The Machine Anxieties of Steampunk

Contemporary Philosophy, Victorian Aesthetics, and the Future

Kathe Hicks Albrecht

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501349331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

What is steampunk and why are people across the globe eagerly embracing its neo-Victorian aesthetic? Old-fashioned eye goggles, lace corsets, leather vests, brass gears and gadgets, mechanical clocks, the look appears across popular culture, in movies, art, fashion, and literature. But steampunk is both an aesthetic program and a way-of-life and its underlying philosophy is the key to its broad appeal. Steampunk champions a new autonomy for the individual caught up in today's technology-driven society. It expresses optimism for the future but it also delivers a note of caution about our human role in a world of ever more ubiquitous and powerful machines. Thus, despite adopting an aesthetic and lifestyle straight out of the Victorian scientific romance, steampunk addresses significant 21st-century concerns about what lies ahead for humankind. The movement recovers autonomy from prevailing trends even as it challenges us to ask what it is to be human today.

1

The Origins of Steampunk: Science Fiction and Victoriana

Introduction

Steampunk today reflects and perhaps helps define a contemporary state-of-mind, in particular in relationship to technology and its tremendous impact on us as individual human beings within a complex social structure. Although it is now positioned as a broad and multi-faceted global enterprise, steampunk’s modest beginnings were as a narrow literary sub-genre of science fiction. Steampunk’s visual inspiration comes from the Victorian period and later chapters will explore that historic era specifically. But this chapter asks the question: what is steampunk? And more importantly it considers the more complex question: how did steampunk evolve from its early years as a literary sub-genre to a global enterprise that resonates with a broad swath of contemporary society today?

The following pages will trace the movement back to its origins in the 1980s, examine possible reasons for its emergence from within the science fiction genre, and then consider steampunk’s proliferation over the subsequent twenty-year period as it transforms into a phenomenon that influences twenty-first-century aesthetics and philosophy. Also addressed are the tensions that exist within the movement. Steampunk practitioners and influencers make various claims on steampunk, reinterpreting its past and projecting divergent futures for it. We will examine, for example, the fraught association that first-generation steampunk practitioners have with the unwieldy and widespread enterprise it has become today. But first, how and when did the concept of steampunk emerge?

The Origins of Steampunk

Steampunk’s beginnings were not revolutionary nor did those early years portend steampunk’s ultimate transformation into a global operation. It is commonly agreed that the term “steampunk” was coined by science fiction writer K. W. Jeter in a letter to Locus Magazine in 1987, in which he described the neo-Victorian writings of James P. Blaylock, Tim Powers, and Jeter himself, all fairly well-known science fiction writers of the 1980s (VanderMeer 2010, 10). Jeter writes blithely, little knowing what he sets in motion: “Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.”¹ In their written response to Jeter editors at Locus magazine agree that the trend of Victorian science-fiction fantasy indeed seemed to be taking hold. With that brief exchange in the popular science fiction news and information magazine the steampunk term is established. Jeter’s new word combines the punk of cyberpunk, which was a popular counter-culture movement in the 1980s, with the word steam, in reference to the steam engine, the dominant technological advancement of the Victorian period. Although later Jeter admits that his “use of ‘punk’ was intended to be more facetious than foundational,” a clever joke about the “punk” label’s overuse at the time, the term resonated within the science-fiction community and stuck (Taddeo and Miller 2013, 65).

Cyberpunk also emerged from the science-fiction arena. It focused on advanced technology in conjunction with expressing an interest in the breakdown of traditional social structures.² Cyberpunk fiction is typically set in the near future, not in distant fantastical worlds. Quite simply, cyberpunk combines futuristic dystopias with dangerous new technologies in the hands of the wrong characters (human or non-). Cyberpunk enjoyed some popularity in the 1980s and 1990s and had an aesthetic presence in movies such as Blade Runner (1982) and several popular videogames of the 1980s. Blade Runner, for example, is set in a dark and dystopian world run ruthlessly by über-corporations manufacturing artificial humanoids for purposes of forced heavy labor. Blade Runner is bleakly pessimistic and gritty, with a vision of a future world in which technology itself and the industrial complexes that manage it run amuck. The movie well represents the cyberpunk vision of a dystopic world, chaotic and strange, a world full of characters with nefarious motivations and questionable origins.

Also very stylistically cyberpunk, with a dystopic worldview and darkly motivated characters, is the game Shadowrun, which began as a traditional table-top board game but ultimately evolved into a global enterprise featuring multiple videogames, collectibles, meet-ups, and competitions. To this day, Shadowrun remains a popular game conglomerate and its fan-base is spread across the world. Shadowrun’s premise of a corporate-run future coupled with a dystopian breakdown of broad swaths of society is further problematized by the re-emergence, within the game, of Native American shamanistic rituals and magic. Destabilizing clandestine operations (called shadowruns) are furtively run against the backdrop of this futuristic world. These potentially subversive elements either threaten—or mindlessly obey—those who run the massive corporatized superstructure. Shadowrun is dark, pessimistic, and laden with futuristic technology. But despite examples of cyberpunk movies and videogames its dystopian vision of a future world dominated by technology and teeming with civil unrest and broken down social structures was a movement that remained distinctly on the fringe of popular culture during the 1980s and 1990s. In that way it differs from the track that steampunk forged, a path that brought the steampunk genre to a much wider audience and gave it a lasting presence on the global stage.

