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The Immersion Book of Steampunk

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James Targett

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“Marvel comes quickly, cloaked in the mundane. It's the woman waking to the smell of smoke as fire spreads, miles away, through her brother's house. It's the sharp flash of recognition as a young man glimpses, in the ordinary hubbub, the stranger with whom he will share his life. It's a mother's dream of her baby, blue in the cold store, six months before he comes, stillborn, into the world. Even the Church Fathers admitted the category of marvelous- or mirabilis, as they knew it. For them it was an irksome classification. A grey area. Compare the marvel with it's less troublesome metaphysical kin. In the thirteenth century, the miracle reflected the steady-handed authorship of the divine- truth made manifest. Similarly magic, or magicus, demonstrated with tell-tale showmanship the desperate guile of the devil. The marvel, however, was of poor performance and tended, therefore, towards ambiguity. It took shape in the merely mortal sphere. It seemed to lack the requisite supernatural chutzpah. Here, the clergy were typically surplus to requirements. Yet, if less outwardly compelling, the marvel was also less easily contained than either the miraculous or the magical. It remained more elusive. More stubborn. And if finally reducible in time, with the erosions of memory, to rationalization, anecdote, drinking tale or woman's lore, the marvel also rarely failed to leave behind a certain residual uncertainty. A discomfiting sense of possibility. Or, on bolder occasions, an appetite for wonder.”

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“We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake up in the morning and as we put on our trousers, we should remember the seahorse, and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next. Each single seahorse contains enough wonder to knock the whole of humanity off its feet, if we would but pay attention.”

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“But he gave no greater gift than the one he offered me shortly before he died, and it was a gift that answers for all time the question of whether it is rational or appropriate to strive for “ambitious” therapy in those who are terminally ill. When I visited him in the hospital he was so weak he could barely move, but he raised his head, squeezed my hand, and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you for saving my life.”

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“How can intermediate level beings see or experience this artificial life? The answer is that we already have virtual reality goggles through which we can view, in three dimensions, sporting events on the opposite side of the world. Today you can purchase equipment that enables you to watch and listen to a professional basketball game that takes place in the United States while you are in your bedroom in Japan, wearing the virtual reality goggles and headphones. Imagine the authenticity, accuracy and realism of virtual reality that a civilization a thousand years more advanced than us can produce!”

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