Steampunk fiction is fun.

There's something about a science-fiction story placed in a Victorian setting that excites the imagination. Well, mine. And apparently a lot of other people's, given the popularity of the genre.

In The Real World of Victorian Steampunk: Steam Planes & Radiophones, Simon Webb looks at a surprising number of inventions -- conceived, proposed and, in some cases, fully realized -- that seem like steampunk conceits but are actually drawn from history.

Much of this history is unknown; in some cases (such as precursors to the Wright Brothers) it was purposely concealed. But, as the title suggests, there was a creative boom in the Victorian era that produced a great many steam-driven vehicles and devices -- as well as other inventions that seem completely out of time -- that has fallen from the public awareness.

So be prepared to discover steam-powered buses and airplanes, pneumatic trains, proto computers and fax machines, televisions and voicemail, robots, gas-less cars and cities under glass. Learn who invented them, how they worked and why they failed.

It makes an interesting read. It also is sometimes sad, when you realize that a lot of these inventions relied less on fossil fuels, were cleaner, quieter and more efficient than their modern-day equivalents, but were shelved for reasons that were often economic. If only things had gone a little differently, the world might be a much different place.

That said, Webb strives needlessly to plump up the book with long-winded prose and repetitions. He tells us things and then repeats them, sometimes in the same chapter (and occasionally on the same page), sometimes later (and, again, later) in the book. He recaps things he has just told us, then warns us what is to come next, then recaps that as well.

This might make more sense in a long, involved textbook, but despite the wealth of information at Webb's disposal, the book is only 150 pages long. At that length, I suppose I can see why he was trying to pad the book to make it seem more weighty, but there are better ways to do that. Perhaps by providing more detail for some of the examples he provides? But no, instead we get a lot of this:

We have looked in this chapter at various inventions which are often regarded as being quintessentially of the twentieth century; the optical transmission of telephone calls, fax machines, hard drives, television and answering machines. To our surprise, we have learned that they were all invented during the reign of Queen Victoria; decades before the beginning of the twentieth century. Before ending this chapter, we will look again at a subject touched upon in Chapter 1; that of Victorian robots, fictional and real.

This is simply regurgitating things he said earlier in the book, and would say again before its end. That made reading the book more tedious than it needed to be. I enjoyed it and I'm glad I read it, but I was disappointed, too.