Would you like some horribly racist Victorian-era steampunk?

[sabotabby]

Apparently there was, at some point, quite a fad for writing Edisonades, dime novels of the Boy and His Robot variety. These stories typically involved a brilliant young inventor creating a gigantic robot and using it as a tool of U.S. expansionist policy in the Wild West.

And thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can read them online.

Here is The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies, Edward S. Ellis (1868).


This is a thing in the world.

Warning: It is exceedingly awful. Shoddy prose, racism, imperialism, ableism, and the most grievous sin of all, the author has chosen to write out the dialect as was the fashion of that unenlightened age.

More about Johnny Brainerd's Steam Man here.

Comments

[coconuthead.livejournal.com]

Ohhh man! Dreadful old novels make good wintertime reading. I hope there's lots of exclamation points.

[sabotabby]

There are many exclamation points. It is truly terrible. I couldn't finish it on account of how much awful there was and also because I couldn't figure out what the Irishman was saying.