Lost Victoriana

[bryant]

There’s a thread over at rpg.net called “Lost Victoriana,” which is actually about the RPG Victoriana, but it got me thinking about a sort of lost history of the Victorian era — a history of technology that dwarves our own, a world of crystal skyships and sophisticated colonies on the surface of Jupiter. The Queen’s Patrol jousts with philosophical criminals who will toast the Queen despite their anarchic ways. Not a steampunk world at all.

Not sure what I’d do with it.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm such a steampunk fan that it's difficult at this point for me to remove that aesthetic from of an alternate Victorian-era construction. I'd be totally curious to read more. :)

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

Same here. I can't disassociate steampunk from Lost Victoriana at all. So when you say "not steampunk at all," what do you mean?

[bryant]

Hm. No steam, for one -- this isn't a world in which steam engines power everything. It's a hidden view into our own history in which some bright lad figured out how to collect the sun's rays in crystalline engines and use them to drive an entire civilization in the Outer Planets.

It's sort of... a posthuman world (a la Vinge's Singularity) starting from the Victorian era, rather than from a point in our own. In fact, that's exactly it -- Babbage uploaded himself into a crystal computer early on, and he's dreaming more and more marvelously advanced things every minute.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

How is this different from the setting for Space: 1889?

[bdeakin.livejournal.com]

Damn, beat me to it.

[bryant]

Significantly more utopian in concept and execution. Also, the conceit is that this is /our/ world... but a history that's been shifted out of existence. I'm not sure that makes any practical difference in play, but consider Mary Gentle's Ash.