Steampunk visuals

I enjoyed the steampunk setting of Emma Holly's Prince of Ice. But I hadn't really visualized the Demon world's technology until I found these images. When Xishi accesses the yamaweb, surely this is what she uses:

By Jake von Slatt in The Steampunk Workshop.
What a cool keyboard, but the mouse is freaky:

By Jake von Slatt. Keyboard from Wired. Mouse from MAKE.
And I can't wait to see the Datamancer steampunk laptop:

I love that these are real. Not steampunk concept art, but functioning steampunk creations.

Steampunk gallery on ClassicSpace

Annalee Lewitz hypothesizes that the steampunk craze is a reaction to the computer era's emphasis on functionality.

Computer aesthetics say "I am functional" -- even the iPod Shuffle....

Think of the crazy dial phones from the 1920s, with their curlicues and shiny brass and polished wood handsets. Or recall early radios, with their curving wooden exteriors meant to look like fancy furniture. And... devices from the 19th century, when everything from radiators to dynamos was covered in filigree and iron flowers and stamped, embossed shiny crap.

Part of the ugliness of modern technology is about its size--which in turn dictates a lot of conformity. The fastest way to take the character out of a room's decor and layout is to buy a wall-sized piece of furniture deep enough to hold a TV's huge backside, just to hold electronics. Now that gizmos are getting smaller, I hope we can start to design our rooms and our technology more harmoniously.

Transportation Futuristics gallery, UC Berkeley

But for me, the fun in steampunk is the "what if". What if we hadn't gone digital? How far could we have developed pneumatic tube transport? What if gunpowder had never come west out of China? Without fossil fuels, would we have different solar technologies? What if we didn't have paper--would we have some other technology, or sharper memories?

I think the popularity of steampunk also expresses our collective yearning for an era when information technology was in its infancy and could have gone anywhere. In 1880 we hadn't yet laid the cables for a telephone network, and computer programming was just an idea in Ada Lovelace's head.

I'm putting more steampunk on my to-be-read list.

Tags: technology, steampunk, fiction, history, future