Month: November 2008

Bruce Sterling (one of the authors of the seminal steampunk novel The Difference Engine), has a new essay about the movement online. Well worth reading.

Money quotes:

“Steampunk has become popular now because it is no longer just fiction. It is an international design and technology effort. Steampunk is a counterculture arts and crafts movement in a 21st century guise. […]

Steampunk’s key lessons are not about the past. They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times.”

The essay is possibly the best examination I’ve ever read explaining the explosion in popularity of steampunk, and why it has widened beyond the historical-SF literature underpinnings.

Instead of a straight bailout for the Big Three automakers, I’d like to see a bailout contingent on switching production over to 21st-century options like this:

Click to visit website.

If a boutique auto company can produce an all-electric roadster that gets 240+ miles per charge, and does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, and can sell that car for $109,000 — imagine what could be done with the mass production abilities of the Big Three.

President-elect Obama on 60 Minutes last night, clearly stating his intention to use executive orders to close Gitmo and ban the use of torture:

As I said way back in the primaries — this was my main, initial reason for supporting him: The rollback of the horrific changes wrought by the Bush administration.

It is also the thing that makes me most fearful — there are a lot of very powerful people out there with a vested interest in making sure such things are not changed, not rolled back, and absolutely not investigated.