the British occupation of India, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Marx, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even skyscrapers! And it was in these days that the very genre of Science-Fiction invented itself in the wildest dreams of industrialists, physicists, and Jules Verne.

Fiction Clemens was not written with any of this "theoretical" framework in mind. I just blasted out a fun story. But it's always something to look back and see what the subconscious was chewing on at the time. I'll leave off here, though. A writer over-analyzing his own work is a nasty habit not fit for the public, and, like masturbation, is preferred behind closed doors.

Now here's a little steampunk for you, junior.