Steampunk without steam: The Book of Devices as Neo-Ottoman experimentation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Turkish author Ihsan Oktay Anar’s The Book of Devices (2017, Kitab-ı Hiyel) employs pseudo-steampunk characteristics in a pre-modern Ottoman context. The novel experiments with the possibility of steampunk’s expansion as a translated/adopted cultural element within the larger concept of world literature. I argue that The Book of Devices distorts the Anglo-American attitude of Neo-Victorianism as exemplified in steampunk. Anar’s (in)competence in depicting actual course of events in history, in portraying an imaginable technology that might work, and in forming a non-colonialist cultural background create a distorted example of an application of the steampunk genre in the Turkish setting. The book then comes to be an attempt to create a Neo-Ottoman mindset against Neo-Victorian expansion as reflected through steampunk. This way, though steampunk presents itself as “inhospitable” in that it resists outside intrusion from non-European experiments, Anar successfully merges it with modern Turkish literature to establish a local genre.