Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  This denser, digital-feudal housing was easier to patrol, defend, and heat. Almost everyone was growing marijuana, in the touching illusion that this fast-growing weed had some value. This was the new vernacular look of White Fungus: this tottering Frankenstein make-do patchwork, this open-air Lagosstyle junk space.

  Lillian looked like that. That was her milieu. An indifferent female vagrant with a backpack, a billed hat, thick rubber boots, multipocketed work jeans and, to top it all, a man’s high-visibility jacket in tarnished silver and aviation orange. Never any lipstick, scissored-off hair. Never anxious, never in a hurry. She had no more origin or destination than a stray cat. Asking for nothing, demanding nothing. Commonly she was munching something from a small canvas bag and reading a used paperback book. Lillian had mushroomed among us when no one was looking.

  In times of turmoil, people love to talk about their troubles. I still talk about those times, as you can see. That was years ago, and life has become quite different now, but those were my formative times, my heroic times. That’s the consolation of a general catastrophe: that misery loves its company so dearly.

  Lillian did not want to talk about her troubles, or about anyone’s. Lillian wanted to act. Demands for conversation bored her: they sent her out the door, into the street. There she merged into the fabric of the urban. She became unfathomably busy.

  Lillian was on a mission: a one-woman rescue of junk space. “Guerrilla urbanist” might describe Lillian, except that I’m flattering myself. In truth, I was the guerrilla urbanist in White Fungus. I like to think my efforts drew her there.

  I was very busy, like she was. Once my boy was fed, the boy had to be schooled. White Fungus had a school of course, but it had no budget and its teachers had fled. It sat dark, paralyzed and useless at the end of a long commute.

  We had no money for new construction. This meant that the children had to build their own school. Their parents were not particularly public spirited, but they were driven mad by their children’s incessant presence underfoot. So these parents commandeered, they squatted, a dead retail box store. We built the new school inside this vast, echoing space.

  The school was made of cardboard: a ramifying set of parametric cardboard igloos. An insulated playground. Because there was no educational bureaucracy left, there was no more reason to build a school like a barracks. Let the children wreck their school, paint it, pierce it, kick holes in it; after all, it was cardboard.

  My son’s school, a playground set of ramifying continua without doors or right angles, was generated out of package-strapping, Velcro, and glue. The structure was a blatant fire hazard, in brutal opposition to a hundred building codes, and it had to be rebuilt every five weeks. This did not matter. The “curriculum” had nothing to do with previous school systems, either.

  The school was no monument; as I said, the costs were mostly borne by sweat equity, and that mostly from sweaty little children. Still, it was the first new building in White Fungus that looked like us—like the new us, like something novel we ourselves had created, that wasn’t a rip-off or a hand-medown of the old ways. We were poor people with computers, so we had to set our computers to work on the poorest and humblest materials. On recycled paper. On fiberboard. On bundled straw. On recycled plastic, on cellulose glue, on mud, on foam.

  On the abject. Machine processing always looked best when applied to the abject. Because the simplicity of the materials made one see the brilliance of the process. And what we could see, we could inhabit.

  Because Rufus never wanted to “come home” from his wondrous new playground, I moved in with him. As a resident intellectual, the locals were keen to have me to teach school. I of course had no salary and no pedagogical clue. So I taught the rubrics of assemblage, the complexity of dynamic systems, and the primacy of experience in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Those Peirce studies interested the children most. Indeterminate phenomenology was the one issue they couldn’t master through Wikipedia in five minutes.

  Lillian had no visible interest in children. The school brought Lillian out of hiding because of her silent passion for abandoned buildings. I remember that she owned a thin, shiny hammock made of heat-reflective fabric, some American astronaut toy. The hammock came with anchors. She would dig her rubber boot heels in, climb the junction between two walls—and reach the overhead corners, which are the deadest spaces in architecture. There she would fix her mirror-colored hammock, climb inside it, and vanish.

  Whenever Lillian was gone, she was commonly four meters above people’s heads, invisibly sleeping. Sometimes I’d see the glow of a solar-battery booklight up there, as she silently paged through the works of Buckminster Fuller.

  There was a legendary period in Fuller’s life, when Fuller dropped out of society, said nothing for two years, and invented his own conceptual vocabulary. In retrospect, I’m quite sure Lillian had experienced something similar. Fuller, for instance, realized that mankind lives on a globe and not a Euclidean plane. Fuller therefore used to refer to the direction “down” as “in,” and “up” as “out.” Fuller theorized that walking “instairs” and “outstairs” might help us pilot SpaceShip Earth. In the long run, we got neither Utopia nor Oblivion; we got what we have.

  Lillian took some similar approach, but she never spoke about it. Her practice had to do with junk spaces. Useful work could be done in junk spaces, but never within the parameters of reason. Junk space was everywhere in White Fungus. Traffic islands. Empty elevator shafts. Gaps within walls, gaps between administrative zones and private properties. Debris-strewn alleys. Rafter space. Emergency stairs for demolished buildings. Nameless spaces, unseen, unserviced, and unlit. No economic, social, or political activity ever transpired there. They were just—junked spaces, the voids, the absences in the urban fabric. This is where Lillian existed. This was her homeland.

