I don't know if "Valve-Punk" is a thing or not, but it's a term I increasingly mentally use to describe the short stories of the 50s golden age of Pulpy magazines, and collections like "Earth is Room Enough" by Isaac Asimov.
At the moment I only use it 'mentally' in case I get regarded as a fruitcake for using it in public.
It's an analogue world, a world of tremendous artifical intelligences that can only be accessed by dipole switch, lever and punch card. I world of spaceships that can travel faster than light, but folk can only communicate with each other using a Bakelite telphone with a far out name.
Fantastic machines exist, and no-one gives a damn about explaining how they work. They just clunk and whirr and overheat...and they just work! dammit!.
Solid state? Transistors? No thank you! Everything is vacuum tubes the size of your arm, and chunky glass valves, and things that light up, and things that chatter and hammer like a typewriter. Computers don't talk, or have screens. Like Asimov's multivac, they exisit in caverns the size of a city, are full of people working within them - shades of men working within the brains of greater men in Olaf Stapeldon - and get on with the serious business of deciding elections results from the thoughts of just a single man, or working out just exactly why humans have a sense of humour.
The answer is unspoken, merely spat out on rolls of ticker tape.
How I love the idea of this clunking, whirring non-digital world where we can yet reach the stars...
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