Babel Clash

Okay, wow.  I don’t want to put you on the spot, but…  You think Jordan, LeGuin, GRRM, Brooks, Hobb, Erikson, Zelazny, and Donaldson ALL got WORSE the longer they wrote in a series?  You think that they were strongest at worldbuilding, so the longer they went, the more the novelty wore off of their worlds, and there was much less left to hold the stories together?  That it was not character or plot that made them good, but exploration of worlds?

This is…yes, let’s just let this one die.  Admittedly, perhaps you wouldn’t count each on that list.  (It seems, from what you’ve been mostly focused on Jordan without wanting to say it.)  My argument will continue to be this: There have been stumbles, but I think it’s due to the nature of the form, not bad writing.  We just haven’t explored the epic fantasy long enough to have figured out the ways around all the pitfalls.  And if we do figure it out, it will be from the perspective given by standing upon the shoulders of the greats.

Anyway, on to Magic.

If you dissect the magic too much, do you risk it dying on the table?  Certainly, you do.  Any time you explain a magic, rather than allowing it to remain mysterious, you are trading some of the sense of wonder for something else.  An ability for the reader to understand the world, and what the characters are capable of.  If you give a character a magic box, and say that when it is opened, something magical will happen that’s one thing.  If you tell them what the magic box does when it is opened, that trades some of the sense of mystery and (a smaller bit) of the wonder in exchange for a plot point.  Now the character can open the box consciously, and influence the world around him/her by what is in the box.  Done cleverly, you’ve traded mystery for suspense, which do different things.

When you start explaining why the box works like it does, you also make a trade.  You trade more of your sense of wonder in exchange for an ability for the character now to extrapolate.  Maybe figure out how to make boxes of their own, or change what the box does when it is opened.  You make the character less of a pawn in a scheme they cannot understand, and more of a (potentially) active participant in their destiny.

I’m certainly over-simplifying, and I don’t want to understate the power of either side.  A sense of wonder, mystery, and a smallness to the characters was essential for such works as The Lord of the Rings.  If you’d known exactly what Gandalf could do, and why, it would have changed the experience.  Instead, you are allowed to feel like Frodo and Sam, who are moving through a world of giants, both literally and figuratively.

However, there are always going to be trades in fiction.  What is it you’re trying to do?  I tend to gravitate toward worlds where the science adheres to the scientific method.  And so long as something is repeatable, it can be studied, understood, and relied upon.  You don’t have to understand the HOW, so long as you know the WHAT and a little of the WHY.  What is going to happen when I open this box, and how can I change the effect?

Done really well (and I’m not certain if I do it really well, but I hope to someday get there) explaining can still preserve a measure of wonder.  The classical scientists discovered, explained, and tried to understand science.  But the more they learned, the more wondrous the world around them became, and the more answers there were to be found.  I think it is important to establish that there IS more to be learned, that the answers haven’t all been found.

Brent,

The end-of-book introduction to the next novel is an interesting beast.  I’m glad you brought it up.  I actually feel about them the same way you do, it appears.

One of the challenges of writing a series is to make certain the reader is satisfied with the book they buy, even though it’s part of a larger story.  Readers seem to have a love/hate relationship with the series, at least in our genre.  Stand alone books, as a rule of thumb, do not sell as well as series books.  Mistborn outsold Elantris and Warbreaker, as an example, and the Wheel of Time books did not start reaching the top of the bestseller charts until the series was at its eighth or ninth volume.

And yet, the longer a series goes, the less pleased readers seem to be with it.  If one looks at most series and compare reader reviews on something like Goodreads, the longer the series goes, the worse the reviews tend to get.  It has happened for nearly every major fantasy series.  (Pratchett is a shining exception.)

Is this because the writing is getting worse?  That might be the cynical response.  There are a number of complaints leveled against the longer series.  That the author is getting lazy, or that they’re so popular now they no longer get the editing they once did.  Some critics think that series degradation happens because the author starts milking them—writing more in the series simply because they sell well.

I wonder if it’s something else, however.  Not a failing on the author’s part, but a natural evolution based on the form of the series.  Readers seem to want continuing characters and plotlines, but along with those come the need to juggle various sub-plots/storylines, and keep track of them across books.  The cliffhanger endings that are really more “Hey, here’s what we’ll be dealing with in the next book” are another aspect of the series.  I agree, true cliffhangers stink.  But it feels very natural to have a section at the end of a book introducing some of the elements from the next book.  This ties the series together.

