Babel Clash

Adrian is absolutely correct in his assertion – I believe – that the steam in steampunk is secondary to the alternative view of history that is being presented. The airships and the clockwork and the brass goggles, they’re only so much window dressing (albeit some of the coolest window dressing you’re likely to find!). It’s the alternate history that gives us the opportunity and license to play with all of these cool gadgets, to dream up circumstances in which they might have been created, to play with weird science and examine a world in which things have developed so differently from our own.

Steampunk, in its purest form, is essentially a sub-genre of that wider alternate history category (although I’d argue that now it has gathered a momentum all its own and its imagery has crossed into fashion and pop culture). This alternate history genre contains everything from Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series to Robert Harris’s Fatherland, visiting Harry Harrison, Philip K Dick, Robert Silverberg, Paul McAuley and many others on the way.

Keith Roberts’s wonderful Pavane – in which England was conquered by the Spanish Armada and Papal rule continued into modern times – had a lasting and profound affect on me, both as a reader and a writer. It is a book not to be missed, a true classic of the genre. Likewise Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which tells the tale of an American science fiction writer at work on an alternate history novel in which the Allies won the war. His story bears a striking resemblance to our own reality, and yet his version of the truth is an America occupied by victorious Nazis.

Lou Anders’ fantastic anthology Sideways in Crime is a great exemplifier of what can be done with the alt history genre, in this instance offering us a selection of original mystery tales all set in divergent realities.

And I can’t leave this topic with mentioning Michael Moorcock’s outstanding A Nomad of the Time Streams, his trilogy of novels about Edwardian adventurer Oswald Bastable, some of the earliest and finest steampunk fiction written.

I guess that’s turned into a raft of book recommendations from me. But I also have an admission to make. Everything I said above is true. But I also just think airships ROCK…

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