Sky Pirate Brewer

The UK is a country which has always had anachronisms. In the 1960s you could easily travel on an electric train, a diesel train and a steam train on a single long journey. Conversely, you could take electric trains from Munich into the Alps before the First World War. Often technology is like the human species and you have Neanderthals still living alongside Cro Magnon man. Look at how many houses in the UK still have coal fires when others have electricity, oil or gas and an increasing number are using solar panel and in Southampton even geo-thermal power. Some of this technology would be commonplace to a person of 1950 whereas others would have been 'science fiction'.

I think one characteristic of steampunk and dieselpunk fans is our interest in the neanderthals of technology. This species of human was supposedly more sensitive and could possibly have become the dominant human species, but it died out. We are interested in things like that for technology and from that what sort of society would have come about if that technology had become dominant. AC current almost lost out to DC current; we could have had Betamax as the dominant video form over VHS, very often fashion or good public relations rather than efficiency means that one technology wins out over another. It is up to us to think about what things would have looked like if we had gone up a different path in technology's evolution and then put into the context that we find it most thought-provoking to be set in, whether that is 1780, 1860, 1920 or 1955 or even now.

-darkshines