(no subject)

[danohu]

Charles Stross rages against Steampunk

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans' Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn't bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right?)

...which is almost appealing enough to make me try NaNoWriMo. Almost

Comments

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Stross does tend towards overgeneralisation about subgenres, I've noticed, but I think he's entirely right about most steam-"punk" - the books spawned on the back of the lifestyle craze are mostly appalling (http://eithin.com/cirw/2009/07/06/jonathan-green-unnatural-history/). On the other hand, some of the trope namers (Powers, for instance) really do have interesting things to say about class.