Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

Airships and electric submarines, automatons and mesmerists? Welcome to the wild world of steampunk. It is all speculative? Or is it? Meet the intrepid souls who pushed Victorian technology to its limits and paved the way for our present age.

The gear turns, the whistle blows, and the billows expand with electro-mechanical whirring. The shimmering halo of Victorian technology lures us with the stuff of dreams, of nostalgia, of alternate pasts and futures that entice with the suave of James Bond and the savvy of Sherlock Holmes. Fiction, surely.

But what if the unusual gadgetry so often depicted as “steampunk” actually made an appearance in history? Zeppelins and steam-trains; arc-lights and magnetic these fascinating (and sometimes doomed) inventions bounded from the tireless minds of unlikely heroes. Such men and women served no secret societies and fought no super-villains, but they did build engines, craft automatons, and engineer a future they hoped would run like clockwork.

Along the way, however, these same inventors ushered in a contest between desire and dread. From Newton to Tesla, from candle and clockwork to the age of electricity and manufactured power, technology teetered between the bright dials of fantastic futures and the dark alleyways of industrial catastrophe.

In the mesmerizing Clockwork Futures , Brandy Schillace reveals the science behind steampunk, which is every bit as extraordinary as what we might find in the work of Jules Verne, and sometimes, just as fearful. These stories spring from the scientific framework we have inherited. They shed light on how we pursue science, and how we grapple with our destiny—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Genres: Steampunk, History, Nonfiction, Science, Technology

400 pages, Hardcover

Published September 5, 2017

About the author

Dr. BRANDY SCHILLACE (skil-AH-chay) is an autistic, nonbinary author, historian, mystery writer and Editor (who grew up in an underground house next to a cemetery with a pet raccoon). Her mystery novel, THE FRAMED WOMEN OF ARDEMORE HOUSE, features an autistic protagonist: Jo Jones. Plus: An abandoned English manor, a peculiar missing portrait, and one dead gardener. “A must read for any mystery lover.” – says DEANNA RAYBOURN, New York Times bestselling author of KILLERS OF A CERTAIN AGE. (This will be book one in the NETHERLEIGH mystery series.)

***QUICK NOTE! I love talking with readers - for Book Clubs and 1:1s, find me now on Skolay: skolay.com/writers/brandy-schillace***

Brandy’s recent nonfiction, MR. HUMBLE AND DR. BUTCHER–described by the New York Times as a “macabre delight”–explores Cold War medicine, bioethics, and transplant science. Brandy’s next nonfiction book, THE INTERMEDIARIES, will tell the forgotten, daring history of the interwar Institute of Sexology in Berlin: trans activists, the first gender affirming surgeries, and the fight for LGBTQ rights in the shadow of the Nazi Third Reich. Rebels against empires, it’s a heart-stopping story of courage in the face of long odds.

And because she writes in two worlds, both of them weird, Brandy hosts a regular YouTube show called Peculiar Book Club. It features livestream chats with bestselling authors of unusual nonfiction, from Lindsey Fitzharris and Mary Roach to Carl Zimmer and Deborah Blum. She has appeared on Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, NPR’s Here and Now, and with Dan Aykroyd on THE UNBELIEVABLE (History Channel). Bylines at WIRED, Scientific American, Globe and Mail, WSJ Books, and Medium. She works as Editor in Chief for BMJ’s Medical Humanities, a journal for social justice and health equity.

Dr. Schillace is represented by Jessica Papin at Dystel and Goderich Literary Management.

http://brandyschillace.com/
@bschillace

Reviews

[Ed Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book says little directly about the modern SF genre called "Steampunk". It rather concerns the technological and societal changes that were occurring in Europe and America during the last few centuries and the stories of some of the characters from those times who appear in steampunk stories: Tesla, Edison, Sherlock Holmes, etc. The author speaks of "Frankenstein" and the works of authors such as Verne and Wells as if they are steampunk, even though the term was invented much later. Fair enough; modern steampunk authors are trying to evoke the feeling of those authors. Anyway, this isn't primarily about literature, but history. The primary inspirations seem to be The New Epoch as Developed by the Manufacture of Power and Men, Machines, and Modern Times.