The steampunk science-fiction stories of the 1980s, those that Jeter refers to in his letter to Locus, were much more optimistic, albeit rebellious and anti-establishment, than narratives from the cyberpunk movement. Steampunk stories were set in a fantastical Victorian England, centered on imagined time-travel and outlandish adventure often to futuristic worlds, and championed a rejection of traditional social norms. The stories pitted virtuous protagonists against evil-doers of varied but always nefarious ilk with those on the good side most often prevailing. As he developed the settings for his steampunk novels, Jeter turned to the writings of the nineteenth century for inspiration and a deeper understanding of the Victorian period. London Labour and London Poor by Henry Mayhew (1812–87) became the main source of information for all three original steampunk writers—Jeter, Blaylock, and Powers. Mayhew was a social researcher, writer, and had been co-editor of the satirical magazine Punch for a number of years. His work centered on exploring the living conditions and social ramifications of London’s poor and disenfranchised citizens. The work of several Victorian novelists also provided research fodder for the London setting that Jeter and others imagined (Jeter 1979b, introduction by Tim Powers).

Jeter’s book Infernal Devices (1987) is one of the early steampunk novels. It recounts the ever-more bizarre and fantastic adventures of George Dower, a hapless Victorian business owner caught up in a web of intrigue involving bizarre and imaginary creatures, mechanical clockworks, and mysterious goings-on.³ Dower’s adventures inevitably land him in trouble with the proper matrons and city officials of the unforgiving Victorian society that provides the setting for his adventures. Steeped in tradition, replete with rules and regulations, the social constrictions continually cause friction and threaten possible jail time for the errant and reluctantly adventurous protagonist. Dower’s adventures stem from his father’s business, which he inherits, and a questionable customer who opens up to him an elaborate sub-world of strange creatures and unfamiliar affairs. These odd beings are newts that mimic human behavior and dress yet who operate in a bizarre parallel world. As the story unfolds, Dower must extricate himself in one piece from that bizarre world and its reptilian citizens.

Some science-fiction works of the time harken directly back to specific Victorian literary works. Jeter’s book Morlock Night, published in 1979, is in fact written as an imagined sequel to Victorian writer H. G. Well’s 1895 book The Time Machine. In Morlock Night Wells’ creatures from the distant future travel back to the Victorian period via a time machine (one of Wells’ preferred story elements) during which they completely terrorize nineteenth-century London. The protagonist Edwin Hocker and his capable and empowered female compatriot Tafe must figure their way out of a disastrous situational tangle that includes Morlocks from the future, slippages in physical time between the Victorian period and that distant future, and a cast of characters both human and non-human. Events take place on the teeming streets of London, but also deep within the vast network of the sewers below, a gritty, airless, netherworld to which many have retreated, and which may contain the key to the salvation of a threatened London.

During the 1980s these historically situated and largely Victorian-based science-fiction novels achieved a level of popularity within the literary community. Later pages of this chapter will examine the leap that this small sub-genre then made to the broader cultural arena, but we turn now to investigate the steampunk science-fiction genre’s own possible literary roots. Some scholars look to works from the 1950s and 1960s as the earliest precursors of the genre. Others look even further back to the early twentieth century to consider whether adventure stories geared toward the juvenile reader provide an insight into the development of modern science fiction in general and the Victorian narrative more specifically.

Those scholars who locate the true beginnings of steampunk in the 1950s and 1960s point to writers such as Ronald Clark in his book Queen Victoria’s Bomb (1969) and Michael Moorcock in The Warlord of the Air (1971), writers who situate their narratives in historic settings reminiscent of Victorian London. Steampunk scholar Jeff VanderMeer considers Moorcock as the “true Godfather of modern steampunk” (VanderMeer 2010, 9). In The Warlord of the Air Moorcock weaves a tale that opens in 1902 in the exotic and mysterious British colonial territories of India and the East. Kathmandu, Calcutta, and other familiar real-world cities are interspersed in the narrative with imaginary ones such as Teku Benga, the capital of Kumbalari. Teku Benga is a strange and nearly uninhabitable mountain enclave deep in the Himalayas. The spiritual city, ancient and decaying, is known as The Place Where All Gods Reside. Much as is the case with James Hilton’s Shangri-La in his 1933 book Lost Horizon, the ancient city is steeped in history and ritual, full of magic and mystery. Into this mystical realm steps an intrepid army captain, Oswald Bastable, who leads a hearty band of Punjabi soldiers on a minor military mission into Kumbalari. Suddenly, a horrific earthquake separates Bastable from his troops and sends him not only tumbling through a maze of caves and passageways but also seemingly into the year 1973.

