Paul Di Filippo Quotes

There is a certain degree of 'steampunkishness' that creeps into my books.

Steampunk, the repurposing of Victorian culture and technology for contemporary fun and profit, is so ubiquitous - in media, books, fashion, music, cosplay, and maker culture - that we tend to imagine its superficial aspects are all that define it.

I've really loved steampunk for a long time, ever since 'Wild Wild West,' and it's always been a genre and an era that's fascinated me. But so often it's set in England, and that doesn't really resonate with me, or maybe it just seems a little overdone.

I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best-known books, the 'Mortal Engines' series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that's because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

Steampunk has been hovering around for a long while, and it's never really caught on in a big way.

The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

I like certain subgenres within science fiction and fantasy, and one of those is urban fantasy, and another is steampunk.

As for genre, my adult books are usually filed under science fiction / fantasy, although some stores put them into romance, and few have stuck them into horror. I consider all my books a mix of steampunk and urban fantasy.

Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity.

Hans Zimmer and I considered 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows' to be a steampunk genre; our inspiration came from Sherlock's own travels.

Steampunk is...the love child of Hot Topic and a BBC costume drama

Within the sphere of steampunk, there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless 'neo-Victorian' novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness.

My first encounter with science fiction was reading the work of H.G. Wells when I was nine or ten, and I don't believe 'The War of the Worlds' or 'The Time Machine' have ever been bettered. Plus, I have always had a liking for Victorian and Edwardian clothes and contraptions, which tends to color the worlds I dream up.

I still tend to read more urban fantasy and romance than science-fiction, but every once in a while, a couple of books will come along and knock my socks off.

We are bodies which think, and we're at home with steampunk because it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical: that which we can understand with our fingers.

I'm the product of 6 million years of evolution? Come on, man. I crawled out of a swamp yesterday.

I don't even really know what the big bang is, and so when people want to go through and say, 'Well, I believe that the universe started by God starting it,' that's fine by me.

For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written manifestation of the steampunk ethos.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with 'Brisk Money' as the origin story.

Goth culture, as mired in the past as it is, even it goes through changes, so Goth when I was growing up is not what it is now. When I think of Goth culture as it is at the moment I think of mall culture.