Hacker News Reader

Comment by idle_processor | Hacker News Reader

>For some reason, it's always assumed that science fiction is about the future.

Isn't steampunk essentially science fiction that's set in the past, near the industrial revolution?

Given what your typical MAD SCIENTIST can do with a handful of gears and a steam boiler, I usually tag it as a subgenre of fantasy, not of SF. Just like Tolkien's medievalism, it's set in a romanticized version of the world before the technological revolution in progress as its being written. With magic.

I predict that once the Information Revolution is over, and the next one has begun, there will be people writing fiction set in an exaggerated, magical caricature of the early 2000s.

I predict that the ability to exaggerate and caricature an era will be inversely proportional to that era's ability to store information and make it accessible to future eras.

I should have said "recent past". I am not familiar with steampunk. I read Wikipedia article, but that's it.

But what about the present day? The technology that we might think of today as thing of the future might just be developed in some obscure lab today, or 5-15 years ago. Wouldn't it be fun to speculate in that direction?

There are quasi-modern-day sci-fi stories like the TV show Eureka or Fringe.

Going backwards just a little in time... Dieselpunk is often set between the two world wars. I loved the style of The Rocketeer, Skycaptain and The World of Tomorrow along with other post-aviation, pre WWII sci-fi/fantasies (even if the non-stylistic aspects of Skycaptain were deeply disappointing).

Cyberpunk would be an example of that.

Heh. Cyberpunk has always been about the future... It's just that we caught up.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwentyMinutesInto... comes close.

Same for the "Clockpunk" subgenre - It's Sci-Fi in the time or form of Leonardo Da'Vinci.

There's definetly a point, though - Have you read Sci-Fi set in the time of the Pyramids? In the time of the Roman Empire? Would you? What would change?

It's worth looking up "Rome Sweet Rome", a short story that got some acclaim a few months back when it was written on Reddit and then optioned by Warner Bros. It's modern military sci-fi, essentially, but the setting and the detail that's put into "What would happen if a modern platoon were set down in the time of the roman empire?" is pretty good.

John Barnes wrote a whole series of this kind of alt-history (e.g. "Caesar's Bicycle", "Washington's Dirigible", etc.). Which reminds me that there is, of course, a entire genre called "alt-history", starting presumably with Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", and notably including L. Sprague deCamp's "Lest Darkness Fall" (1941, and online in its entirety at scribd by arrangement with the author), and branching out a lot over the past decade or so.

I'd totally read Hellenistic steampunk. That's the culture that invented steam power (and fancy clockwork, see the Antikythera mechanism); it's pretty disappointing there's all this Victorian steampunk instead.

In the meantime: http://www.ams.org/notices/199805/review-graffi.pdf

Atomic Robo has some of these themes, and is generally awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com