Secret bible of the paleo-steampunks

[daphatgrip at aol.com]

My favorite 'steampunk'-- and what I was reading just prior to discovering Pynchon-- is China Míeville's 'Perdido Street Station' and its anti-sequels, 'The Scar' and 'Iron Council'.

-d


--- Original Message ---
From:"Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
Sent:Tue 4/14/09  2:55 pm
To:"P-List" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subj:Secret bible of the paleo-steampunks

Secret bible of the paleo-steampunks: Mayhew's "London Labour and the
London Poor"
Posted by Cory Doctorow, April 14, 2009 7:08 AM | permalink

On Sunday, I was on a panel about steampunk at the Eastercon in
Bradford with Tim Powers, one of the original creators of steampunk
literature (see his Anubis Gate). Halfway through, Powers mentioned
casually that he came to write a science-fictional book influenced by
Victorian England after reading, London Labour and the London Poor , a
classic text by Henry Mayhew. Powers said that the book was KW Jeter's
(Jeter coined the term "steampunk") and that it was passed around to
both Powers and James Blaylock, three friends whose works were,
arguably, the first steampunk novels ever written.

Powers said words to the effect of, "After reading this book, I
realized that I had a whole novel's worth of research right there." It
struck me that I'd never heard this story before, and that here, in
this book, there was an important origin story about one of the major
ways that an entire genre of literature, making, film and comics came
into being....

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/14/secret-bible-of-the.html

Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor (1861)

http://books.google.com/books?id=Q4oBAAAAQAAJ
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MayLond.html
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140432411,00.html?London_Labour_and_the_London_Poor_Henry_Mayhew

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/25
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/race/rc10.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_Poor

http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/25