The book, set in part in Victorian times and in part in 1973, with a plot line that involves the romantically imagined future, traveling airships, and adventures through time, is certainly a steampunk prototype but it lacks the focus on the odd characters of steampunk—newts, Morlocks, and hybrid beings—and it does not create a full imaginary alternative to the Victorian physical space. The Warlord of the Air unfolds more along the lines of the James Hilton novel, the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, or even Johann David Wyss’ adventure novel of 1812, The Swiss Family Robinson. It is more of a critique of the political and social issues of our own time (written in 1971 and describing 1973), achieved through the depiction of an alternate twentieth-century history. However, it is that concept of alternative histories that does tie the book to the emerging steampunk sensibility. Alternative histories lie at the heart of the steampunk movement.⁴ In the section of the novel set in 1973 Vladimir Ilyitch, an aging Russian revolutionary who is clearly based on the historical figure of Lenin, makes a point about this concept. He states that “there are an infinite number of possible societies. In an infinite universe, all may become real sooner or later. Yet it is always up to mankind to make real what it really wishes to be real” (Moorcock 2013, 203). Moorcock’s envisioned 1973 is the result of the Victorian concept of the ideal world of the future, a world of Western Imperialism and worldwide colonization. The author critiques this period in history, calling it out as a result of Imperialist tendencies of the nineteenth century. The story is thus a strong social commentary and provides a cautionary note to humankind in regard to our post-colonial position.

Interestingly, The Warlord of the Air appears to be written from the viewpoint of the nineteenth century, despite the fact it was written in 1971. For example, airships are shaped like dirigibles and travel at the rate of 100 miles per hour, an incredible speed from the viewpoint of the nineteenth-century citizen, but laughable in terms of what is possible today as commercial airliners, for example, travel at about 600 miles per hour. Furthermore, the story’s airships and motorcars are powered by steam—a concept that makes sense from a Victorian individual’s ideas about how a future might develop but which does not make sense to us now. Moorcock has constructed a Victorian novel in the vein of H. G. Wells as if written by a contemporary of H. G. Wells. This unusual viewpoint puts it more in line with the pure scientific romance than with the steampunk genre’s re-imagined yesterday as visualized through a contemporary post-human lens. As such, and despite some prototypical steampunk concerns, I would suggest that Moorcock’s novel is less an early steampunk story as it is a creative and unique effort to craft a true Victorian scientific romance.

Certainly we can trace a historical thread through all the adventure novels written that incorporate fantasy elements, be they the imagined flora and fauna of the Swiss Family Robinson’s island adventure or the magical transportation of the protagonist through time in The Warlord of the Air, or even the discovery of a mountain city that erases the effects of time on its inhabitants as is described in Hilton’s famous novel. But true steampunk emerges with Blaylock, Powers, and Jeter as they create elaborate imaginings of a time-warp that brings Victorian London into the future in an alternative historical narrative, and does so in terms of our own contemporary, post-human perspective. That contemporary perspective will be further elucidated in Chapter 5. For now we turn back the clock to an even earlier time period to discover the connection between steampunk and the “Edisonades.”

Steampunk and the Edisonades

The writers who trace steampunk’s origins further back to the beginning of the twentieth century connect the genre to a period which felt the tremendous initial literary impact of writers Jules Verne (1828–1905) and H. G. Wells (1866–1946). Writer and steampunk scholar Jess Nevins sees a link between the spirit of the steampunk storyline and the popular “Edisonade” publications of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (VanderMeer 2008, 3–11). The Edisonades were stories distributed as cheap pulp fiction starting in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Named after inventor Thomas Edison and echoing another genre termed “Robinsonades” (named after the fictional character and seafaring adventurer Robinson Crusoe) the Edisonade emerges during a time of great interest in science and technology, the era of that brilliant inventor Edison, and also of popular writers of scientific adventure stories, Verne and Wells (VanderMeer 2008, 3). This was a period during which tremendous strides were being made in the fields of telegraphy, factory engineering, chemistry, geology, among many others, which will be discussed in some detail in Chapter 2.

The target audience for the Edisonade adventure stories was young boys. The upbeat and action-packed narratives always involved great and highly risky adventures of epic proportion in which a young courageous inventor creates a new and heavily technological weapon or tool to beat back a powerful enemy. That enemy was often in the form of foreign invader, for example, East Indian or African roughnecks, but occasionally the enemy who posed a perceived threat hailed from within America’s borders as in the case of the Native American marauders, aka “Indians.” Adventure in the Edisonades was highly optimistic and evoked the concept of Manifest Destiny, that inevitability of American settlers’ westward expansion and the ultimate control of the American continent, coast to coast, by those new settlers. The stories describe a clear set of “good guys” pitted against a menacingly portrayed set of “bad guys.” There is little gray area in the narrative: it is a “white hats” versus “black hats” scenario...