Don't mistake this as a book about steampunk - it's more about the two authors than it is about the genre. Carrott is apparently a historian (he tells everybody he interviews, and he tells the reader at least once per chapter) and Johnson is a futurist (whose "job is to look 10 to 15 years out and come up with a vision as to how people will interact with computers."...he tells people that too, but not as often). They had great access to a lot of names in steampunk, which tempers their insistent desire to talk about themselves. Still, with all that access, they missed what steampunk is and is not.

A whole early chapter on steampunk as counterculture - it's not..."sub" culture, maybe, but the fans and players aren't generally countering anything - set the wrong tone. They rescued themselves somewhat by interviewing some of the authors (I've not found much in steampunk as a written medium that appeals to me), makers (this I like...creatives at work), and participants (I don't go to cons though the cosplay is fun to see). They also threw in stuff about a comedy club, Siri and an anthropologist, taking the temper out of the temper. And they threw in more of themselves.

They spent too much time arguing over whether steampunks long for a different world, and talking about some guy named Charles Stross who apparently took steampunk too seriously by criticizing it as not scientific enough (he write "hard science fiction", thus is an expert). And they really didn't address the subtitle of their book too well at all.

Steampunk is fun precisely because it's not,/i> possible and everyone knows it's not. There's no philosophical subtext. Just plain fun. I plan to come back to this again for what Mieville and a few other had to say, but I'll take the Thomas Jefferson bible approach and cut out all the irrelevant stuff about them and their bars and dinners and just re-read the meat. ( )

http://www.zomboscloset.com/zombos_closet_of_horror_b/2013/05/vintage-tomorrows-... ( )