Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed ‘steampunks.’ Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
The term ‘steampunk’ itself, now a badge of honor, began as a putdown, a joke. But like ‘Big Bang’ in cosmology, the diss became the standard. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
It’s a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
Writers begin changing the instant they append ‘The End’ to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything – or anything – about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
Blending consensus historical events and personages with imaginary occult forces is a strong recipe for counterfactual storytelling goodness that combines the best of two worlds: resonant history with wild-eyed fantasy. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as ‘The Battle of Dorking’ from 1871 showed how SF’s trademark ‘what if’ scenarios could easily encompass warfare. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
Writing one’s first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published ‘V.’ The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon. Paul Di Filippo Read Quote
