![]() For example, it’s possible to look at the impact of technology without getting bogged down in legislation and public enquiries. This makes it easier to dissect aspects of modernity. Next, Quasi-Victorian Steampunk presents a world like ours, but less reformed, and simpler. In both, Babbage is in the ascendant, the Industrial Revolution in full swing, Imperialism the norm, and poverty the underbelly. The classic example of this is Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, but you also see this in more recent works, such as Tidhar’s Bookman Chronicles. In a sense, such books are an archaeology of lost aspirations, but they also rub our noses in the downside of the milieu: the grime, the exploitation, the casual racism, and the imperialism. Typically it lets writers hammer out magical realist riffs on the 19th century, using exaggeration to bring to the surface technological, social, and intellectual undercurrents. The genre seems to serve three literary purposes.įirst, Steampunk can be a way of exploring historical forces. However, Steampunk settings are about more than just window dressing. If you don’t like this kind of cool, fine, step off the zeppelin and make room for somebody else. What’s it good for?Ībove all, “sense of wonder.” Corset-clad beauties peering through goggles from the cockpits of Zeppelins while gatling bullets ping sparks of off riveted machines of brass and iron… it’s all just cool. The same goes for Steampunk music it’s fun and if it has one foot in the unpleasant past, then so does a lot of Classical music: Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring glorifies pagan times when it was apparently routine for a young woman to dance herself to death as a human sacrifice and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg revels in a patriarchal Medieval past when a young woman could be the prize in a singing contest. It follows that unless you are prepared to repudiate all Historical fashions and fads (except those relating to whichever political movement you embrace), then you have no business painting Steampunk fashion as morally or politically dubious. ![]() While we’re at it, let’s have no more toga parties… Presumably Lindy Hoppers should put away their petticoats and wingtips shame on you for embracing an era when the Klan ran rampant and patriarchy was the norm! The Society for Creative Anachronism should also put down their swords and start closing down all those Renaissance Fairs. However, this is pretty much true of every period, other than our own, and we ourselves are only exempt from the accusation if we are careful what company we keep. Sure, corsets and gentleman’s formal suits are probably only fun when social mores don’t force you into them and the Victorian period is one of misogyny, racism, and imperialism. Something quite so playful hardly needs defending. Cherie Priest showing off Steampunk Fashion… As somebody once said, it is what happens when Goths discover brown. ![]() Oddly, Steampunk is most visible as a fashion subculture. Let’s deal with the fashion and music first. I am afraid that my off-the-cuff response was, “WHAT WAS THAT, SIR? I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY ZEPPELIN ENGINES.”Īfterwards, I wish I had mounted a more serious defense of the genre. My friend, however, dismissed them and Steampunk as something like “socially retrodyne misogynist crypto-imperialist nostalgia”. I think of their style as Electric Urban Folk they’ve taken all the sounds you’d hear in pre-WWII cosmopolitan cities - Jazz, ballad, sea shanties, gypsy fiddle, marching songs - then rocked them up using a mixture of traditional and electric instruments.) With songs like “Airship Pirate” and “Steampunk Revolution,” they push all the tropish buttons, but they are more than just a concept band they can sing and play. ( Abney Park, if you’ve just tuned in, are like Maximus from Gladiator: The Steampunk band that made an album that became a roleplaying game that became a novel. Over on Farcebook, I once posted an admiring link to Abney Park and got an irritated slapdown from a mate who is slightly more politically correct than I.
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