THE PORTRAIT OF A STEAMY, (UN)CORSETED SUB-CULTURE

Elena Enciu

Abstract: Most scholars trace the beginning of the neo-Victorian novel back to the 1960s, followed by steampunk novels some twenty years later. Also, the first critical works trying to define neo-Victorianism appeared in the late 1990s, before scholars started to write their papers on steampunk around the year 2009. Nevertheless, this does not mean that steampunk derives from neo-Victorianism, but rather, in a more realistic approach, that the two literary genres and the two critical traditions evolved separately, discussing similar themes. As steampunk does not seem to go anywhere, except backwards into the future, this article aims at exploring the main elements and characteristics of this escapist sub-genre in novels written by Gail Carriger, Kate Locke, China Mieville, W. Gibson and B Sterling.

Keywords: steampunk, retrofuturism, magic, (techno)fantasy, science, steam, corsets

If fantasy is a genre born in Great Britain and adopted by the Americans in the 1970s, steampunk took shape directly in the United States. In 1975 three young authors, studying at California University, Tim Powers, James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter were proposed by editor Roger Elwood to participate in a series of ten volumes about King Arthur. Coincidentally, the Arthurian source of inspiration is characteristic to fantasy and emerged stronger in Victorian England. Jeter, who writes Morlock Night to rewrite Arthur in the nineteenth century, uses Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor as his main source of inspiration and makes the study known to the other two authors. All three share a common passion for Dickens’s work. As the project fails, they are left with the already written manuscripts. Nevertheless, Jeter succeeds in publishing Morlock Knight in 1979, specifically identified as a sequel to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). The term “steampunk”, coined by accident by Jeter, has given rise to much speculation and debate. It is baked in the evolution of science-fiction as a reaction to “cyberpunk”, an overly- technologized fictional world where the frontiers between humans and machines, between the real and the virtual worlds get thinner giving way to a liberal, cynical world. Cyberpunk is a dystopic type of science-fiction that brings to the center the hacker as both hero and anti-hero, a

22 sub-culture with higher aspirations that takes itself too seriously. Almost opposed to it, steampunk suggests a playful return to the sources, with a visible pleasure to storytelling. The “punk” elements continue to divide the community of fans. To be fair, nobody can prove that Jeter can claim the discovery of something truly revolutionary and Mike Perschon reinforces this idea when he criticises audiences for believing that everything written under this name must “have a resistance force” as it is not applicable to all works.(Perschon 50) Part of the confusion is caused by authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling who wrote seminal works in both genres. The Difference Engine (1990) is considered one of the most important works of the genre although it does not reflect the relaxed style of the beginnings of steampunk. Despite the definition given by numerous “fans” of the genre, steampunk is not Victorian science-fiction. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are rather the grandparents of this sub-culture called steampunk, initiated by accident by James Blaylock, Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter during the 1980s that resembles more a visual culture than a literary one. Steampunk dares to imagine to what extent the past would be different if the technological advancements of the future arrived earlier. It is a type of retrofuturist science-fiction that uses Victorian inventions and gadgets such as steam engines to reinvent this age. Retrofuturism as a trend, having steampunk as the main character, refers to more than an age that has lost its trust in the future. The exact origin of steampunk is uncertain and shows significant variations from one novel to another. Certain works, such as The Difference Engine (2011), as historiographic metafiction, move through steampunk and neo-Victorianism, suspended between the paraliterary limbo and the consecrated postmodernism. Certain journals, like “The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies”1, demonstrate a certain open-mindedness regarding steampunk and do not treat this sub-culture as an accepted branch of neo-Victorianism. In terms of literary and critical enterprise, neo-Victorian literature and steampunk have their own separate paths that occasionaly happen to cross. It is also very important to reiterate the fact that steampunk is not only or before anything a literary genre: according to Mike Perschon it is an aesthetic genre. (11) Through fashion, magic and dance shows, steampunk manifests its aesthetic influence. It is close to impossible to name all movies that show steampunk elements (Sherlock Holmes of 2009 and 2011), but their growing presence underlines the strength of holmesian adaptations. Steampunk is everywhere: in fashion, art, music, accessories, literature and film. A steampunk novel can be written under the influence of its predecessors, but it is written first and foremost in strong connection to the present and within a material culture: Want your steampunk to have more punk? Fill the aesthetic with your activism. Want your steampunk to have more steam? Make your aesthetic accurate. Just looking for a good time? Then add some absinthe to your aesthetic, and let loose the dirigibles of war (or exploration) and head for the horizon. Implicit in retrofuturism’s malleability as either nostalgia or regret is the elasticity of steampunk as an aesthetic: these three lenses can be trained upon myriad types of stories, serious and whimsical alike. (Perschon 241) When discussing steampunk, the problematic derives directly from the aesthetic approach, relying on the notions of “bricolage” and “detournement”, defined by Patrick Novotny in his article “Chapter 6: No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration”. When discussing cyberpunk, an earlier form of science-fiction,

