Vintage Tomorrows

Prelude. A Note from the Historian

“Chronological living is a kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. Existence doesn’t have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other.”

— Charles Yu How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010)

Brian and I set out from that dinner stuffed full of questions, with just the slightest lingering aftertaste of a few hypotheses. It was time to get down to business—this was a project in earnest. So earnest, in fact, that I left my job at Microsoft and took to the road as an itinerant historian. Talk about a dream job. I immersed myself even deeper in steampunk—talking to everyone I could, reading piles of fiction and watching hours of video, spelunking the web and attending ...