“Through the act of abstraction denoted, speculative fiction signifies an intellect and intellectualism divorced from the dirty physicality of science, from any slack-jawed wonder at gadgets and gimcracks. It claims a cerebral rather than visceral effect…”

It does this by necessity, as it’s central concern is not (like a lot of other sf) “what would society look like with rocket ships?” or “what would society look like with infotech?” or “steam power?” or “nanotech?” or whatever, but “what does a society look like while it is undergoing a true revolution in its foundational technical culture?” This is why steampunk is recognizable: it is an investigation of that question as applied to the industrial revolution, instead of the infotech one. The key is that the focus is on the lived experience fo the transitional period, not the new society that has not yet emerged.

As a direct result of this, gadgets and gimcracks CANNOT be ignored. At the same time, they can’t be looked at with any sort of slack-jawed wonder. They and our relationship to them must be engaged in all their dirty physicality. It’s, like, important that Cayce fires up a Mac Cube to send an email to her boss in Pattern Recognition. The gadgets are no longer (only) symbols of the change represented, or even of Change itself: they are the change incarnated (and they ARE, even in the coffeehouse where I type this as no fewer than four children under the age of ten are playing (working?) on iPhones or iPads).