Browsing by Author "Perschon, Mike"
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Item Finding Nemo: Verne’s antihero as original steampunk(2010) Perschon, MikeIn the foreword to his annotated translation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Walter James Miller suggests that Verne’s image was in need of rehabilitation due to the plethora of poor English translations his works have suffered. With the emergence of better translations, the same need for rehabilitation has emerged for Captain Nemo, the anti-hero of Verne’s underwater adventure tale. In the updated, post-colonial English translations of The Mysterious Island, Nemo is revealed to be the antithesis of the Caucasian pop-culture iteration made famous by James Mason and most recently continued by Patrick Stewart and Michael Caine: an Indian prince whose real name is Dakkar, a leader of the Sepoy rebellion against colonial rule in 1857. It is this Nemo, Verne’s original character, who embodies the essence of the Steampunk aesthetic of the instability of identity through his repeated death-and-rebirth cycle in both novels. Mixing one part recursive fantasy, one part historical criticism, and one part textual analysis, this paper will demonstrate how Captain Nemo is representative of one of the core elements of the Steampunk aesthetic, namely the redefining of identity.Item Finding Nemo: Verne’s antihero as original steampunk(2023) Perschon, Mike; Westfahl, GaryThis volume is a fresh examination of the works of Jules Verne, the pioneering and enduringly popular science fiction writer. Essays study Verne’s various novels—including Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Included essays offer analyses of literary responses to Verne’s work, assessments of film adaptations of his novels and discussions of steampunk, the Verne-inspired science fiction subgenre that has influenced writers like Philip Jose Farmer, Caleb Carr and Adam Roberts.Item Sequestered spaces, and what is within and without in regards to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series(2020) Letendre, Casey; Perschon, MikeNaomi Novik’s Temeraire series re-imagines the Napoleonic Wars in a world where dragons have always existed alongside human society. Temeraire focuses on its protagonist Captain William Laurence and his dragon, Temeraire. Laurence’s life is upended when he acquires Temeraire’s egg as a spoil of war and becomes the dragon’s captain. He is forced to leave the normal society he knew to enter the one crafted around dragons and working life within the Aerial Corps. Temeraire belongs to both the historical fantasy and alternate history subgenres. Understanding the interactions of these two subgenres is key to understanding the truly re-imaginative aspects of Novik’s work. Through these blended subgenres, Novik creates a world that allows for large amounts of agency to be given to her female characters without disrupting the historical setting that earns the series its place in the historical fantasy subgenre. The addition of dragons into our history leads to spaces sequestered specifically for dragons within British society; these spaces allow room for what can be considered fantastical characterizations of women when contrasted against morals held during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815. The women of the Aerial Corps exemplify personal expression and agency that aligns with modern reader values; they are inherently at odds with their contemporary societal expectations. Novik begs the question of how the lives of British female officers can be justified to exist within the setting she has created for Temeraire, her answer being heterotopias - spaces that exclude and excuse these women from normal society.Item “Steam Wars,” the special edition: steampunk on the move in Philip Reeve’s and Christian Rivers’s Mortal Engines(2024) Perschon, Mike; Danahay, Martin A.; Howey, Ann F.While steampunk continues to defy a fixed definition, certain features can be identified which appear in almost all steampunk cultural products. These features are technofantasy, retrofuturism, and vintage elements. This last feature is often represented as neo-Victorian. While it is undeniable that many steampunk works are set in worlds or alternate histories based upon the Victorian culture or period, there is a growing body of steampunk works set in other cultural spaces, temporal periods, or even secondary worlds. This article suggests that it’s time to leave the tacit conflation of steampunk and neo-Victorianism behind, in favor of vintage, a more dynamic term that points to a past that is decades distant, but not in the ancient past.Item Their own devices: steampunk airships as heterotopias of crisis and deviance(2021) Krentz, Courtney; Perschon, Mike; St. Amand, AmyMichel Foucault uses a sailing vessel as the exemplar of his theory of heterotopia because of its mobility. The lateral and vertical mobility of the steampunk airship indicates the potential for an even greater exemplar of heterotopia, particularly of Foucault’s defining principles of heterotopic crisis and deviance. These principles are explored onboard the steampunk airships of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy and Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, resulting in travel towards progressive social frontiers of gender and race. The protagonists of the Leviathan trilogy move from a position of crisis to deviance, as mediated through the friendship and romance of two representatives of warring factions. In contrast, the heroine of the Finishing School series moves from deviance to crisis as she navigates the vagaries of gender and racial identity. These airship heterotopias of young adult fiction, which not only descend geographically but also socially, cross liminal crisis spaces of class, race, gender, and identity to craft literary cartographies for these social frontiers, providing readers with literary maps for their uncertain real worlds of crisis.