Clockwork Futures

Brandy Schillace

Airships and electric submarines, automatons and mesmerists? Welcome to the wild world of steampunk. It is all speculative? Or is it? Meet the intrepid souls who pushed Victorian technology to its limits and paved the way for our present age.

The gear turns, the whistle blows, and the billows expand with electro-mechanical whirring. The shimmering halo of Victorian technology lures us with the stuff of dreams, of nostalgia, of alternate pasts and futures that entice with the suave of James Bond and the savvy of Sherlock Holmes. Fiction, surely.

But what if the unusual gadgetry so often depicted as “steampunk” actually made an appearance in history? Zeppelins and steam-trains; arc-lights and magnetic rays: these fascinating (and sometimes doomed) inventions bounded from the tireless minds of unlikely heroes. Such men and women served no secret societies and fought no super-villains, but they did build engines, craft automatons, and engineer a future they hoped would run like clockwork.

Along the way, however, these same inventors ushered in a contest between desire and dread. From Newton to Tesla, from candle and clockwork to the age of electricity and manufactured power, technology teetered between the bright dials of fantastic futures and the dark alleyways of industrial catastrophe.

In the mesmerizing Clockwork Futures, Brandy Schillace reveals the science behind steampunk, which is every bit as extraordinary as what we might find in the work of Jules Verne, and sometimes, just as fearful. These stories spring from the scientific framework we have inherited. They shed light on how we pursue science, and how we grapple with our destiny—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Dr. Brandy Schillace writes about culture, the history of medicine, and the intersections of medicine and literature. She is the Managing Editor of the international health journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and teaches at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.  Brandy has lectured at the New York Academy of Medicine and writes for The Huffington Post and InsideHigherEd, among other publications.

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Endorsements & Reviews

"Schillace recounts the fascinating history of the real scientists and inventors who laid the foundations for our modern-day technology (such as Edison, Tesla and Volta), along with such fictional practitioners as Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes. In a way, the book stands as a companion to Richard Holmes’s popular history The Age of Wonder. Entertaining and illuminating. It answers some questions I never even thought to ask." The Wall Street Journal

"A wide-ranging narrative. Those not yet immersed in the steampunk ethos will get a sweeping introduction to the heroes, outlaws, and automatons populating the subgenre and their real-life progenitors. An engaging social history of technology and invention that offers a great nonfiction crossover for steampunk fans." Library Journal

"Schillace examines rituals of bereavement across cultures and across time. She points toward the confusion that has emerged in a technological age when brain death, heart death and other definitions becloud our understanding of expiry itself. We don't know what death means or even what it is." Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review (Praise for DEATH'S SUMMER COAT)

"Schillace perceives the forces behind our misaligned contemporary attitudes about mortality." The New Yorker [Praise for Death's Summer Coat]

"A thoughtful and wide-ranging examination. Schillace looks at how cultures worldwide have dealt with death, both in the past and present." The Boston Globe [Praise for Death's Summer Coat]

"Schillace’s explorations are extensive and interdisciplinary, drawing on research in the sciences but also valuing the many expressions of death in the arts. With her personable voice, she is able to breathe compassion into what might otherwise be a depressing topic. Endlessly fascinating. This vibrant window to other lives also creates a deeper understanding of one’s own." Publishers Weekly [Praise for Death's Summer Coat]

"Schillace writes glowingly of a growing movement to counter the death-denying attitude of Western society. Wide-ranging and surprisingly easy reading. " Kirkus Reviews [Praise for Death's Summer Coat]