1 In the special issue from 2010 of “The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies”, Jason B. Jones is one of the authors who makes a clear distinction between steampunk and neo-Victorianism, setting the two ideologies apart in his analysis of Alan Moore’s works. 23

Novotny makes a distinction between the two forms of appropriation stating that “detournement is the appropriation of existing cultural fragments in such a way as to alter and invert their meaning” (Novotny 100) while “bricolage is the transgressive activity of individuals who are able to appropriate cultural styles and images for their own ends.” (102) Perschon uses the term “bricolage” instead of pastiche to describe the checkered style of steampunk authors who bring together a multitude of elements in order to imitate a particular author and designates “detournement” to texts with a powerful revisionist potential. He insists that “the spectrum should not be read as valorizing one of these positions over the other” (Perschon 98), but at a closer look, it is “detournement” that enables a closer perspective on the social and political structures, left in confusion after the technological revolution. Mike Perschon, therefore, offers a perspective on steampunk that is both scholarly and personalized. He cites the works of Hadley, Kaplan and Gutleben and revisits the criticism against the too limited definition of neo-Victorianism (226), formulated by Heilmann and Llewellyn in their seminal study Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (2010), who argue that neo-Victorian texts must be “self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery, and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (4). Maybe the definition of neo-Victorianism that he provides in The Steampunk Aesthetic seems too vague:

neo-Victorianism indicates steampunk’s evocation but not accurate re-creation of the nineteenth-century. […] steampunk is the suggestion of this period, but not necessarily place or even time. Steampunk can occur in any time, and any locale (in this world or a secondary one), but it repeatedly suggests the nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century to us in one way or another. (Perschon 238)

This statement does not include the intention to redefine the national or temporal limits, to rewrite history from a different perspective. To him, neo-Victorianism is an element in his area of research, an element of lesser importance. Thus, one of the characteristics of the genre is precisely the fact that it lacks a clear theoretical ground: it does not have a clear definition that unites all fans and critics. At its origin, the novel is all about a playfulness that an entire body of works chose to take seriously. Steampunk is ludic and manages to encompass the magic of the past. This fact, rarely mentioned by other critics other than Perschon is more visible in Gail Carriger’s trilogy The Parasol Protectorate (2009) and less in The Difference Engine (1990), where the supernatural is absent. This shows that steampunk has always been fantasy masked as science-fiction, or a hybrid genre that ignores generalizing boundaries. Characterized as a mode, a sub-genre, an aesthetic, steampunk is an extremely flexible term, both on a grammatical and conceptual level and this flexibility is reflected by its perspective on time, gathering in just one word many different kinds of retro-futurisms. Steampunk is another face of retro-futurism. Perhaps, when it comes to the contemporary production and the comprehension of the audiences, steampunk is retro-futurism. Steampunk is not just about otherness: the term is part of a ramification of names that, on the one hand, colonizes the twentieth century with its dieselpunk and atompunk, and on the other hand, glances into the past through clockpunk. But these distinctions are little mentioned and little respected. The sub-genres continue to emerge without our knowing whether they should be taken seriously or not. In his book, The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of