Development of new sciences and technologies over the past few centuries was much faster than any prior time. Science lectures by people like Humphry Davy excited the public about new discoveries. People could easily imagine thrilling new adventures made possible by airships and railroads and submarines, so invented stories about them. The experiments of Galvani suggested a strange relationship between life and electricity which could inspire stories like Frankenstein.

New technologies also caused great changes in ways of life, working conditions, and had big influences on the environment and the structure of society. Easier travel led to easier colonization and exploitation. Thoughts about these societal changes also made their way into steampunk and proto-steampunk works such as Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century (unpublished in his lifetime).

While stories from earlier times might be inspired by Edison (see The Steam Man of the Prairies), modern Steampunk more often involves Nikola Tesla or Charles Babbage. Contemporary people, however, couldn't understand what the purpose of "The Difference Engine" would be, so stories based on that had to wait for works of alternate history which we now call steampunk. This author suggests that William George Armstrong could make an interesting steampunk character.

Arthur Conan Doyle is an interesting case. His character Sherlock Holmes was hyper-rational, but Doyle himself believed all sorts of nonsense. But so did many scientists of the day, making ghosts and other fantasy elements fair game for steampunk. While the author mentions Doyle's fictional blood-detecting technology helping inspire modern stories of crime-scene investigation, she missed a chance to mention that Mark Twain described fingerprint investigation in Pudd'nhead Wilson.

The modern steampunk stories that the author mentions lead me to believe that she has read very few works in the genre. If she had, why would she focus so much attention on Whitechapel Gods? It is not well-known, won no major awards, and doesn't even appear to be typical of the genre. It feels like she decided she had to read at least one modern book and chose one at random. But again, this book really isn't about modern steampunk fiction. A few of the more relevant books she mentions are The Difference Engine, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1, The Five Fists of Science, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

I was distracted by many typos. But it was never hard to figure out the meaning, so I won't complain much. Twenty years ago books would go through more stringent editing, but fewer books were published.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

True confession time: my direct exposure to steampunk pretty much amounts to the following three things:
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1 by Alan Moore
The "Punked" episode of ABC's Castle


But the steampunk genre has always fascinated me. The dichotomy and idealism of Victorian technology put to fantastical use can be very entertaining. So I was intrigued by a book promising to explain how grounded steampunk is in reality.

I'm not so sure of Clockwork Futures: The Science of Steampunk and the Reinvention of the Modern World's connection to steampunk, but it's a great tour of the major scientific and philosophical advances made during the 1700s and 1800s. Steampunk just happens to provide Brandy Schillace a nice connective tissue to lead a path through history.

The introduction kicks off the book with some unexpectedly dense prose and thoughts. If you go into this book expecting a breezy read, you might be in for a bit of a shock. The overly academic writing does calm down after this first section, though. Otherwise, the book might have been a tad pedantic.

The book goes all the way back to the roots of modern thinking with Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, Newton, and Leibniz. Then it turns to the philosophical side of things with René Descartes. All this information seems only tangentially related to steampunk, at first. The build up to Newton in the first chapter, though, winds up offering comparisons later (particularly to Tesla) and highlights the dichotomy of rational thinking versus spiritual beliefs (and spiritualism). Descartes' mechanistic universe model also winds up being a good fit for a genre of science fiction focused on clockwork machines. Still, it's not a very direct connection to steampunk, so some readers expecting loads of references to genre works may be disappointed. The most cited genre books are Whitechapel Gods (a book I'd never heard of) and Frankenstein, a book I never thought of as steampunk but in retrospect totally is.