But it’s also something that could make readers gripe.  (Especially if they have to wait another year or more to read what you’re teasing them with.)  Anyway, I love series.  I love writing them and reading them.  But I also like a nice stand alone for flavor now and then.  (Which is why I’ll continue to do them, regardless of sales comparisons.)  However, it is interesting to me that the nature of the beast is such that the more you write in a world, the more people will simultaneously praise you and complain about that fact.

Ah, good.  Something we can disagree on.  (Though only a little, since we’re both mostly arguing against bad usage of form–which by that definition, is bad.  So neither of us would want to use it anyway.  But there does seem to be some room to talk here.)

I think short chapters do some good, and accomplish a lot.  Martin is a master, and he uses them well.  (At least, in some places.)  Pratchett does an equally good job at it in a different type of sub-genre.  But used poorly (or, well, unfairly) they do some terrible things to me as a reader.

An example here for me is Dan Brown.  I don’t want to pick on him, as big targets are often too easy to pick on.  He’s obviously been very successful, and has some very interesting things about his writing.  However, one thing I noticed reading the Da Vinci Code was that he seemed to be using the same tricks over and over and over to simply get me to turn the page.  Someone would open a door and…  We don’t find out what was on the other side.  The chapter ends.  We go to the next chapter, and we either find out that nothing really that important was on the other side of the door, or we get told “I’ll tell you what was on the other side of that door eventually…if you keep reading.”

This actually works, quite well, for a little while.  (For me in the Da Vinci Code it worked for about half the book.)  And then, it just gets wearying to me.  The gimmicks start to show through, and I get tired of never finding anything out.  There doesn’t feel like development, just one big long stall.  Yes, it’s possible for a book to be “too exciting.”  Because if excitement is all there is, we lose character, setting, and a whole lot of depth.  We go from trouble, to trouble, to trouble.  Hight tension moment to high tension moment.

Now, this is an extreme example, but I think that it’s something for writers to think about.  You suggest that self-indulgence is a danger.  Yes, perhaps it is.  At the same time, I’m not writing thrillers.  I’m writing epic fantasy.  I’m writing 300,000 word plus books.  There should be ups, there should be downs, there should be moments of frantic pace, and there should be scenes of (yes) dinner.  Sometimes, the most telling scenes in a story can be a simple dinner sequence.  The scene with Faramir riding to charge while his father eats from the LoTR movies comes to mind.

But this isn’t exactly what I was trying to get to.  I write long chapters not to (hopefully) indulge.  I do it to make each chapter (or sequence of them) to have its own rising action, its own climactic moments, its own falling action.  I want to open the door and, instead of cutting away, show something on the other side that really does upset the scene.  Then continue through the scene to show the ramifications.  I want to have each chapter be a story unto itself, rather than a movie trailer for the next chapter.  (Which, in turn, is a movie trailer for the next one…and so on.)

Again, I do think there are great ways to use the short chapters.  But I worry that the conventional wisdom of “Don’t ever let them put the book down!” is bad advice for some authors.  Les Miserables has a whole lot of parts that are not very exciting.  There are plenty of parts where, once I’m done with the scene, I can put the book down and walk away.  It pulls me back to read not because it uses a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, but because the deep, rich characters draw me back to read further about them.

I do agree that the larger casts are a problem that doesn’t seem to have a good solution.  Either you ignore half your characters for a book–as GRRM did–or you give them only brief appearances–as Robert Jordan often did.  I don’t think I’m in a position to criticize either author as, unlike Dan Brown, I think they both do/did fantastic jobs with their works.  But I am consciously keeping the cast of the Stormlight Archive down.

I thought I’d do a post on pacing, chapter length, and pulling readers through a story.  This is something I’ve been thinking about.  Specifically, I’ve noticed at many authors in fantasy seem to be adopting a more thriller-style (genre, not the music video) of pacing.  Shorter chapters, with cliffhanger endings that make for a quick turn to the next page.

Perhaps it’s always been this way, and I’m just more sensitive to writing methodology now, as I’m a writer myself.  But it does seem to be happening more.  A good example are the Codex Alera books by Jim Butcher.  But I’ve noticed some of it in your own books, Brent.  It makes me wonder if this is a reaction, on our part as a genre, but the huge teen-fantasy bubble that happened surrounding Harry Potter.  YA and middle grade also tend to be more quickly paced, more tight in this regard.

