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Victorian science fiction soon ceased to be fanciful

Iwan Rhys Morus describes how novelists’ futuristic visions began to be realised by engineers – though the course of invention is more random than he imagines

18 January 2023

10:00 PM

18 January 2023

10:00 PM

How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the Nineteenth-Century Innovators Who Forged the Future Iwan Rhys Morus

Icon, pp.324, 25

One of the more daft but enduring spin-offs of the science fiction genre is steampunk – fiction fashioned with a retrofuturistic love of 19th-century industrial technology. Think of an ironclad of the air, shaped like a fantasy submarine, with six or more propeller engines powered by cogs and levers, funnels pumping out coal smoke from the steam turbines, windows replaced by watch dials, and hundreds of rivets holding the whole thing together.

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