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enormous American enthusiasm for invention that carries on in each generation

In a third-floor loft where programmers build Internet start-ups, Mackenzie Cowell is talking about the tools he and like-minded young colleagues are using to fuel what they hope will be the next big thing in biology. The list includes a cut-up Charlie Card, ingredients bought on eBay to make a kind of scientific Jell-O, and a refrigerator, just scored on Craigslist.com, that chills to 80 degrees below zero.Cowell is part of an effort called DIYbio — short for do-it-yourself biology — that aims to move science into the hands of hobbyists. It is starting by holding sessions where amateurs extract DNA, and attempt genetic fingerprinting using common household items and the kitchen sink.

It shatters that clinical image

the biohacker

After all, Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club played a part in the personal computer industry and counts Apple Inc. founders among its attendees

This follows in the heels of enormous American enthusiasm for invention that carries on in each generation

But the work also raises fears that people could create a deadly microbe on purpose, just as computer hackers have unleashed crippling viruses or broken into government websites

Tom Knight, a senior research scientist at MIT who is cofounding a synthetic biology company called Ginkgo BioWorks, sees the transformative value of biohacking — the phrase used to describe doing to living organisms what computer hackers have long done with electronics. But he has reservations about putting such power into the hands of amateurs.“I think if the safety issues can be addressed, there is a big opportunity,” Knight said. “It’s a huge issue; how do you regulate so [people] don’t cause havoc.

The clash between the potential benefits and dangers of doing home science were highlighted by the case of Victor Deeb. The retired 71-year-old chemist in Marlborough saw his basement lab dismantled by authorities this summer after it was noticed by fire officials putting out a second-floor air conditioner fire.The state DEP said officials intervened in Deeb’s workspace because it did not meet lab standards. Chemical companies shipping Deeb their materials were unaware that they were shipping to a residence, authorities said.Deeb, who said he was trying to make safer surface coatings for food containers, insists that the chemicals he was using were less hazardous than common cleaners and household chemicals. He questions why his hobby was seen as more dangerous than, for example, a hunter with a gun collection, or a person using a propane grill

I have a bit of a confession to make; I don't really know what Steampunk is. Genre, aesthetic, movement, sub-culture, style, all of these terms have been used to describe it but none quite capture the richness and variety I see in this community.

Depending on how exactly the present re-/constructs the Victorian past, it will lend itself to a variety of ideological purposes. Early forms of the feminist movement, the glory days of British imperialism and colonialism, industrialization, urbanization, and proletarization--they all can be construed as variants of contemporary issues as long as the paradigm of historical continuity is upheld by cultural critics like Marcus

examine respectively the scientific and the supernatural discourses whose intertwining makes the Victorian p.245 period so fascinating to contemporary readers

Steampunk constitutes a special case among alternative histories, a science fiction subgenre that postulates a fictional event of vast consequences in the past and extrapolates from this event a fictional though historically contingent present or future.

A steampunk novel, such as Gibson's and Sterling's The Difference Engine , follows the formula in positing, among other things, that Victorianism takes a turn for the exotic when Charles Babbage introduces the computer more than a hundred years before its historical adven

Considering how quickly steampunk has fragmented into a bewildering variety of styles, critics would be best off considering their own definitions as working hypotheses, tentative, evolving fictions in themselves.

postmodern fantastic historiography

In one, fabulation or mythomania (369) conjures up a world of mixed ontologies, which conveys ''the feel of the real past better than any of the ''facts'' themselves'' (368)

In the other, ''the purely fictional intent is underscored and reaffirmed in the production of imaginary people and events among whom from time to time real-life ones unexpectedly appear and disappear''

means of specific historical detail, by a pastiche of the rhetoric of Victorian literature, and by the introduction of fantastic technologies that might not have existed a hundred years ago but have the right ''feel.'

placing imaginary and real-life people side by side

steampunk focuses on technology as the crucial factor in its understanding and portrayal of Victorianism. In adopting the name ''steampunk'' that is to say, in chosing the steam engine as the most appropriate icon of the past to describe itself, it makes technology its main focus. Since the contemporary world is highly technological, any past in which it would see itself reflected must share, or rather, must be made to share, its cultural agenda

What Rosenheim suggests here is that a specifically technological history is discontinuous and erratic enough to defy extrapolative prediction. To the degree that the historical changes produced by technological breakthroughs are ''literally unimaginable,'' they demand metaphorical strategies to be represented properly, strategies the fantastic can provide in great range and variety

More like Jameson's ''postmodern fantastic historiography'' and less like science fiction's more conventional alternative histories, steampunk is primarily concerned with foregrounding the fictionality of its narrative universe.

Instead, these authors employ a pseudo-scientific rhetoric that, in keeping with science fiction's fictive technologies, reminds us that all disciplines claiming unproblematic access to the truth operate within the framework of the same narrative conventions and are subject to historical and cultural change

To be sure, steampunk takes the textuality of history for granted. It does so when it mixes historical figures and fictional characters or when it fictionalizes historical characters. Figures like Lady Ada Byron in The Difference Engine, Whitman and Dickinson in Walt and Emily, or Queen Victoria in Victoria appear to contemporary readers primarily as textually mediated. Our knowledge of them depends on texts written by or about them