science fiction question

[obandsoller]

I'm not reading much at the moment, because I'm being several kinds of rubbish, but amongst the reading that I am doing is a little H. P. Lovecraft. Whenever I read science fiction, and some of Lovecraft clearly is that, I'm always struck by the Zeerust (the way that the futuristic view of the world is incredibly dated and based on science or

Comments

[several_bees]

You could try William Gibson's The Difference Engine? I haven't read it, but it's steampunky alternate history in a Victorian-vision-of-the-future kind of way.

Steampunk in general is certainly often an attempt to evoke that same zeecrustic aesthetic.

[obandsoller]

Thanks.

I had considered The difference engine, and it's something I really ought to read anyway. But I'd gotten the impression that it wasn't based on science that we now know couldn't work; more an alternate history based on science that could have worked but simply wasn't developed.

[gm000]

I was thinking about Sterling/Gibson's "Difference Engine" too - yet imho that is somehow a way of doing a social commentary about viewing our own information revolution from the p.o.v of steampunk.

There is something to be said in favour of Harry Turtledove's alternative USA/CSA series too in terms of attitudes towards race, politics etc.

I'm also struck how Bram Stoker used a lot of textural technologies in his "Dracula" -typerwriters, Victrola phonographs etc- to give verisimilitude to the varied accounts of the protagonists. This literary device could be worked up in a modern vampire story maybe with our own recording technologies. Similar, of course, is the file that the narrator of HPL's "The Call of Cthulhu" describes when going through his uncle Prof. Angell's effects. I always loved the sequence of the 'cutting bureau' that charts all the weird events during the rise of R'lyeh; it's a snapshot of the early global village.