A Speculative Essay on STEAMPUNK

I say "speculative" for two reasons. One, people seem to have been throwing around the term "speculative fiction" a lot lately and I thought I'd join the party. Two, I've always known what steampunk is but I've never been an expert on it, and educated speculation is still speculation when the extent of your knowledge comes from conversation and poking around on the internet.

Now, onward.

Steampunk is a genre of fiction, and it was always that, first. But the literary genre was defined most strongly by an aesthetic that manifested later in pop culture, most notably fashion and industrial design. From time to time a film (like Final Cut) borrows lightly from the aesthetic but leaves the themes at home.

In my last post I mused as to why it is Britain, specifically, that would have born such a genre. A few people had a few theories on that. Briana said it was cultural ties to the land. Sean said it was discomfort with industrialization. John, like me, said it was the pagan roots. I'm sure that like any true thing, it's a combination.

I remember being in England a couple of years ago. We saw lots of really old things, but it hit me hardest when we saw the Tower of London and some one said that it was over 900 years old. My god! I thought to myself. The United States is so young, we absolutely cannot fathom what 900 or a thousand years of history even feels like. There is no such thing as an American historical figure of 1200 AD. The dust on English shelves is several times older than our government. The closest we get to even existing that early in the record books is some viking who took a boat out and wrote about the land mass in his little viking diary.

So imagine a region like that, whose mythological counterpart is Arthurian legend. They had a good thing going for several centuries, and the most recent of those centuries was spent ping-ponging wildly between - guess what? Science and religion. I imagine it was a difficult thing for a group of little islands to fully accept the industrial revolution when they had roots so deep in magic.

Jules Verne and HG Wells were loose contemporaries of the industrial revolution, which, in case you didn't take 9th grade world history, was totally a British thing until some jerk literally smuggled the designs of the steam engine into the States.

Verne and Wells were futurists and politicos just as much as they were novelists. Their work is responsible for steampunk, but it's not really fair to call them steampunk. At the time they were regular old science fiction writers. Like any good science fiction writer (heh. heh.), they wrote about social structures as much as anything else. They had lived through the Victorian Era, entering into the Edwardian Era, and here before them they saw the birth of marvelous new technologies. When they wrote, they naturally combined the cultural moors of the Victorians with futuristic devices like airplanes, rocketships, submarines, time machines. To a turn of the century man, the future was in steam, just like the real-life, totally game-changing steam engine trains.

Fast forward about a hundred years. The Industrial Revolution in Britain had fizzled to kind of an Industrial Meh, but now it's 1970ish, so, you know, lots of other stuff is going on.

Like punk. I'm sorry, PUNK!!! And not surprisingly, the UK is right there too. You know The Sex Pistols, Clash? Yeah, I'm sure you've never heard of them. The seeds planted by Wells and Verne are rustling in the ground.

I don't know what it was that started this magic brew, but for some reason the punk movement dug out those old books and found a match made in heaven.

I don't know why this happened. Maybe the punks related to the sort of existential crisis posed by a civilization on the brink of a major paradigm shift. Maybe it was Victorian sexual fetishism. Or maybe they just thought it was really damn cool.

Because suddenly the ordinary science fiction of The Invisible Man or 2000 Leagues became a marvelous future that never was, as imagined by people for whom Victorian style was a reality and not a novelty. Since then people have really taken with the notion of rewinding before moving forward.

Steampunk unlike fantasy, usually doesn't deal with alternate dimensions or hidden worlds. It deals with our world, but with key differences, as if we could just back the car up in reverse and take another direction. It has since grown to popularity in other cultures, but at its origin it is a terribly, terribly, terribly British thing.

Which means of course, that there is also magic. And this is the happiest thing of all.

Key Characteristics:

- it's often dystopian or post-apocalyptic, but not always
- It's generally a hash-up of Victorian England and 1980s England, but not always
- Often has paranormal, fantastic, or magical themes.
- Magic and technology have a special relationship, they are either at odds or mutually enabling.
- Steam-powered technology
- Modern writers, having more perspective on the time period that Victorian writers were trying to describe, like to add in other funky time warp gadgets, like wooden computers.

Examples:

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (British Comic): Written by Alan Moore and having mutated to lots of other mediums. Pretty hardcore steampunk. Directly derivative of Verne and Wells.

Full Metal Alchemist (Japanese Anime): Basically posits that Alchemist efforts of yore actually worked and have been taken to their logical extreme.
http://www.onemanga.com/Full_Metal_Alchemist/94/00-cover/
Note the big clunky robot, the turn of the century bifocal guy, and the dude in the cape.

Arcanum (American Videogame): Basically if the LotR style traditional fantasy universe went through the Industrial Revolution. In this case, magic is in direct conflict with technology.

FreakAngels (British Webcomic): I was pointed there when an acquaintance read my last post. It's a very good comic, and ongoing, but I'm still waiting for something... 12 young hot things with telepathic/paranormal powers try to run a small urban compound in post-apocalyptic, mostly-flooded London.
If you want a good example of how Victorian meets punk in fashion, just check out KK and Conor's clothes:
http://www.freakangels.com/?p=25&page=5
For the sake of beating a dead horse I should probably tell you that KK dropped a water canteen on the blonde girl because that's what runs her magical steam-powered helicopter bike.

And because I've never read any steampunk novels, here's an Amazon forum with a few people who have, and who have opinions.

That's all I've got. If you have anything to say, or anything you think I would like, send my way please? Thanks.