  She was always busy. Living in spaces no organized system could see, she took actions no organized system would take. For instance: if cars become rare or nonexistent, then bicycle lanes should appear. Of course, this rarely happens. Someone has to study the streets with care, find the paint, and perform the work. The administration taxed with such labor no longer exists. Worse, no shamefaced official wants to admit that the cars are truly gone, that a glorious past has collapsed through sucking its own exhaust, and that the present is abject.

  Physically, it is quite simple to repaint a street for a horde of bicycles. One small, determined adult could do this useful task in two or three nights. If they asked no permission from anyone. If they demanded no money for doing it. If they carried out that act with cool subterfuge and with crisp graphic precision, so that it looked “official.” If they calmly risked any possible arrest and punishment for this illicit act. And if they told no one, ever, about the work they did, or why, or how.

  This was what Lillian was doing. At first, I simply couldn’t believe it. Of course I noticed her interventions, though most untrained eyes never saw them. I saw the work and I was, I confess, thunderstruck by its tremendous romantic mystery.

  Here was this uncanny female creature, diligently operating outside any comprehensible reward system. Lillian was not a public servant, an activist, a political campaigner, a nun devoted to religious service; she wasn’t working for money, or ethics, or fame, or to help the community. She wasn’t even an artist, least of all a prankster, or a “subversive” of anything in particular. When she dropped sunflower seeds in a dead tree pit, when she replaced and rerouted useless traffic signs, tore out the dead surveillance cameras—she was just… being herself.

  Those mushroom spores. Surely that was the strangest part of it. A mushroom pops out overnight, but the mushroom itself is a fruiting body. The network of the mushroom, those tangled mycelial threads, are titanic, silent, invisible things, some of the oldest living beings on Earth. Seeding flowers is one thing—your grandmother might do that, it’s warm, it’s cuddly, it’s “green”—but seeding mushroom spores? Or spreading soil
bacteria? To “befriend” the bacteria: who would ever see that? Who on Earth would ever know that you were the friend of microbes?

  Well, I would know. Myself. Of course I would learn that, in the way that a man’s obsession with a woman makes it necessary for him to know. There’s nothing commoner than a lonely man, with his “chivalrous concern,” stalking a woman—whether she returns his feelings or not.

  They say—well, some sociobiologists say—that every creative work of the male species is a form of courting behavior. I could never make Lillian come to visit me, but, infallibly, I could get her to visit a project.

  The projects started small, with the children, who were also small. The new architectural order scarcely looked like order, because it was growing in a different ontological space: not “utilitas, firmitas, and venustas,” but massing, structure, and texture. My personal breakthrough came when I began practicing “digital architecture” without any “computers.” I was adapting and upgrading the materialist methods of Gaudi and Frei Otto. I don’t want to go into that subject in depth, because there are so many learned treatises written about it now. At the time, we were not learning it, we were living it. Learning becomes so tiresome.

  Let me simply summarize it as what it was: white fungus. A zeitgeist growing in the shelter of decay. First, it silently ate out the dead substance. When that work was done, it burst up through the topsoil. Then it was everywhere.

  Our architecture did not “work.” We ourselves were no longer “working,” as that enterprise was formerly understood. We were living, and living rather well, once we found the nerve to proclaim that. To manifest our life in our own space and time.

  “If we can crack the design of the models necessary to accomplish this, it will propagate virally across the entire world.” I didn’t say that, but I did hear it.

  The Internet—we used to call it a “commons.” Yet it was nothing like any earlier commons: in a true commons, people relate directly to one another, convivially, commensally. Whereas when they train themselves, alone, silently, on a screen, manifesting ideas and tools created and stored by others, they do not have to be social beings. They can owe the rest of the human race no bond of allegiance. They can be what Lillian was: truly, radically alone. A frontier wanderer with no map for her territories. Hard, isolated, stoic, and a builder.

  She was the worst lover I ever had: worse than you could imagine. To be in her arms was to encounter a woman who had read about the subject and was practicing sexual activity. It was like banging into someone on a sidewalk. Other aspects of our intercourse held more promise, because there were urban practices a single individual could never do within a reasonable time. Exploring, patching, and clearing sewers. Turning swimming pools into aquaculture sumps. Installing park benches and bicycle parks. Erecting observation towers on street corners, steel aeries made of welded rebar where Lillian liked to sit and read, alone.

  Lillian was no engineer, she had no fondness for electrical power or moving mechanical parts, but there were urban interventions that required such skills. There, at least, I could be of some service to her.

  Inevitably, I could feel her growing distant, or rather, distant from me. “You don’t need a woman,” she said at last, “you need a nest.” That was not a reproach, because, yes, in White Fungus we did need nests. Lonely women were never in short supply.

