Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [3]
So I would argue that steampunk was well under way by the 1880s but came into its own in the 1890s. This decade saw so much technological development that writers were struggling to keep up with it. At the same time the emergence of cheaply priced popular illustrated magazines full of short stories allowed a huge market to develop for science fiction, mysteries and strange tales. The Strand led the way because of the popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. These magazines, in Britain and the United States, hungered for unusual fiction that would capture the public imagination and the writers would respond. There were the likes of George Griffith, Cutcliffe Hyne, M. P. Shiel, George C. Wallis, George Allan England and, of course, towering above them as the adopted Father of Science Fiction, H. G. Wells. His novels, especially The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon and When the Sleeper Wakes contain all the imagery that would later be plundered by the masters of steampunk. Wells’s work is too easily available to be reprinted here, but his imaginative power pervades the book.
But that should not diminish the abilities of the writers collected here. You will find, for instance, that some, like George Parsons Lathrop, utilised ideas ahead of H. G. Wells. Others, like Owen Oliver may have followed in Wells’s wake, but with original and unusual ideas of his own. What I have done is selected stories that on the whole are lesser known but which, between them, create many of the concepts and images that have become associated with steampunk — airships, automatons, secret societies, vast engineering projects, anti-gravity, moving walkways and so on. This was how the Victorians and Edwardians in Britain and their American counterparts saw the future — our present.
Science fiction continued to grow and prosper, of course, but it mutated. The wonderful visions and hopes of the Victorians became overtaken by the real world, especially by the First World War. So we might argue that the great era of steampunk ran from around 1880 to 1914 and those are the years covered in this book. Or at least, the years when the stories were written. Their ideas and visions go way beyond, ultimately to 13 million years in the future.
Here then are the days when the future was young and everything was possible. The days of steampunk prime!
MR. BROADBENT’S INFORMATION
Henry A. Hering
The idea of the mechanical man or automaton is as old as myth. Jason, in his quest for the Golden Fleece, encountered Talos, a bronze giant made by the god Hephaestus to protect the island of Crete. It walked around the island three times each day making itself red hot and embracing any strangers it encountered. Mechanical toys, usually of clockwork, were made throughout the Middle Ages though the first genuine life-like bio-mechanical toy was that of a flute player made by the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson in 1737. These toys became very popular and were also represented in fiction, one of the earliest being the Talking Turk in “Automata” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, published in 1814.
It was the idea of creating man that really launched science fiction with the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and it was the “steam man” featured in the popular dime-novel adventures, starting with The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward F. Ellis that brought the dawn of steampunk.
We should not call these steam men or automata by the name robots. That word did not pass into the English language until the translation of Karel Capek’s 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1923 and it soon caught on. For the steampunk period they were automata and, as the essence of steampunk, they feature in our first two stories.
Henry A. Hering (1864-1945) wrote quite