Oddly, I’ve found myself reacting against it.  Not that I don’t like this style of storytelling–in fact, I think it works very well.  Jim’s novel that I mentioned above was a real pleasure to read.  Terry Pratchett does this in his books, and they’re excellent.  But I don’t know if it matches every project and every story.

Conventional wisdom in writing is that you don’t want the reader to stop and take a break, otherwise they might not return to the book.  You always want to leave them hanging.  And yet, I don’t know if this kind of pacing works very well in the very long form novels.  When I write my books these days, I WANT to give the reader some breathing room.  Some time to step away from the book, if they want, and digest what has happened.  I feel that if I pace them absolutely break-neck, the experience will be exhausting and draining across the long haul, and the book will end up unfulfilling.

Is this something you’ve ever thought about?  Do you merely let pacing and chapter breaks happen?  Readers, do you notice this?  What do you think of it?

Brent, I think you’re absolutely right several places in there.  (Though I feel like I should object on principle, so there’s more conflict to our narrative.  Good storytelling, and all that.)

Yes, there are things I can get away with now that I couldn’t before–or ones I didn’t try to get away with before.  One big one is flashbacks.  In my early years as a writer, published and unpublished, I stayed far away from flashbacks.  Partially because I’d been told to do so, and partially because I’d seen them done poorly from a large number of other new writers.  There are good reasons to stay away from them, and the advice is good.  If you do flashbacks the wrong way, you’ll break the flow of your narrative, risk undermining the tension of your story, confuse the reader, and basically make a big old mess.

Then Pat Rothfuss comes along and does a narrative-within-a-narrative where the entire book is basically flashback, and it works really well.  I do know, however, that Pat had a lot of trouble selling that book of his to start.  (Though admittedly, I’m not sure if that was the flashbacks or not.  I seem to remember he added the frame story later in the process, and that the huge length of the book was what was scaring people away at first.)

I guess this brings us back to the first rule of writing: you can do whatever you want, if you do it well.  Regardless, I decided–after some deliberation–that I’d use flashbacks as an extensive device in The Way of Kings and the rest of the series.  None of these were in earlier drafts of the novel, however, because I knew that many readers (and editors) have a knee-jerk reaction against flashbacks because of how likely they are to screw things up.  Now that I’m established, however, I feel that people will trust me when they see them.

(One thing I’m leaving out is that I think I’m a better writer now than I was before, and if I’d tried these flashbacks during earlier days, I’d likely have flubbed them.)

You talk about foreshadowing, and make some great points.  One thing I think that I want to bring up is the idea of nesting reveals.  I always try to have a nice spectrum of types of plot twists and revelations in the book.  Some are easier to figure out, others more difficult.  My experience has been that some readers want to try to guess what is going to happen, and others do not, but both appreciate a legitimate twist in the story.  (One that was clearly foreshadowed, but not made obvious.)  As so yes, there are going to be different types of readers, and some will see the foreshadowing that others will not.  Some won’t care at all if the story just twists unexpectedly (and without explanation) while others will consider it a put-downable offense.

In the spirit of tossing questions back and forth, then, let me ask you this: I just mentioned above that you can do anything in your writing if you do it well.  Yet I’ve also talked a lot about the importance of foreshadowing.  What do you think?  Is it ever justified to have a total Deus Ex Machina?  (For those who don’t know, this refers to a major plot twist–usually involving the heroes/protagonists being rescued from danger unexpectedly–that is not explained or foreshadowed.)  How might one do this well?  Or is it an exception to my rule?  Is my rule even really a good rule?

(Also, all, please forgive typos in this post.  Just back from book tour after a long day traveling, and wanted to make sure I got this posted.  But I’m kind of drooping here.)

People have been asking me to expand on that essay, though it was written (originally) to be part of a series I did on writing The Way of Kings.  I never had the time, however, and that was the only one that was fleshed out, so my assistant suggested it might be a good fit for a Scalzi guest blog.  However, I do worry that some of the ideas are unformed, as it was written to come after several other essays I was planning.

The short answer to your first comment is a yes, you are right. The realization I came to while working on The Way of Kings was that I was so accustomed to writing self-aware fantasy in the Mistborn books that I was searching to do the same with Kings.  While anyone can enjoy Mistborn (I hope) it works best as a series for those who are familiar with (and expecting) tropes of epic fantasy to come their direction. That allows me to play with conventions and use reader expectations in a delightful way.  But it also means that if you don’t know those conventions, the story loses a little of its impact.

