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"A Lady at Her Dressing Table in the Year 2000"
from postcard ca. 1900. Photo: Denise Tortorici. |
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Jules Verne, the 19th century science fiction writer and author of
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, was
born in February of 1828. He wrote of space and time travel in an era when that was impossible, and used his novels to describe strange lands and technology in a Victorian aesthetic, but with an eye to the possibilities of future scientific and mechanical inventions. His works were considered strange in their day, but his novels have received an upsurge of attention in the past 30 years, with the development of the
“Steampunk” fantasy literary genre. Steampunk style is created when a person imagines what life would be like in the 1880s and 1890s if Jules Verne’s ideas and contraptions were successfully translated into real technology, using only the energy sources of the 19th century, like steam, fire, gravity, wind, sun, and water. This is the “steam” part of “Steampunk;” the “punk” part is what happens when a person builds something that brings these Victorian science fiction ideas to life, especially by taking apart real objects of the era and re-fashioning them into the new/old creation. There is an element of the
"mad scientist" in Steampunk!
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