Steampunk for Pynchon Readers

[Jasper Fidget]

>From The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Clute and Nicholls, 1993:

"STEAMPUNK Item of sf terminology coined in the late 1980s, on the
analogy of Cyberpunk, to describe the modern subgenre whose sf events
take place against a 19th-century background. It is a subgenre to which
some distinguished work attaches, though in no great quantity."

[a great quantity of examples omitted]

"It is as if, for a handful of sf writers, Victorian London has come to
stand for one of those turning points in history where things can go one
way or the other, a turning point peculiarly relevant to sf itself. It
was a city of industry, science and technology where a modern world was
being born, and a claustrophobic city of nightmare where the cost of
this growth was registered in filth and squalor.  Dickens -- the great
original Steampunk writer who, though he did not write sf himself,
stands at the head of several sf traditions -- knew all this."


Other citations:
http://www.jessesword.com/sf/view/327