But this is an interesting discussion as to the larger form of a novel.  Is it okay, in an epic fantasy, to hang a gun on the mantle, then not fire it until book ten of the series written fifteen years later. Will people wait that long?  Will it even be meaningful?  My general instincts as a writer so far have been to make sure those guns are there, but to obscure them—or at least downplay them.  People say this is so that I can be more surprising.  But it’s partially so that those weapons are there when I need them.

It often seems to me that so much in a book is about effective foreshadowing.  This deserves more attention than we give it credit. When readers have problems with characters being inconsistent, you could say this is a foreshadowing problem—the changes, or potential for change, within the character has not been presented in the right way. When you have a deus ex machina ending, you could argue that the problem was not in the ending, but the lack of proper framework at the start. Some of the biggest problems in books that are otherwise technically sound come from the lack of proper groundwork.

In the case you mentioned, however, I think I would have cut the creature.  Because you said it was slowing things down.  There’s an old rule of thumb in screenwriting that I’ve heard expressed in several ways, and think it works well applied to fiction.  Don’t save your best storytelling for the sequel.  If your best storytelling isn’t up front, you won’t get a sequel. Of course, once you’re done, you do need to come up with something as good or better for the sequel, otherwise it might not be worth writing.

For The Way of Kings, I’ve had to walk a very careful balance.  I do have ten books planned, but I had to make sure I was putting my best foot forward for the first book.  I had to hang guns for the later novels, but not make this story about them—otherwise readers would be unsatisfied to only get part of a story.

Question for you, then, Brent.  Have you ever planned out a story to be a certain length, then ended up deciding there just wasn’t enough there to justify it?  I had trouble learning this balance as a younger writer, and some of my readers know that I wrote two failed books (one called Mistborn, the other called The Final Empire) in which neither one had enough material to form a novel.  It wasn’t until I combined the ideas and story together and wrote Mistborn: The Final Empire that everything worked.

This is the part where I pitch my book, apparently. Only, I’ll admit, I’ve never been that great at this part of the whole process. I once heard a wise man (Robert Jordan) say something along the lines of “Well, I wrote the series as long as I did because that was how long it took me to tell the story. If I could tell the story in a one-page summary, that’s what I’d have written in the first place.” I always had trouble writing a query letter or synopsis for one of my books. (Note how I cleverly worded that sentence in such a way as to keep from having to figure out how to spell the plural of synopsis.)

But if you’d like a summary, here’s a page where I posted some things my editor wrote about the novel:

Blog Post: It’s Out!

That page also includes a nice long list of reviews from top tier media sources, including some glowing words from:
Publisher’s Weekly (They call the book Powerful, extraordinary, and highly entertaining.)
The Library Journal (They call the book “essential reading for fantasy fans.”)
Booklist (They call the book superior.)
And Michael Moorcock, who says: “Anyone looking for a different and refreshing fantasy novel will be delighted by this exceptional tale of magic, mystery and the politics of divinity.”

Are the words of those nice people why you should read my book? Well, I guess it depends. What and what are your personal tastes? Warbreaker is a stand-alone epic fantasy, self-contained in one book with an original magic system. The story focuses on reversals and witty dialogue, along with some (hopefully) deep and interesting characters. Is that why you should read the book? Perhaps.

If you’ve liked what I’ve had to say on the blog, if you enjoy epic fantasy that tries to take a few steps away from the cliché, if you like to support people who post their books on-line for free alongside the store product, or if you’re simply curious who this guy is that is finishing the Wheel of Time, maybe that is why you should read the book.

But it’s hard for me to explain to people what they ’should’ do. You make that call yourselves. It’s been a pleasure visiting with you all for these two weeks, and I hope to do it again some time. If you’re curious about my work, check out the link above. If not, then you’re fine by me. Not every book is going to appeal to every reader, and we can like different things and still get along.

Thanks for listening to my random rants!

Brandon

Because of the excellent discussion we had here about the whole series vs. standalones idea, I thought it would be interesting to delve into the types of series out there and talk a little about how I envision each one.  This is kind of off the cuff; I’ve never really looked at this before.  But perhaps it will be interesting.  If not, at the very least the post might make some fertile grounds for mockery.

