Any discussion of fantastical technology must start long before the dreadful work of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the hopeful tales of Jules Verne. The most alarming and insight volume available today concerning fantasies of scientific nature is Adrienne Mayor’s Gods and Robots in which Mayor delivers thorough insight into the legends and myths of of mechanized men and women that left me to wonder what might have possibly inspired such forward thinking by these ancient people. What prehistoric technology, subdued and forever extinguished from existence, could have been the forerunner and foundation for the air patrol of the iron Tholos or the deceptive fem fatale Pandora? The latter was programmed for a covert offensive strike against humanity. All this because good old Prometheus delivered the wonder of fire allowing not only grilling but the liquifying, combining, and forming of metals, which the great storytellers of the day turned straightly into flying patrol robots and beautiful seductresses.
Few authors have dedicates themselves more to the glorification of humanity’s ability to shape their world than Jules Verne. His stories read as hymns of praise to the value of human knowledge, the wonderous things humans are capable of if they possess understanding of physics, geography, geology, and the other natural sciences. But he was writing after the fact of great and wonderful technological advances. His father would have told him of the development of steam power with the same excitement that youngsters these days are told of the first days of the Internet. He shared his infancy with photography and saw the dawn of high-speed, long-range communication via telegraphy in his teens. By the mid-1870s his the success of his writing career was well established and the massive technological advancements of that period overshadowed even his great imagination.
Meanwhile, countering her male counterpart’s adoration of invention, Mary Wollstonecraft explored the equivalent of Pandora with her own take on the dreadful use of biology to create a man hateful and doubtful of its creator and determined to undermine Man’s achievements.
Steampunk fits into historical science fantasy as its elaborately adorned monarch. This subgenre of science fiction was officially and wonderfully christened by KW Jeter in 1987, but it was born ten years earlier with those four fabulous words on the big screen:
A long time ago . . .
George Lucas, who owes much of his inspiration toward romanticism to Frank Herbert with his embrace of aristocratic references, made a daring suggestion to sci-fi to turn around and look back rather than forward. The advancement of technology had veered afar in the Wollstonecraft warning direction and away from the valiance of Verne with each new rendition of war machine it produced. With doom and despair being the preeminent outlook for our technological future (again, this is prior the advent of the great unifying, informing, and entertaining Internet) the romantic notion of looking back rather than forward seemed a good idea. Jeter shortly thereafter launched the subgenre with Morlock Night, a wonderful play off HG Wells’ The Time Machine.
