Extraordinary pasts: steampunk as a mode of historical representation

This paper discusses the thirteen stories in Nick Gevers's anthology, Extraordinary Engines, as exemplary texts for considering steampunk as a form of historical representation. Despite their cavalier attitude towards conventional history, the stories are found to adopt specific strategies of historical representation in order to work through metafictional concerns about the relationship between the present and the past, the origins of the conventions of genre fiction, and the idea of progress itself.