Now, I’m not talking genres here—I’m talking about the actual format of the series.  As I see it, there are several different types, and each have their advantages and disadvantages.  And, because I’m like that, I figure I’ll try to name each one (mostly just for the purpose of discussion here).

Type One:  The Saga

I’m borrowing this title from Lee Modesitt, who talks about his main series (the Saga of Recluse) in these terms.  A saga by this definition is a series where the books are connected only in that they deal with the same world.  A saga jumps around in time quite a bit, and rarely follows the same viewpoint characters for more than a few books.  The author is really telling the story of the world and its history, rather than talking about a specific set of characters.  The most famous example in sf/f would probably be the Pern books.  You rarely have the same main protagonist from one book to another, and the books were not released in chronological order.  Recluse, mentioned above, is another excellent example of this kind of series.  Discworld would fit here too, though those do have a larger number of consistent viewpoint characters than some of the others.

I tend to like sagas because of the way they mix a standalone with a series.  You can pick up any Pern or Discworld book anywhere in the series, and generally you’ll be all right if you’ve skipped a few.  Continuity between books is less important than the story of the contained novel.  If you do read them straight through, you gain a little bit more understanding, and can enjoy the ’series’ aspect of it that way.  Of course, you always have the trouble of deciding whether to read the books chronologically as written, or as they happen in-world.  (Personally, I vote for as written.  Dragonflight isn’t the same if you’ve read the books about the arrival of mankind on the planet.  Though, thinking of Pratchett, perhaps it would be interesting to start with the first one chronologically.  What would that be?  Small Gods?)

Type Two: Serialized Epic

These are the series where the next book in the series picks up right where the previous one left off.  In essence, the author is writing one enormous book, releasing it in installments.  Obviously, The Wheel of Time would fit here.  Lord of the Rings is another great example.  I’d probably cheat and slip Mistborn in here, though there are year gaps between the books.  One essential feature of this type of book would be distinct, continuing characters and a continuing story that arcs over the course of several books.

The Serialized Epic is great because of the way it lets us invest in a series and characters over the long haul.  The biggest problems are probably learning curve (you can’t just pick up the middle book in a series without being terribly confused) and cliffhangers.  It’s extremely difficult to walk the line between giving each story its own arc and giving the entire series a larger arc, which leads to a lot of frustration as the books take time to wind down.  However, despite its flaws, when this is done right it’s my favorite kind of series.

Type Three:  The Continuing Adventures

This is the series where you get one central protagonist who has a complete story in each book.  Then, when another book comes out, that character can go on another adventure.  It differs from the saga in the fact that it goes chronologically and focuses on a single, central viewpoint character.  The Dresden Files and the Miles Vorkosigan books are great examples of this type of series.  Any given book could be the end, if it had to be, but we keep coming back to read more about the central character.  Sometimes, there are longer arcs across books—but those are always secondary to the mystery or objective in each given volume.

These kinds of series can be very successful.  (In fact, outside SF/F, I’d say this was the standard way of doing a series.)  You gain even more flexibility for drawing in new readers with each book, as it doesn’t really matter where you start in the series.  Sagas can get confusing because of their odd chronology, but the Continuing Adventures books are much more streamlined.  However, they do usually trade some measure of scope and urgency to gain this format.  I’ve found that I’m not as quick to run out and buy the next book in a Continuing Adventures book because the question of “What happens next” isn’t as strong as in the Serialized Epic.  At the same time, I don’t get as frustrated with these series for not getting a volume out on time.  They aren’t as confusing as the Saga, but at the same time, you don’t get to see the sheer scope of the world in the same way as you do with a series that jumps around through time and shows a lot of different viewpoints.

Well, I think that’s gone long enough.  There are other types of series we could define.  The Sequel Series (where an author follows one series with another) could be one.  What kinds did I miss?  Are there series that don’t fit any of these?  What do you think of the categories?  Did this even need to be defined?  (Probably not, but I like thinking about and writing about these kinds of things.)  What are your favorite types of series, and why? I’ll be eying the comments to see what I missed.  Maybe we can come up with a good framework that covers all the series out there.

When I was in high school, I spent some time doing service at a local library.  For the most part, this meant re-shelving books or looking through the stacks to make certain everything was in order.  I remember being asked to shelve a copy of Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey.  I couldn’t find the place in the computer where it was supposed to go, so asked the librarian.  She told me I’d been looking in the wrong place—Dragonflight was shelved in Children’s, not adult.