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Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature (2010), Jeff VanderMeer even provides a small humoristic guide on the usage of new coinages that adds to clockpunk and dieselpunk terms such as boilerpunk, raygun gothic, stitchpunk, mannerpunk, where Gail Carriger’s works might fit, and gaslight romance. (58-59) Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, steampunk has gained notoriety outside the borders of its mother-country, the United States of America. Using images of heroes and dragons, corsets and gadgets in bright colors or, on the contrary, in dark shades, steampunk novels catch the eye of the reader. The books themselves, apart from their content, become important as aesthetic objects as one should always be reminded that steampunk, despite its growing popularity as a literary genre, finds its natural habitat at conventions or on specialized websites that promote objects, items of clothing and accessories fashioned to suit certain tastes. Thus, it is before anything else a material sub-culture, an extremely visible movement that remains marginal. In a narrow and historical definition of the genre, science-fiction as a specific literary genre does not exist before nineteenth century science became sufficiently advanced so that authors like Mary Shelley could become inspired to write novels in which men move beyond the boundaries of what was known as possible. By doing this, it aligns itself to an older stream of imagination that makes it return to the first mythical stories of humanity. Clearly defining this genre is important in order to understand that imaginary writings are not a uniform mass. There is a distinction to be established between the scientific discourse in the context of a steampunk novel and the extrapolation of a scientifically proven fact in telling a story: science-fiction is a narrative inspired by science, resulting from science and not a magical invention shaped to look like science and formulated using scientific terminology. This difference is important. In her novels, Gail Carriger plunges into a serious thought process: confronted with the living dead, nineteenth century science does not have the means necessary to formulate a theory explaining such an aberration, one that produces a system based on the idea that the soul is a quantifiable matter, a notion inconceivable for Victorian spirituality. In her works the difference between the living, the living dead and the inanimate result from the nature of the links between the body and the soul, or the presence or absence of particles of inner “aether”. Despite the fact that the characters in Gail Carriger’s Blameless (2010) enjoy exploring the supernatural mystery using a pseudo-scientific discourse, they cannot “make” science: the attempts of Club Hypocras to artificially make vampires and warewolves with transfusions and electroshocks are not only deemed to fail but also reprehensive from a moral point of view. In the end, this attempt ended up reducing the Club to “[…] only one small branch, and their actions became sadly public. Quite the embarrassment, in the end” (Blameless 49) The personal dimension seems essential to understand the role of magic as a superior, transcendental force: it is not necessarily good or moral. The disruption of the natural order represented by necromancy is limited to just one man and one moment, while evoking the advancements of science in neo-Victorian fiction seems to operate in the shadow of the twentieth century horrors, such as eugenics or the atomic bomb. Steampunk, that tries to exorcise this menacing horizon with its pseudo-science, is even more impregnated by it. Magic has a sort of inner energy, stronger than that of human nature and is able to limit the damage that humans might cause, opposed to science which does not have the same inner energy and it is limited by human agency. The privileged status of present-day skepticism and rationalism has been the object of scholars’ attention throughout the years. In her article “Anna Kingsford: Scientist and Sorceress”(2006), Alison Butler states that science and magic should be

25 better understood instead of considered “exclusive and disparate notions” and she argues that “the study of magic is particularly susceptible to this type of present-centeredness because of the traditional understanding of magic as belonging to the primitive and the irrational.” (Butler 62) Thus, the difference between magic and science is not only limited to a set of generalized labels or the authorial perspective. This idea might seem difficult to reconcile with the technological advancement, or with the things considered impossible, magical and in time they become part of the daily routine thanks to progress. In the Victorian period, there were numerous points of contact between science and magic, thus the line between the two concepts becomes particularly fluid in neo-Victorian novels:

[…] unlike the more rigid, discipline-based, institutionalized science characteristic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, nineteenth-century science is both chaotic and unregulated. In the first three decades of the century, science was still closely allied, at least in the public imagination, with magic, alchemy and the occult. (Willis 10)

