sensawunda n.

Item 17....HONEYMOON IN SPACE by Geo Griffith. A fabulous item. A complete paperback form, perhaps 60 years old and looks it—but all there to read. Your sensawunda will be especially aroused by the advertisement for Ven-Yusa, ‘the famous oxygen face cream, the most refined & ingenious preparation ever invented for the human skin.’

SF on the box just doesn’t seem to come across. There is no ‘sensawunda’ about it, no suspension of disbelief. It all comes across like an attempt to televise SF, not like SF per se.

Gerrold’s skimpy three-paragraph intro is a glorification of the sensawunda, and reads with the anonymous hyperbole of a blurb.

It gave me that initial jolt of Sensawunda, the first high that sends you craving for more, even though you will never attain such an emotional peak again.

If you don’t get your full complement of sensawunda from this tale, you’ve been tamed and declawed by too much literary canoodling.

So we could conclude that Steampunk reinvigorated readers with that old-fashioned gosh-wow sensawunda we had as teenagers first discovering science fiction and fantasy.