I wonder why there aren't more science fiction stories about the past. For some reason, it's always assumed that science fiction is about the future. I say it's about the new and exciting science, but some of this new and exciting science (physics breakthrough, artificial intelligence, etc.) just might have happened today or in the recent past, and we might not be able to notice it yet (or it have backfired back then and will only come to fruition later). Given that recent past is the time all of us have lived in, and some have nostalgic feelings for, it looks like such an oversight to me. In sci-fi games, I can only see 0x10 and Darwinia do this to a degree.
Given what your typical MAD SCIENTIST can do with a handful of gears and a steam boiler, I usually tag it as a subgenre of fantasy, not of SF. Just like Tolkien's medievalism, it's set in a romanticized version of the world before the technological revolution in progress as its being written. With magic.
I predict that once the Information Revolution is over, and the next one has begun, there will be people writing fiction set in an exaggerated, magical caricature of the early 2000s.
I predict that the ability to exaggerate and caricature an era will be inversely proportional to that era's ability to store information and make it accessible to future eras.
I should have said "recent past". I am not familiar with steampunk. I read Wikipedia article, but that's it.
But what about the present day? The technology that we might think of today as thing of the future might just be developed in some obscure lab today, or 5-15 years ago. Wouldn't it be fun to speculate in that direction?
There are quasi-modern-day sci-fi stories like the TV show Eureka or Fringe.
Going backwards just a little in time... Dieselpunk is often set between the two world wars. I loved the style of The Rocketeer, Skycaptain and The World of Tomorrow along with other post-aviation, pre WWII sci-fi/fantasies (even if the non-stylistic aspects of Skycaptain were deeply disappointing).
Same for the "Clockpunk" subgenre - It's Sci-Fi in the time or form of Leonardo Da'Vinci.
There's definetly a point, though - Have you read Sci-Fi set in the time of the Pyramids? In the time of the Roman Empire? Would you? What would change?
It's worth looking up "Rome Sweet Rome", a short story that got some acclaim a few months back when it was written on Reddit and then optioned by Warner Bros. It's modern military sci-fi, essentially, but the setting and the detail that's put into "What would happen if a modern platoon were set down in the time of the roman empire?" is pretty good.
John Barnes wrote a whole series of this kind of alt-history (e.g. "Caesar's Bicycle", "Washington's Dirigible", etc.). Which reminds me that there is, of course, a entire genre called "alt-history", starting presumably with Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", and notably including L. Sprague deCamp's "Lest Darkness Fall" (1941, and online in its entirety at scribd by arrangement with the author), and branching out a lot over the past decade or so.
I'd totally read Hellenistic steampunk. That's the culture that invented steam power (and fancy clockwork, see the Antikythera mechanism); it's pretty disappointing there's all this Victorian steampunk instead.
Terry Pratchett (wildly successful author of the Discworld series) once quipped that fantasy is just scifi without the nuts and bolts. I take that as indicating that fantansy and scifi are related in that they both create narratives around fictional mechanics. The tropes differ, but they are exploring the similar space of what might happen in a world with mechanics (e.g. magic, 'quantum') allowing completely different set of experiences than the real world.
Just google his name and "rivets". Looks like it's actually a joking remark Card makes himself to express what it's like to dabble in both sci-fi and fantasy (Card is successful with both).
Card maintains that switching genres wasn't a difficult
thing for him. He believes that, ultimately, the
difference between the two genres is largely on the
surface. "Half joking, I was writing to Ben (Bova) about
this very subject, and I said, look, fantasy has trees,
and science fiction has rivets. That's it, that's all
the difference there is, the difference of feel,
perception.
There are quite a few stories about people being sent back into the past.
Just off the top of my head I can think of: Conrad Stalingrad, Jainsiaries, and 1635 (Eric Flint).
And there are ofcourse the alternate history stories like the Drakar chronicles (wherein there was a African slave-state empire rather than traditional colonialism).
I believe Stephenson himself commented that the Enoch Root's long life and the ability to bring dead people back to life, both presumably due to alchemy, makes Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle 'past sci-fi'. Otherwise, yes, it's almost the same as historical fiction. A perhaps better example of the blurriness between the two is "Gravity's Rainbow."
Anathem takes place on another planet, and in our future (in that characters in the book have our present as their past).
