THOUGHTS ON
In just the past few decades, the world has marveled at yet another industrial revolution. Gone are the levers and gauges, they having been ousted by the touch screens and digital displays. Never again will the steam whistle roar, silenced is it by the electronic alarms and pings of synthesized sound. We bid farewell to analog, to the ticking, clunking, sputtering, and pounding of mechanized wonders of another age. Although, it does not seem so very long ago that today’s technology seemed but a distant dream.
Still, inventors of yesterday had a very different future in mind when they pondered the advancement of latter generations. Hardly could they dream of a digitized world wherein a single person commands as much power as the largest publishing houses of their day and access to as a much knowledge as all the universities in the contemporary world. Hardly could they dream that, but dream they could, and dream they did.
These dreamers of dreams envisioned a future quite different but no less fantastic than what we know it today. A land where electricity was rendered obsolete by energy harnessed from the the heavens and the automobile too far out matched by the aerial automobile or terrestrial aeroplane. Inventors imagined railways to transverse oceans, buildings to encompass cities and even signals what would leave our realm and break into the spiritual plane. A pity, the vast majority of such contrivances never left the drawing board.
And so, today, much of what is showcased here one might call, “steampunk,” a term of endearment upheld by those with a curious passion for the contrivances envisioned by those of days gone by. The only departure from literary steampunk being that those herein were all designed with the intention of becoming a facet of our reality rather than a mere figment of our imagination. It is from their blueprint that the prior takes its inspiration. These “real McCoys” may not all have been powered by steam but, suffice to say, all run on the fuel of imagination.
In memoriam to those forgotten inventors, this collection is dedicated. It is an ode to that land where dreamers dream, a tribute to those who may not have exceeded the limits of what we can accomplish but, greater still, pushed the boundaries of what we can imagination.