To be able to make a clearer distinction between magic and science, it is necessary to clarify the historical context of the fictional creation. As Alex Warwick argues in his article “Margins and Centers” (2006): “it is […] not new to suggest that nineteenth-century science is deeply influenced by, as well as being an influence on, nineteenth-century culture […], particularly literature.” (5) Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless character, Sherlock Holmes, earns the Victorian public’s adulation despite his personal flaws through the use of his extensive knowledge on phrenology and the analysis of fingerprints to solve the cases and save the Empire, thus validating them as sciences, but a contemporary author who writes a detective story cannot adhere to the same line of thought, especially when he knows the consequences described by criminal psychology. The neo-Victorian writer is unable to escape his or her own context when re-writing the past. It can be tempting to favor the self-made theories, to say that science-fiction is to be taken as it is and that the objective criteria that might lead to a clear definition of the genre are open to negotiation. Perhaps a certain lack of distinctions between imaginative literatures in general can invalidate the history of science-fiction and reduce the development of distinct genres to editorial etiquette. At the same time, there is also a point of view according to which novels such as Carriger’s popular series belong to science-fiction if the focus is not on hard science, but on social science, as the theory on the ways of the soul is both difficult to follow on a pseudo- scientific level, and intuitive due to its social applications. As Mike Perschon emphasizes, the absence of an official definition for steampunk, a definition that takes into consideration the expansion of the genre, leaves the door open to a hidden arrogance on the part of some critics. As an example, Gail Carriger’s work was judged as not sufficiently “punk” to satisfy the self- proclaimed purists: “the series was marked as a romance, and ‘real steampunk’ could not be romance (this by the ‘serious’ Steampunk aficionados, who wish to exclude any silly girls from their tree fort).” (Perschon 86) Perschon has a descriptive approach to steampunk and would rather consider the balance between different elements without insisting on fixed patterns and boundaries. Recently, along with steampunk writer Cherie Priest and pop-culture scholar Jess Nevins, I have begun using the idea of a spectrum for talking about steampunk. The spectrum answers the question ‘how steampunk is it?’ not ‘is it steampunk or not?’. If you look at the side of those

26 goggles, you’ll see a little dial attached to each lens’ control- that’s to govern intensity. With those dials, we can intensify each feature’s presence in our goggle-gaze […] (17) According to him, steampunk relies on three major ingredients: retrofuturism, neo- Victorianism and technofantasy, with the latter easily destroying the difference between magic and science. Technofantasy would constitute steampunk’s specific “novum”, “irrational and inexplicable to the modern reader.” (157) This assumed irrationality can be translated, especially in Carriger, into a ludic usage of the pseudo-scientific discourse. Asked about the source of inspiration for coining these words, Carriger invokes her fascination for the tradition of technical jargon initiated in series such as Star Trek. The etymology of these coined “fake words” could be entertaining to analyze, but real pleasure resides in the accumulation of new words, each more absurd than the other, the enchanting rhetorical questions and the emphasis expressed by the choice of punctuation, the interjections and the italics. The words, most of which are incomprehensible and almost impossible to pronounce, are invoking sounds rather than a real dialogue. Perschon, touching upon the problematic association of Star Wars to technofantasy, concludes: “SF like Star Trek is making an attempt to sound scientific. Steampunk rarely tries.” (164) Another important element, even if it seems like a reductive synecdoche for steampunk, steam is not just a smoke curtain, but a moving force, a bridge between all these works. Each steampunk author exploits in his or her own way the poetical value of an invented source of energy, but the driving force imagined by Mieville in Perdido Street Station (2003) goes the extra mile. The mathematics that makes his motor function constitutes a xeno-encyclopedic version of chaos theory. It means to calculate the potential energy of a situation and to make the resulting equation into a machine propelled by steam and/or thaumaturgy. Thus, it becomes possible to access the relationship between cause and effect, so much so that the crisis increases and gradually consumes itself, creating a retroactive loop that can lead to perpetual movement. The pseudo-scientific jargon is by no means to be taken seriously as fact: Isaac demonstrates the importance of an intension by conducting an experiment on a piece of cheese: “The crisis was all about potentiality. If he had no genuine intention to crush the cheese, it would not be in crisis. You could not trick an ontological field.” (Mieville 216) In addition to humor, it is the literary value of such language that amazes readers and scholars alike, the way in which, during tense moments in the intrigue, these paradoxes give mathematics a poetic dimension:

