Papers by Robbie McAllister
Science Fiction Studies: Extrapolating Nostalgia, 2021
Originally conceived as an adaptation of the works of Jules Verne by Hayao Miyazaki and eventuall... more Originally conceived as an adaptation of the works of Jules Verne by Hayao Miyazaki and eventually developed by Hideaki Anno and the studio Gainax, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990 - 1991) acts as one of the clearest examples of the fascinating interdependencies that are evident between the Japanese entertainment industries and the movement that has become known as steampunk. Variously defined as ‘neo-victorientalism’ and ‘steampanku’ by those with an interest in its representations of industrial nostalgia, Japanese steampunk has served as a rich resource for representations of Japan’s past, present and future to be filtered through the iconography of fantastical steam-powered and piston-driven machinery. This article offers a close analysis of the series and considers the ways that its reworking of archetypal representations of nineteenth-century science fiction offers opportunities to evaluate the enormously complex and contradictory facets of nostalgic reminiscence. By considering the ways that the series fetishizes referents to this past age of technological development, I evaluate the means through which a legacy of bygone scientific romance and imperial adventure continues to reflect the fin-de-siècle concerns of a latter century and Japan’s own orientation in a globalised and post-colonial world.
Film Journal, 2019
Since the dawn of the new millennium, the retro-futuristic movement and literary sub-genre known ... more Since the dawn of the new millennium, the retro-futuristic movement and literary sub-genre known as steampunk has become highly commodified within a number of media. Adapted through its own fin de siècle anxieties, cinema has played a central role in bringing this atavistic phenomenon to the attentions of mainstream audiences. In this article, I will explore how steampunk’s sensational technologies mythologize an alternative Victorian landscape where magic collides with reason. Utilizing mechanical marvels that range in size from floating dreadnaughts to pocket-sized Frankensteinian gizmos, the aesthetic identity of steampunk film is defined by objects that bear the semblance of scientific rationalism – yet are unmistakably anachronistic and fantastical. I will question how the nineteenth century has become a global resource for industrial nostalgias that mourn an age of technological tactility and ‘authenticity’ that is, nevertheless, seemingly indistinguishable from sorcery.
Studies in Literature and Culture, 2017
As the twentieth century drew to a close, a literary sub-genre known as steampunk developed into ... more As the twentieth century drew to a close, a literary sub-genre known as steampunk developed into a movement and phenomenon that has since gained mass-cultural significance. Through fashion, art, crafts, music and more, steampunk artists, writers and ‘makers’ have constructed countless alternative histories where the technological developments of the nineteenth century veer wildly off their ‘proper’ course. These works offer a nostalgic vision of a Victorian past where piston-powered and steam-driven devices are capable of utterly fantastic and anachronistic effects. In this article, I will consider the role that cinema has played in popularizing the movement’s retro-futuristic romanticism for a bygone age of industry: reimagining the nineteenth-century through twenty-first-century advances. By evaluating the clockwork fetishisms of these millennial productions, I shall argue that steampunk uses its industrial histories as a means to interact with the technological dependencies of contemporary life, and reflect the intense process of digitization that film itself is undergoing.
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2018
The focus of this article will be a wave of contemporary films that envision neo-Victorian pasts,... more The focus of this article will be a wave of contemporary films that envision neo-Victorian pasts, presents and futures where historical progress is reordered by the anachronistic presence of ‘steampunk’ machinery. I will consider how steampunk’s mainstream emergence coincides with dramatic shifts in cinema’s own industrial identity and has been used to mythologize the technological fears and fetishisms of twenty-first-century progress. As the inventors of steampunk fiction scavenge their worlds for the mechanical debris needed to construct their patch-work machines, the genre’s films similarly restructure pop-cultural icons of modernity: reengineering textual and mechanical histories for contemporary purpose.
Books by Robbie McAllister
Bloomsbury, 2019
Born from an age of scientific innovation and industrial revolution, cinema possesses a unique an... more Born from an age of scientific innovation and industrial revolution, cinema possesses a unique and indelible relationship with the steampunk movement. In Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction McAllister calls attention to a wave of films that collectively imagine alternative histories where technological development has been dramatically derailed from its canonical course. Used as a means to explore the complex development and identification of genres in new forms, this book places steampunk cinema under the microscope and questions how a series of high-profile and big-budget films have repeatedly adopted identities that fantastically blend future and past through the representation of spectacularly anachronistic machinery. Traced across numerous cultural boundaries and the work of countless filmmakers who draw upon the movement’s fetishism for worlds still powered by cogs, pistons and steam-engines, McAllister questions how and why the film industry has so frequently acted as a stage for steampunk’s retro-futuristic nostalgias.
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Papers by Robbie McAllister
Books by Robbie McAllister