I'm Something of a Fan of Science Fiction
And within science fiction, there is something peculiarly attractive to me about certain subgenres: steampunk is one of them.
Structures--Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf was well known to have little patience with Ulysses. Joyce Carol Oates, in her book The Faith of a Writer suggests that part of this may have been the jealousy of one genius admiring the aplomb and power of another. Following is a quotation from Virginia Woolf's diary available from Fathom.
"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
One of my first signs that the internet would change everything was when I read The Difference Engine, shared it with a friend, and we argued over some obscure point. It got to the point where they said, "I guess we'll never know unless we meet the authors" and something clicked. I spent a few minute searching and found Bruce Sterling's email address (this was the pre-web era) and sent him a question. He answered in a an hour. It was a stunning example of the connectedness that was to come.
ReplyDeleteDear Randy,
ReplyDeleteI remember you showing this to us at one of our meetings--or at least sharing it as it happened. And it was significant. We are connected, at times, perhaps too much so. But so much good has come of it.
shalom,
Steven
I've read several steampunk novels and found them OK. THE steampunk novel, which probably many would consider to be Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine, is not one of them, though. In fact, I lost interest about half way through and stopped reading.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised as both Gibson and Sterling are favorites of mine, having read many of their works. I am much happier with them when they are writing cyberpunk.
One author mentioned in the article was KW Jeter, who really doesn't fit into any category since he also writes cyberpunk and horror. One of his best, or at least, one that I like best is his _The Glass Hammer_, which is probably best classified as cyberpunk, if anything. I have also read his _Infernal Devices_ and enjoyed it. I didn't think of it as steampunk, but I could see that it could be labeled as such.