Syftet med detta arbete är att undersöka om man med utgångspunkt i Steampunk-genren inom datorspel, kan göra en implementation av stereotypa High fantasy-element och hur det kommer att uppfattas av Steampunk-entusiaster. Kommer de överhuvudtaget att märka skillnaden och om så är fallet, hur pass stor inverkan tycker de att implementationen har? För att undersöka detta så skapades två karaktärskoncept, en man och en kvinna. Dessa karaktärer utrustades sedan med fyra uppsättningar karaktäristiska kläder och föremål från Steampunk-genren. Sedan lade jag till två stereotypa detaljer från High fantasyn på varje karaktär. Dessa koncept presenterades sedan för ett antal informanter som var insatta i ämnet Steampunk, i form av semistrukturerade intervjuer.

Feminist Science Fiction: Cherie Priest's The Clockwork Century Diploma Thesis Petra Nováková Abstract Marleen S. Barr, one of the pioneers of feminist science fiction criticism, is an outspoken commentator on gender inequality in this genre. In Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction and Future Females: A Critical Anthology, Barr defines feminist science fiction as metafiction about patriarchal fiction. She speaks out against both authors and critics who recycle narratives restricted by a patriarchal view of the world in which women are silenced and/or relegated to the position of an accessory of the male hero, made to behave in a stereotypically feminine manner. While Barr does not include steampunk fiction but focuses on science fiction oriented towards the future and space exploration, her analysis of the female character's plight is nonetheless applicable to the steampunk genre. In this respect, feminist steampunk fiction can be read as a meditation on established gender norms. Cherie Priest's work is a prime example of such an innovative re-examination of gender stereotypes that Barr calls for in her critical work. As both a woman and a writer of science fiction, the author has adopted a feminist approach in her steampunk series The Clockwork Century. Among other things, Priest examines the role...

Neo-Victorian studies is a burgeoning subfield which seeks to examine contemporary representations of the Victorian period. For the last decade, neo-Victorian scholars have offered up definitions of what makes a text “neo-Victorian”; often, this has been via a description of what the neo-Victorian is not. The ‘ruling’ definition—i.e., the definition most consistently repeated—hails from the introduction to Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn: “the Neo-Victorian is more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. […] texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (4). This short delineation significantly comes at the expense of historical fiction, which is a move repeated throughout neo-Victorian efforts to define itself. Neo-Victorian studies has largely concerned itself with literary novels, operating with a heavy anxiety that ‘other’ fiction set in the nineteenth century is escapist and nostalgic in the sense that it simply perpetuates problematic past systems of oppression while evoking the fashionable aesthetic trappings of the Victorian. My dissertation argues that contemporary genre fiction, long derided as ‘simply’ escapist in nature, can also be neo-Victorian. In each of my chapters I analyze texts from a specific genre—steampunk, popular romance, detective fiction, and Sherlock Holmes pastiche—in order to offer a basis for investigating genre fiction with a neo-Victorian lens. I analyze the depiction of corsets and feminist protagonists in three steampunk novels, explore the exhibition of unlikely romantic heroines and Romany romantic heroes in Lisa Kleypas’ historical romance series about the Hathaway family, examine representations of class and gender as well as germane social issues in Anne Perry’s William Monk detective series, and highlight the feminist potential of Carole Nelson Douglas’ series of Sherlock Holmes pastiche featuring Irene Adler. Each chapter considers the Victorian period as represented alongside Victorian novels and literary periodicals in order to demonstrate the shape of these neo-Victorian revisions and make the case the genre fiction can be self-conscious despite its lack of metafictional content.

The creative writing is preceded by a critical introduction that explores the history of the steampunk genre, the YA literature movement, and many novels and short stories in both genres. The critical introduction establishes genre guidelines and expectations, as well as provides examples for important qualities of the genre. The nature of the story required additional research into steam engines, WWI history, the RMS Olympic, tree climbing ascension techniques, and various other subjects. This informal research was used to improve the descriptions of technology in the creative work, as well as the naval terminology and battle tactics performed by steam powered ships before and during the first World War. Though not a historical novel, this information assists in building a believable steampunk world.

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There is a growing recognition of the interconnectedness of the crises of food, water, democracy and climate change as stemming from the capitalist hunt for modernity and progress. As climate change is thus not only so complex, but urgent, the question of a successful portrayal of it for an enhanced understanding and subsequent action becomes vital. The name of the Capitalocene functions to highlight the intersectional origins of climate change - as the Global North has done violence upon nature in the quest for monetary value, so has it also done violence upon people in the process. The Kingston Cycle is part of a fast-rising wave of speculative fiction with the potential to successfully communicate not only an encompassing picture of the acknowledgedly incomprehensive totality of the current crisis, but also the solution in the form of an egalitarian society founded on the value of community instead of capital. As writers are thus beginning to discover the suitability of speculative fiction to depict the Capitalocene, especially spatiotemporal combinations of genres such as historical steampunk fantasy, it is necessary for scholars to follow in order to breach the hitherto persisting view of speculative fiction as simply an escape from reality, and to investigate how it can be used to create not only an understanding of the current crisis, but an incentive to action.

The Fantastic Machine - the story of a man who struggles to keep family & friends safe when evil visits 1905 Portland, Oregon.

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Steampunk first appeared in the 1980s as a subgenre of science fiction, featuring anachronistic technologies with a veneer of Victorian sensibilities. In recent years steampunk has re-emerged in young adult science fiction as a fresh and dynamic subgenre, which includes titles such as The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross, The Hunchback Assignment by Arthur Slade, and Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. Like their predecessors, these modern steampunk novels for teens use retrofuturistic historiography and innovative mechanical aesthetics to dramatize the volatile relationship between man and technology, only in these novels the narrative is intentionally set in the context of their teen protagonist's social and emotional development. However, didactic conventions such as technophobia and the formulaic linearity of the bildungsroman narrative complicate and frustrate steampunk's representation of adolescent formation. Using case studies of Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld and The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia, retrofuturism and technological hybridity are presented as defining features of steampunk that subvert young adult science fiction's technophobic and liberal humanist traditions. The dirigible and the automaton are examined as the quintessential tropes of steampunk fiction that reproduce the necessary amphibious quality, invoking new expressions and understanding of adolescent growth and identity formation that have a distinctly utopian, nostalgic, and ecocentric undertone.

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