Abstract

This essay draws on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s steampunk and alternate history novel The Difference Engine (1990) and Len Deighton’s dieselpunk and alternate history thriller SS-GB (1978) for the purpose of discussing the blurring of genres within speculative fiction and addressing retrofuturism and retrophilia within an alternate world building framework. Thus, it provides a background for the analysis of the concept of genre blending and the merging of pre-determined tropes and topics within the scope of science fiction, fantasy, adventure and mystery plots so as to characterize alternate history as a blended genre.

Highlights

  • This essay aims to discuss the blurring of genres within speculative fiction by means of e­ xamining how alternate history is deployed in steampunk and dieselpunk narratives

  • It begins by providing a background for the analysis of the concept of genre blending and the merging of p­ re-d­ etermined tropes and topics within the scope of science fiction, fantasy, adventure and mystery plots so as to characterize alternate history as a blended genre

  • It continues by f­ocusing on The Difference Engine (1990) as a steampunk and alternate history novel set in a technologically developed Victorian Britain

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Summary

Genre theory and fictional world building

The category “genre” is designed to classify literary texts and is meant to establish rules prescribed for a literary work’s form, mode and content that writers are expected to follow (Cuddon 298–99). A taxonomy of the alternate history genre has been the object of a vivid debate, as Karen Hellekson demonstrates by starting her analysis with a quotation from Robert Silverberg’s introduction to the science fiction and fantasy volume Three Trips in Time and Space, published in 1973: “If all things are possible, if all gates stand open, what sort of world will we have?”. Hellekson establishes as distinctive and differentiating topics in alternate histories the ability to travel back and forth in time, the parallel worlds story and uchronias She draws on the systematic approach favoured by the historiographer Hayden White, placing the alternate history within the larger framework of four models of history: the eschatological, genetic, entropic and teleological models (concerned, respectively, with final events or an ultimate destiny of humankind or of history; with origin or development; with disorder or randomness; or with future-oriented history).

The latter is also the author of “Hitler’s England
Case studies: steampunk and dieselpunk narratives
Final remarks
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