An angel appeared, together with a ram, letting Abraham know that God didn’t really want him to kill his son, that he should sacrifice the ram instead, and that the whole thing had merely been a test.Īnd to modern observers, at least, it’s abundantly clear what exactly was being tested. We all know how things turned out, of course.
Abraham, the father, had been commanded, by the God he worshipped as supreme above all others, to sacrifice the young man himself, his beloved and only legitimate son, Isaac. Unbeknownst to the son, however, the father had another sort of sacrifice in mind altogether. The young man carried on his back some wood that his father had told him they would use at the top to make an altar, upon which they would then perform the ritual sacrifice of a burnt offering. "I like to say that it was 1987 when steampunk became aware of itself," Adam Smasher, the steampunk musician, says.One day in the Middle East about four thousand years ago, an elderly but still rather astonishingly spry gentleman took his son for a walk up a hill. By the time Jeter coined actual term, in 1987, steampunk as a concept had been well established. That was quickly followed by "Brazil" (1985), which took the retro-future look even further. Twenty years later, when Michael Radford filmed George Orwell's 1949 novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," he depicted the year 1984 as imagined in 1949 - an "alternate" future in which TVs still had old-fashioned picture tubes and movies were still in black and white. The effect was enchanting, and other films followed suit: "From the Earth to the Moon" (1958) "The Time Machine" (1960) and "First Men in the Moon" (1964) featured time travelers in Edwardian frock coats and astronauts with snuff boxes.
The eternal frontier answers update#
Wells.Ī key moment was in 1954, when Walt Disney filmed Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." The studio made a fateful decision: rather than try to update the 1869 novel, they would do the whole thing in period. Captain Nemo's prototypical submarine, the Nautilus, contains plush Victorian red carpet, mahogany, brass fittings,19th-century upholstery and a full-size pipe-organ. It was a future that was, even then, starting to diverge quite a bit from the one envisioned by the first generation of 19th century sci-fi writers, like Jules Verne and H.G. That decade, which saw the beginnings of the space race and the computer age, is the time when the future as we now think of it began to shape itself. Though the term "steampunk" dates to 1987, the idea itself probably goes back much further - to at least the 1950s. They take something that already exists and change it, and make it old but new at the same time." "The people who are into it are very creative, so everybody is making their costumes, their props," says Rita Flores, a digital artist from Bogota who got into steampunk about four years ago.
If you see bracelets made of hex nuts and watch springs, chairs made of rusting treadles and velocipede seats, or wall hangings made from hundred-year-old rods, cranks, valves, levers and flywheels, you're looking at steampunk. It means reusing old bits of flotsam and jetsam- particularly antique hardware - in creative ways. "Upcycling," is a big word in steampunk circles. It's a relatively inexpensive way to show you're doing something steampunk." "The connotation is flying, or working on an airship, or doing science. "Goggles are a clear specifically defining visible characteristic that anyone can wear," Mach says. Their tropes include top hats, corsets, fans, Victorian pith helmets, mechanical arms, outlandish retro weaponry, and any kind of outfit that can be made to contain gears, cams, cogs, nuts, bolts and rivets. Only their chosen mode is 19th- and early-20th-century retro - Victorian whimsy with a space-age twist. Like their Renaissance Faire brethren, they love to dress up.