...or at least it still was when I started writing this.

Last December we did a meme where we wrote about topics suggested by readers (you all remember that, right?), and redsnake05 asked me to talk about The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, which I am now doing.

...almost a year late, but we're in a small pocket universe where time sometimes folds back on itself, right?

Actually the delay was due to a couple of things, first that I wanted to get my hands on the book, which I sadly didn't manage to do until this month. Second that I don't really have anything deep to say about Lovelace and Babbage except OMG, it's the BESTTTT, you all HAVE TO READ IT ok, look I now understand about quaternions! this comic is magical.

And third that if I wanted to write anything more coherent about Lovelace and Babbage, I would have to talk about my feelings on steampunk in general, but I can't really do that, because my feelings on steampunk in general is "gosh, it's all so insipid compared to Lovelace and Babbage, why bother", and thus I don't have enough background in it to make a fair comparison.

But I shall make a valiant effort anyway! After all, not knowing what he was on about never stopped Babbage.

So here are my Three Things I Want In Steampunk, broken down into ridiculous layers:

1. The Victorians Were Goddamned Off-The-Wall, Turned Up To Eleven, there is basically nothing you can write in speculative fiction about them that can't be outshone by something from real history that was more amazing, spectacular, horrible, terrible, cruel, ridiculous, awesome, etc.
   • This Also Applies To Their RL Tech vs. Invented Tech, i.e., the real stuff is always going to be way weirder and more interesting that the made-up stuff, and if they didn't quite get there in real tech, there's probably some related tech in actual Victorian spec fic that's more interesting than the tech in 21st century cod-Victorian spec fic.
     • Which Is Not To Say That The Victorians Were Any More Off The Wall Than Any Other Group Of Humans, but they were courteous enough to also exist at the first point in history at which they were able to leave us copious and detailed documentation of all the weirder-than-fiction things they did
   
   
2. New Technology Catches On When Society Is Ready For It, not as a result of some lone genius working on his own, no matter how dramatically compelling it is
   • And When Society Is Ready For It means that the materials, tools, and skill needed to make it exist and make it go are reasonably available, the transportation/communication/trade networks needed to transport those things around are in place and secure enough to be usable, and a real demand exists for the technology that makes putting all the above together worthwhile.
     • When It Does Catch On, It Changes Everything, and especially things nobody would have expected it to change.
       • Human technology is always changing at an accelerated rate, faster than we can keep up, it always has, and thirty years later we've always forgotten it was ever any different.
   
   
3. The Victorians Lived At The Inflection Point Between When It Was No Longer Possible For One Person To Know Nearly Everything, And When It Newly Possibly For Nearly Everyone To Know Many Things
   • The Last of the "Polymaths" - the upper class, classically educated gentlemen who could make major contributions in all the sciences -- were dying out and being slowly replaced by modern hyperspecialization, as the amount of known information rapidly outpaced what one person could know
     • At The Same Time, Everybody Could Do Groundbreaking Science In Their Shed - mass literacy, relatively cheap printed materials, and urbanization which gave access to public lectures created a class of non-wealthy people who could follow science fairly closely as a hobby, but at the same time most sciences and technologies were still at a point where a relatively intelligent person could replicate groundbreaking experiments cheaply at home, and have a pretty intuitive understanding of the results.
       • The whole point of steampunk is that if anybody stuck gears on something, they would do something. Probably something that nobody had ever figured out how to make gears do before. Make your gears do something real.

If you know anything about Lovelace and Babbage - and if you don't, you need to scroll back up and follow that link and read it all, I'll wait, there's not that much - you'll probably start to understand why I love it so, because Syndey Padua quite apparently shares my views on at least the first of those things: that nothing she could make up could ever outdo the actual history, and thus her best function is to make the primary sources as accessible and compelling as possible - partly through fictionalizing in an (excellently put together and hilarious) AU, but at least as much through copious footnotes and quotations, because yes. Footnotes.

But anyway rather than talk about that to illustrate my completely unfounded by wide reading issues with steampunk as a genre, I'm going to talk about some other books I've been reading lately, which include:

Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Rockets, Missiles, and Men In Space, by Willy Ley
The Knight and the Umbrella, by Ian Anstruther
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher by Charles Babbage

( You'll note that only one of these is fiction. )
Which is all just to say, read Lovelace and Babbage. It doesn't get any better than Lovelace and Babbage.