It's not really until the chapters on Charles Babbage with Ada Lovelace and Nikola Tesla with Thomas Edison that things get into more familiar, standard steampunk territory. As Schillace notes multiple times, it's also very telling that the genre chose Tesla and Babbage to canonize rather than more immediately successful contemporaries such as Baron William George Armstrong or Edison. As a fan of the comic Atomic Robo and the Fightin' Scientists of Tesladyne and The Five Fists of Science, I can certainly attest to Tesla's popularity versus Edison (and I also realize maybe I've read more steampunk than I originally thought). The culmination of all the science and philosophy ends up with the fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, and the 19th century coining of the term "detective." It feels a bit of an odd conclusion to a book purportedly about the science behind steampunk, even if Holmes is an updated "Renaissance Man" with knowledge ranging across all the new scientific methods of the late 19th century. That it also follows an entire chapter devoted to acid makes the ending somewhat lackluster.

It is nice that Schillace provides a nice summation of everything at the end of each chapter. This helps tie together all the disparate thoughts she includes. The content at times felt like she did a ton of research and wanted to include everything. Clearly this was an exhaustively researched book (the 30 pages of end notes is proof), but all that information also leads to a lack of focus at times. That still provides plenty of entertainment for scientific history nerds (like me) but doesn't do much to link all of it back to steampunk.

One huge improvement the final book should contain is an index. My advance reader copy did not have an actual index. This book begs for such a tool to cross reference as you move through the chapters, especially when the chapters start covering the same time period from different perspectives. I just took to jotting down all the names of prominent people so I could research them further at my leisure.

Clockwork Futures might be a bit oversold as the "science of steampunk" but it definitely fulfills the second part of its subtitle, "reinvention of the modern world."

[George Siehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is deeply engaging across a range of topics from the history of science and technology to our interrelationships with speculative literatures such as science fiction and steampunk. The author, affiliated with a medical museum, enriches the discussion of technology with a number of connections to biology and the human body in particular.

Schillace labels her introductory chapter a "perambulation," and it is a walk of survey. But, her deft and imaginative use of language makes it more of a literary "dance of the seven veils," giving quick, intriguing glimpses of what is to come, capturing the imagination, and leaving the excitement-aided impression of having learned more than what one has actually seen. A turn of topic, a swirl of words, and the reader is re-entranced: this chapter is worth the price of admission.

The book is built upon, and incorporates, many sources, two of which are a series of lectures by engineer George Shattuck Morison published in 1903 under the title "A New Epoch," and a 1966 book by his nephew Elting Morison, "Men, Machines, and Modern Times." Central to the elder Morison's theme was the idea that technology had advanced to the point where man no longer had to harness animals but could now manufacture power. This, Schillace writes, "seemed to offer the germ of what we today call steampunk, that hopeful aesthetic of Victorian future -hunting." Morison extols the potential for good inherent in this new power, but Schillace cautions that while it may portend "life and light and possibility," it may also offer "death, darkness, dread," a recurrent theme in the book. She highlights a number of steampunk novels, projects, and scholarly writing before turning to the younger Morison's work. In his book, he too, sounds a cautionary note about disturbing the universe.

In the following chapters, Schillace provides a capsule history of the development of science, starting with the astronomers and mathematicians, such as Newton, and moves into the development of machines such as Charles Babbage's difference engine. It is the development of machines that provides the most immediate ties to the fictional portrayal of steampunk. She captures the rivalry between the "big names" of industrial science, Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse, for instance in the development of the electrical power industry. The non-industrial application of electricity is reviewed in the work of biologists such as Galvani, Vesalius, and Volta and the animation of animal body parts through electrical stimulus, the "spark of life" that Schillace links to Victor Frankenstein's inspiration in Mary Shelly's novel. Interestingly, sghe notes that the less successful characters, such as Tesla and Babbage, are the ones who appear most often in contemporary steampunk novels.

"Frankenstein" is one of the novels noted frequently throughout the book, along with the works of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and more modern works such as "Whitecastle Gods," "Infernal Machines," and "The Difference Engine." Schillace offers the scientific history not so much in an effort to link it in a systematic fashion to individual works, but to present the informational resource base available to writers as they develop their stories.

