http://shadowsoftheapt.com/blog/52 The Insect Man / Empire Rising Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:28:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://shadowsoftheapt.com/blog/52/comment-page-1#comment-32 Do You Feel Lucky, Steampunk? : Shadows of the Apt Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:22:57 +0000 http://shadowsoftheapt.local/blog/52#comment-32 [...] The name, once tapped on the anvil and found to be pure (4), has spawned numerous spin-offs, and indeed there is a tendancy to coin a new subgenre for any given book: pick a concept and add “punk”. Certainly, there should be a word for Mary Gentle’s historical-magical Rats and Gargoyles, which is set several hundred years too early for Steampunk, but definitely has a lot of the punk to it (5). Thaumatopunk, perhaps? The possibilities are endless. One of my favourites is “Mannerpunk”, used bizarrely to desribe the sort of social-interaction fantasy that is set in an imaginary world but frequently lacks even a mention of magic. The key example of this is Gormenghast, although what Peake would have thought of the word I have no idea. Still, the little thread of a genre keeps going. Hardinge’s Fly-by-Night is more of a Mannerpunk than anything else, and I’d even make a case for Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell even though that has magic to spare. But then we’re starting to talk about alternative histories… [...] […] The name, once tapped on the anvil and found to be pure (4), has spawned numerous spin-offs, and indeed there is a tendancy to coin a new subgenre for any given book: pick a concept and add “punk”. Certainly, there should be a word for Mary Gentle’s historical-magical Rats and Gargoyles, which is set several hundred years too early for Steampunk, but definitely has a lot of the punk to it (5). Thaumatopunk, perhaps? The possibilities are endless. One of my favourites is “Mannerpunk”, used bizarrely to desribe the sort of social-interaction fantasy that is set in an imaginary world but frequently lacks even a mention of magic. The key example of this is Gormenghast, although what Peake would have thought of the word I have no idea. Still, the little thread of a genre keeps going. Hardinge’s Fly-by-Night is more of a Mannerpunk than anything else, and I’d even make a case for Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell even though that has magic to spare. But then we’re starting to talk about alternative histories… […]

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