Fans of steampunk fiction should get themselves down to the Science Museum with all haste. They’re giving away copies of a cracking little booklet. Albertopolis Disparu is styled as a preface to a lost work by author James Colvin (better known to the world as Michael Moorcock). The full work, if only it existed, presents an alternative reality where the roofs of South Kensington are packed with observatories, laboratories, ‘tarpaper shacks and ramshackle sheds’. It’s 1915, or thereabouts, and this rooftop world of Albertopolis sits atop a gigantic network of tickertape machines, difference engines and phonographs, designed to listen in on German intelligence. We read how the familiar institutions of Exhibition Road are put to use as a top secret ‘listening post’, and of the device’s eventual destruction by an unorthodox Zeppelin attack. It’s superb, dense stuff for an eight-page story.

Albertopolis Disparu is the work of Tony White, the former writer in residence at the Science Museum. His story is a response to the museum’s Listening Post, which projects live messages from internet chat rooms onto a giant grid of screens. Argh, too many things referencing other things in this blog post. My brain hurts.

You can pick up a copy of the booklet from the Listening Post room, or download the PDF here.