The dark social consequences of Victorian technology are examined in some detail: the harsh displacement of workers by machines, and the Luddite reaction, as well as the political consequences such as the formulation of Marxism and the rise of anti-imperialism, a theme espoused by Verne.

Schillace takes the reader to many unexpected places in her book. She cites her players as scientists, engineers, and "the most illustrious of steampunk careers, the detective." This gives her the opportunity to revisit medicine via such exotic digressions as to the Chicago World's Fair Hotel and the mass murder proprietor H.H. Holmes who disposed of his victims in acid. A subsequent London swindler, John George Haigh, did the same. Acid, however, was also important in destroying germs in operating rooms as acceptance of the germ theory became more prevalent. Carbolic acid was one of the first to be used, but often resulted in further injury and death to patients as well as harm to doctors using the acid. We are led from this introduction to the development of forensic medicine during the Victorian era, one early user of which was that famous chemist (and detective), Sherlock Holmes. In describing some of Holmes cases that relied on the forensic approach, Schillace illustrates one of the interrelationships between steampunk fiction and real science. In one story Holmes refers to a chemical test that will identify the presence of blood at a crime scene. A number of years later such a test was actually developed.
(An early precursor, perhaps, of detective Dick Tracy's 1940's era wrist radio and its later actual production.)

Overall, this an interesting, enjoyable read. While some links between the science history and the literature becomes clear, not all the veils are shed. One is left to think independently upon some of the deeper philosophical issues that are raised.

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat unblended mixture…

My thanks go out to the crew at Pegasus Books for my copy of this book. Live long and prosper!

The world of Steampunk explores a world that is sometimes extremely advanced, but uses fossil fuel, batteries, and clockwork to accomplish wonders. Imagine driving a car that burns coal, robots that require periodic winding to keep the clockwork ticking and ray-guns that operate from a battery pack.

Most Steampunk Literature is set in Victorian Europe or the American Wild West. This is a world where gasoline, alternating current, computers and electronic devices do not exist. Industries are powered either by steam or water wheels. Some famous people appear from time to time. I’ve noticed that when electric power is included, the work of Thomas Edison is usually used. Edison favored DC batteries while rival Nikola Tesla, father of AC is ignored. Edison made life harsh for Tesla, but today AC current rules!

The inventions in Steampunk are fantastic! There are flying conveyances of all kinds, warships, cars, trucks, tanks, and robots for any occasion. Alchemy and vivisection are considered science, working with the known world in the 1880’s.

This book straddles the No Man’s Land between fiction and possible textbook. The data portions of the book are a fine intro to the aspects of a Steampunk society. The technology they do have, the way they dress, law enforcement, etc, are laid out with fair clarity. The fiction part shows how various authors take theory and create masterpieces.

I’m very torn on this one. I do not find it interesting enough to really like it, but I cannot say that it is boring, either. I will give it a neutral score, three stars…

Quoth the Raven…

[Morf Morford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is astounding. Steampunk is a strange term - and not simple to define. But this book frames the entire concept as a precursor to the multitude of tech (and other) dilemmas we find ourselves in the midst of. One theme is that any, and every, tech development carries unknown, if not unknowable seeds of destruction - perhaps even of its own demise.

In the Steampunk era, technology was tangible and visible - no computer chips or mysterious black boxes.

Iron, wood, leather and glass fueled industry and fantasy. Coal and steam powered civilization.

Did we learn anything from this technology that could have defined modernity? Did technology make us more free or less free? More human or less? Read this book and take notes.

[Ernesto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good pacing until the last section on Holmes...

[Les · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting history of the advancement of science from the 1600s through the 1800s. The author very effectively uses steampunk literature as the narrative to tie it all together.

[Mary Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it an interesting book, learned some things.

[Kara]

DNF. The "steampunk" aspect is just window dressing to get you to pick up the book. Its more just a straight history text on the history of tech for the past few centuries, and it covered too much for me to be able to stay interested.