That’s right.  This award winning story, one of the best spec-fic books of all time, was shelved in Children’s.  That bothered me for reasons I couldn’t quite define.  It made me feel childish and annoyed at myself for feeling childish.  What I was experiencing was something that a lot of literacy professionals have talked about recently—that teens HATE the idea of being thought of as children.  (Who knew?)

There’s nothing wrong with the children’s section, and there’s nothing wrong with shelving McCaffrey there.  If her books are of interest to teens, then putting them where teens will find them is a good thing.  (As a culture, though, I think we still have a tendency to look down on teen/middle grade/children’s authors and books.  To shelf something in children’s still strikes many of us as something of an insult.  I wonder why that is.)

Anyway, as the 90’s passed, more and more ‘teen’ or ‘YA’ sections started appearing in bookstores and libraries in order to provide a place for teens to go find books without having to enter the dreaded children’s section.  About the same time, interestingly, fantasy fiction was invaded by a plethora of fantastic YA and middle grade fantasy novels.  His Dark Materials has been brought up, so has Harry Potter.  I’m partial to Garth Nix’s work as well, and they’re just the tip of a mound of very good, excellently worldbuilt fantasy novels that appeared in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

As someone working in this genre, all of this leaves me to wonder and speculate.  Did the increasing prominence of YA sections add to this explosion?  Was it all the Harry Potter bubble?  Or were people jumping ship from traditional epic to YA because epic was beginning to feel stale?  Perhaps it was all of this.

I think it made the genre better.  I think we’ve had to look at our sluggish beginnings in epic, and realize that two hundred pages of wandering around a castle before conflict appears may not be the best way to begin a story.  We’ve had to become more creative in our worldbuilding, partially (I think) to compete with the elegance of YA competition.  Probably, most epic authors don’t even think about this, though I bet many of them have read Potter and the others.  You can’t help but react to, incorporate, and learn from what you read.

What do you all think?  What are your favorite YA fantasy novels, and how do they compare to your favorite epic fantasy novels?  Am I just searching for correlation where there is none, or is my speculation on to something?

Talking about people taking chances with fantasy and pushing the genre in interesting places has me thinking about one of my favorite spec-fic subgenres: Steampunk.

I’ve been fascinated by the Steampunk (and its younger cousin gearpunk/springpunk/whatever you want to call it) since my early days enjoying the anime movies my brother would dig up here and there.  (If you’re lost as to what these are, might I point you to Wikipedia?  They’ll do a better job of explaining it there than I have time for here.)

There are a lot of interesting things going on in the sub-genre.  Scott Westerfield’s LEVIATHAN looks very well done, and the sub-genre as a whole seems to be enjoying a renaissance of books, stories, and visuals.  (A lot of fantasy art lately has had a decidedly steampunk edge.)  I actually wrote a very fun gearpunk story two years back—a full novel, actually, that I haven’t had time to revise or do anything with.  (The Wheel of Time has proven somewhat distracting to me lately….)  It’s called Scribbler.  Maybe I’ll get around to doing something with it eventually.

I have a lot of curiosities about this genre.  What is it that draws us to it?  Why do we love this classical use of technology, turned in to science fiction?  Perhaps it captures that sense of exploration and wonder that used to exist to a larger extent in scientific discovery.  Science is still exciting, but it’s become something much more…technical these days.  Back in the late 1800’s early 1900’s, there was a feel that science could not only solve all problems, but that it was something every day people could explore and understand.  A lot of branches of science were relatively new, at least in the modern form, and there was a general excitement and enthusiasm to the process.

Now, science is something we study in school and take tests on.  In general, even the common person has a grasp of basic scientific principles.  What is happening is amazing, but at the same time, there’s a density to it.  Trying to figure out quantum physics or other areas where breakthroughs are happening can twist the brain in knots.  Some of the wonder is gone.  And so, we find ourselves looking back at times when science WAS magic to us, and we create stories that explore these eras.
Or maybe that’s all just me waxing overly philosophical.  What are your thoughts?  Do you like Steampunk?  Is it played out and over-done, or is it here to stay?  Why haven’t we had a really good steampunk live-action movie?  (Note that I said a GOOD one.  LXG and Wild Wild West do NOT count.  Hellboy gets points for having some gearpunk elements, though.)  Why does this subgenre fascinate us so?