Issue Details: First known date: 2013... 2013 Steampunk : Imagined Histories and Technologies of Science and Fantasy
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'With reference to James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone, this exegesis explores the writing of Heart Fire as a steampunk text from the perspective of a writer in the genre of fantasy. It argues that steampunk is not limited to texts representing steamdriven machinery, but also includes fantastical texts that rely on pseudo-Victorianism often set in imaginary worlds characterized by anachronism, pseudoscience, technofantasy, magic, hybridity and imagined events inspired by science fictional history as well as real history.'

Source : Author's Abstract

Notes

  • Steampunk Note: Critical text arguing for a wider understanding of steampunk that is more accommodating to pseudo-Victorian fantasy settings and other less technologically focused fiction.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Heart Fire; and Steampunk : Imagined Histories and Technologies of Science and Fantasy Carol Ryles , Perth : University of Western Australia , 2013 10482052 2013 single work thesis

    Heart Fire

    The novel Heart Fire addresses steampunk’s darker side from the perspective of rebellious commoners battling a demon-haunted scientist and deadly automatons.

    In the city of Forsham, all people are born with magic of varying degrees. The upper classes have been bred to have potentially destructive heart-magic, while the lower classes are supposedly left with weak and manageable skin-magic. Disaster strikes when factory owner, Sir Mathias Grindle – a mage without power – consorts with demons and attempts to elevate his position by eliminating all heart-magic.

    Ju Weatherton is a commoner with too much magic who vows to overthrow the mages who suppress her. She joins forces with an outcast shapeshifter and a misfit dandy when another shapeshifter turned to stone in a human woman’s womb tricks her into facing Sir Mathias’s demons. Meanwhile Sir Mathias’s soul-stealing automatons terrorize Forsham’s skies, tearing out people’s heart-magic to transplant it into machines to provide them with perpetual motion.

    The novel explores class oppression, Otherness, the use and misuse of technology in a pseudo-Victorian otherworld alongside the themes of friendship, trust, love, loss, grief and betrayal.

    Steampunk : Imagined Histories and Technologies of Science and Fantasy

    With reference to James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone, this exegesis explores the writing of Heart Fire as a steampunk text from the perspective of a writer in the genre of fantasy. It argues that steampunk is not limited to texts representing steamdriven machinery, but also includes fantastical texts that rely on pseudo-Victorianism often set in imaginary worlds characterized by anachronism, pseudoscience, technofantasy, magic, hybridity and imagined events inspired by science fictional history as well as real history.

    Perth : University of Western Australia , 2013
    pg. 311-374
Last amended 4 Jan 2017 12:32:36
311-374 Steampunk : Imagined Histories and Technologies of Science and Fantasysmall AustLit logo
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