thewalkingriot:

fuckyeahdieselpunk:

(via Libertador - Dieselpunks)

There’s been a movement recently to multiculturalize steampunk. I haven’t heard of anything similar for it’s somewhat sootier cousin, unfortunately.

Now my brain is working this over.  I’ve been following the multiculturalization of steampunk on Facebook and cheering— there was so much more going on in the world in the Victorian era than the British, and I’ve seen some beautiful Middle Eastern and Indian(Asian) influenced steamy stuff, South American steampunk, and Potawatomie girl doing “nativepunk”.  I’m huge on folks learning about other cultures, and… well… in part because I look around and see the world homogenizing and that’s nice if you like the parts of other cultures that you’re adopting, but it’s really kind of sad too.  I look at diesel era stuff and it looks… I have a hard time imagining that multicultural.  I’m going to have to work on it, because I really want to.

To be honest, I think multicultural dieselpunk is less of a stretch than its Victorian counterpart. If you look at non-European cultures during the latter half of the 19th century, most of them weren’t using steam technology, and so any interpretation of how they would have reacted to it is a fabrication.

From the 1910’s to the 1950’s, however, there was a much wider availability of diesel tech than there had been of steam tech previously. Look at T.E. Lawrence, for example. The Arab revolt has all of the drama of any wild-west steampunk adventure, but it actually happened. We know what the Arabs would have done with armored cars and artillery around 1916. Certainly, they didn’t have much, but they had some. Easy dieselpunk alternate scenario: give them more.

Personally, I think that the conflicts of the diesel era command more narrative interest and have more modern significance than those of the steam era. Colonized countries were rebelling, members of the working class were speaking up around the world, various ideologies were blossoming (or festering, as the case may be)… not to mention the fact that, honestly, Zeppelins belong to the age of diesel—at least, the really awe inspiring ones do.

Above, a Steam-Era airship. Below, a Diesel-Era one. You decide.

fractalized:

Photo by Eddie O’Bryan. Blizzard in Alleyway, Downtown NYC.

pandrewshaner:

“Serving the Machine”

Vladimir Komarov, a cosmonaut, knew he was going to die when he left Earth for space on the Soyuz 1. His friend Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space, knew Komarov would too. But Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution with a spectacle. So Komarov boarded the Soyuz 1, and just like he predicted, ended up dying. The picture above is Komarov’s remains.

All-right, it might not be dieselpunk, exactly—the late 1960s aren’t really any *punk, and the closet fit would be atompunk, if anything. Nevertheless, the picture definitely has a surreal film-noir style, and the image of the high-ranking Soviet officers standing over the charred corpse of a national hero could easily be worked into a weird war setting.