The engine applied rigorous crisis logic to the original operation. A mathematical command had created a perfect arithmetic analogue of a source code from disparate material, and that analogue was simultaneously identical to and radically divergent from the original it mimicked. […] The process was, from absolute first principles of analysis, modelling and conversion, utterly riddled with crisis. (Mieville 554)

This passage, despite its serious and scientific tone, is “riddled” with paradoxes, starting with the perception over time, trapped between the infinite – the imaginary mathematical operation is detailed over multiple pages- and something almost instantaneous. Perhaps Perdido Street Station cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts: the writing process, from the occurrence of the first idea to laying it on paper, is expressed by the “crisis” that can also be read as a metaphor for inspiration or like an element in the literary structure. The metatextual dimension is evident and constitutes a characteristic of steampunk, the genre that imitates works from the Victorian canon in a manner totally divergent from the model.

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Mieville encourages the idea that through this pseudo-science all the energies invented for and by steampunk are at their core, literary energies. Far from falling into self-reflection, the meta-literary characteristic fuels in its turn all the different communication systems that reflect on and question the process of writing imaginative literature. Apart from steam and gadgets, corsets are essential and easily recognizable steampunk elements and so are the different sources of energy proposed to replace steam in the discussed novels. Both elements present a real potential in overthrowing Victorian power structures and have their own discursive codes. For any reader interested in the subversive qualities of steampunk clothing bricolage, the fetishism of corsets represents a dilemma: the negative implications of encouraging women to adopt a means of controlling the female body to the limit of torture could actually result in progress. In the uchronic setting of The Immortal Empire series written by Kate Locke, corsets are inevitable and are modified and adapted so that they serve as armor for the bodyguards called halfies. God Save the Queen (2012), Locke’s first book in the series, introduces Xandra Vardan, the daughter of a vampire and a prostitute, now fighting in the Royal Guard to protect the Aristocracy. In Locke’s The Queen is Dead (2013), the second book in the series, Xandra, who makes a remarkable entrance when, during a combat training course, states : “there was nothing special about my clothes- snug black and white striped bloomers with a vest-like corset, and my usual arse-kicking boots, but the kids continued to stare” (38) The lexical field describing societal norms – “nothing special”, “usual”- serve as a pretext to describe her garments with false modesty. But the mixture itself is subversive in its eclecticism: the boots are more weapons to be used in combat, rather than fashionable accessories, and the idea of combining a corset with the bloomers is certainly obsolete. This article of clothing played an essential role in the women’s liberation movements, first in 1850, then again between 1870 and 1880 and remains controversial today. From a respectable Victorian lady’s point of view, Xandra is wearing openly her undergarments, but uses this as a source of power instead of a vulnerability or an objectification. Thus, the corset becomes one of the most important symbols of steampunk as it is an object that belongs to the past, made iconic in the nineteenth-century, and stands for the politics of an entire society and for oppression. In wearing as the only clothes what was originally created to stay hidden, all of the original connotations are re-interpreted. The importance of bright colors in Xandra Vardan’s clothes and sugary hair marks a visual connection between punk fashion and Lolita2 style. Although uncommon, Gail Carriger was given the opportunity to choose the cover image for Soulless (2009)3 and later made it her mission to include a description of the dresses worn by the models on each of the following volumes. Thus, clothes and dress code are not just random accessories, but profoundly personal within the novels and prove an interchangeable relationship between the images and the text. If one of the characters from Parasol Protectorate would find it difficult to accept wearing their corsets on the exterior, Carriger herself follows steampunk tendency and proves to have an impressive expertise regarding corsets. The “Retro Rack” blog, where Gail Carriger talks about steampunk fashion and provides detailed descriptions of the outfits she chooses to wear at conventions4, serves as an important

