Many of Steven Millhauser’s best stories are wonders of historical futurism. He is interested in the road not taken, in what might have been, whether it’s a frighteningly interactive form of painting (“A Precursor of the Cinema”) or a bodysuit that simulates any tactile experience (“The Wizard of West Orange”). If you like steampunk or sci-fi, if you like Christopher Nolan or Rian Johnson–really, if you like PopSci–you owe it to yourself to check out Millhauser.
Millhauser is mostly known as a short story writer, though he won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Maybe his best-known short story is “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” about a Viennese magician, which was made into a movie called The Illusionist in 2006, starring Edward Norton. His pet themes are often contrasting; he writes tales of fantastic technological achievement in calming language, he mixes historical characters with completely fictional ones, he compares real inventions with those that only exist in his pages.
via Popular Science