2 Fashion style emerging in the 1990s, in Japan. It promotes doll-like casual outfits and it can be divided into a plethora of sub-genres such as gothic Lolita, punk or industrial Lolita. 3 http://gailcarriger.com/2009/10/07/how-soulless-got-its-cover/ 4 http://retrorack.blogspot.com/2011/10/proper-foundation-garments-part-3.html 28 communication channel between author and audience and allows an even more personal approach to the text. On this blog Carriger shares “backstage” secrets and intimate details about her works. This can be viewed as a marketing strategy, but also a way of appropriating, personalizing the literary endeavor that produces the series of novels. Also, once steampunk fashion became a lucrative industry, the sub-culture valorizes the do-it-yourself trend. Each item of clothing becomes charged with its own history, maybe as important as the final visual effect. Steampunk’s metaliterarity does not rest only in its isolated images, but forms and informs all the works belonging to the genre. It is even more surprising that even though steampunk is not primarily a literary movement, it appears to be just like one of its engines, a communication engine that responds to its own questions and continually produces new stories. Steampunk, that does not appear to insist on passing serious theories, brings into attention the emptiness of recycling clichés, but what is truly remarkable is not the technical fetishism. The difference between surface and depth, between the golden gadgets of technofantasy and the plain difference engines isn’t always clear and is almost always flexible and interchangeable. The neo- Victorian elements can easily glide from diversion to divergence in their treatment of technology and history.

Works Cited

Butler, Alison. “Anna Kingsford: Scientist and Sorceress”. David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis (eds.) Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking. London: Anthem Press, 2006, pp. 59-70 Carriger, Gail. Soulless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 1), New York: Orbit, 2009 ------Changeless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 2) New York: Orbit, 2010 ------Blameless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 3) New York: Orbit, 2010 ------Heartless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 4) New York: Orbit, 2011 ------Timeless. ( The Parasol Protectorate Book 5) New York: Orbit, 2012. ------“How Soulless Got Its Cover” October 7, 2009 http://gailcarriger.com/2009/10/07/how-soulless-got-its-cover/ ------”Proper Foundation Garmets, Part 3: Corsets!” October 27, 2011 http://retrorack.blogspot.com/2011/10/proper-foundation-garments-part-3.html Gibson, William and Sterling, Bruce, The Difference Engine. London: Orion Publishing Co., 2011 Hadley, Louisa. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 Heilmann, Ann and Llewellyn, Mark. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century,1999-2009. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Jeter, K.W. Morlock Night [1979]. Botley: Angry Robot, 2011 Jones, B. Jason. “Steampunk & the Neo-Victorian in Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”. Neo-Victorian Studies 3:1, 2010, pp. 99-126 Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana- Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

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Press, 2007. Kohlke, Marie-Louise. “A Neo-Victorian Smorgasbord:Review of Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s 'Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1990-2009'.” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2010): 206-217. La Ferla, Ruth. “Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds” May 8, 2008 https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html Locke, Kate. God Save the Queen. ( The Immortal Empire Book 1) London: Hachette Digital, 2012. ------The Queen is Dead. ( The Immortal Empire Book 2) London: Hachette Digital, 2012. ------Long Live the Queen. ( The Immortal Empire Book 3) London: Orbit, 2013. Mieville, China. Perdido Street Station. New York: Del Rey Books, 2003. Novotny, J. Patrick. “Chapter 6: No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration”. Political Science Fiction, eds Donald M Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998, p. 99-123 Perschon, Mike. The Steampunk Aesthetic: Technofantasies in a Neo-Victorian Retrofuture. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2012 Vandermeer, Jeff. The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature. New York: Abrams, 2011 Warwick, Alex. ”Margins and Centers”. David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis (eds.) Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth- Century Thinking. London: Anthem Press, 2006, pp. 1-16 Wells, H.G. The Time Machine [1895]. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995 Willis, Martin. Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006

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