  Lillian appeared at my construction sites less frequently, then not at all. Then her friends.... I wouldn’t call them “friends,” but they were clearly associates of hers, people who had intuited her aims and who mimicked her activities. Women, mostly. A cocktail party or a knitting bee had more social cohesion than these women. They had no logo, no budget, and no ideology. They were mercilessly focused, like the Rubble Women of postwar Berlin. They were dusty women with shovels and barrows, and with no urge to discuss the matter. They did things to and for the city, in broad daylight. We learned not to fuss about that.

  These women were looking after Lillian, it seemed, in the way that they might take in a stray cat. With no thought of reward, no means and no ends. Just to do it, because stray cats are from the street. So Lillian was gone, as she was always gone. Several months passed.

  When she at length reappeared, I never saw her. She left me with a basket and a note. “My work here is done,” said the note. My second son was inside that basket. Not much need for talk about the subject: he was my futurity, just like my first one.

  I want to destroy steampunk.

  I want to tear it apart and melt it down and recast it. I want to take your bustles and your fob watches and your monocles and grind them to a fine powder, dust some mahogany furniture with it and ask you, is this steampunk? And if you say yes, I want to burn the furniture.

  Understand, I want to do this out of love. I love what I see at steampunk’s core: a desire for the beautiful, for technological wonder, for a wedding of the rational and the marvelous. I see in it a desire for nonspecialized science, for the mélange of occultism and scientific rigor, for a time when they were not mutually exclusive categories. But sadly I think we’ve become so saturated with the outward signs of an aesthetic that we’re no longer able to recognize the complex tensions and dynamics that produced it: we’re happy to let the clockwork, the brass, the steam stand in for them synecdochically, but have gotten to a point where we’ve forgotten that they are symbols, not ends in themselves.

  Now, I am a huge fan of the long nineteenth century. I am a scholar of the long eighteenth century, which, depending on whom you ask, begins in the seventeenth and overlaps with the nineteenth, because centuries stopped being a hundred years long in the twentieth—which is, of course, still happening, and began in 1914. But the nineteenth century holds a special place in my Lit Major heart. When, about ten years ago, I began to see the locus of the fantasy I read shifting from feudal to Victorian, swapping torches for gas lamps, swords for sword canes, I was delighted. I was excited. There was squee.

  I could write about this, I thought. I could write about how steampunk is our Victorian Medievalism—how our present obsession with bustles and steam engines mirrors Victorian obsessions with Gothic cathedrals and courtly love. I could write about nostalgia, about the aesthetics of historical distance, and geek out!

  And I could. I have, to patient friends. But I’m not going to here, because I think we’re past the point of observing what constitutes a steampunk aesthetic, and should be thinking instead of deconstructing its appeal with a view to exploding the subgenre into a million tiny pieces. We should be taking it apart, unwinding it, finding what makes it tick—and not necessarily putting it back together in quite the same way. In fact, maybe we shouldn’t put it back together at all.

  A case in point: I was recently asked to contribute a story to Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, an anthology that does what it says on the tin. I wrote a story in what, to my mind, would be a steampunky Damascus: a Damascus that was part of a vibrant trading nation in its own right, that would not be colonized by European powers, where women displayed their trades by the patterns of braids and knots in their hair, and where some women were pioneering the art of crafting dream-provoking devices through new gem-cutting techniques.

  Once I’d written it, though, I found myself uncertain whether it was steampunk. It didn’t look like anything called steampunk that I’d seen. Sure, there were goggles involved in gem-crafting, and sure, copper was a necessary component of the dream-device—but where was the steam? My editor asked the same question, and suggested my problem could be fixed by a liberal application of steamworks to the setting. Who could naysay me if my story had all the trappings of the subgenre?

  Syria, you may be aware, is a fairly arid country. There are better things to do with water than make steam.

  So to add that detail would have meant acknowledging that steampunk can only occur in Victorian England—that it is bound to a time and a place, without which it must be something else. It would have meant my Damascus would be London wi
th Arabic names tacked on, and that Syria could not participate in the exciting atmosphere of mystifying science that characterized Britain in the same period without developing precisely the same technology. It would mean that the cadence of my characters’ speech would need to change.

  I changed other things. I gave my protagonist an awareness of world politics. I raised the stakes of the technology she was developing. I tried to make my readers see that the steampunk with which they were familiar was happening somewhere within the bounds of this world, but that I would not be showing it to them, because something more interesting was happening here, in Damascus, to a girl who could craft dreams to request but rarely dreamed herself. And my editor liked it, and approved it, and I felt vindicated in answering the question of whether it was steampunk with, well, why not?

  I submit that the insistence on Victoriana in steampunk is akin to insisting on castles and European dragons in fantasy: limiting, and rather missing the point. It confuses cause and consequence, because it is fantasy that shapes the dragon, not the dragon that shapes the fantasy. I want the cogs and copper to be acknowledged as products, not producers, of steampunk, and to unpack all the possibilities within it.

  I want retrofuturism that plays with our assumptions and subverts our expectations, that shows us what was happening in India and Africa while Tesla was coiling wires, and I want it to be called steampunk. I want to see Ibn Battuta offered passage across the Red Sea in a solar-powered flying machine of fourteenth-century invention, and for it to be called steampunk. I want us to think outside the clockwork box, the nineteenth-century box, the Victorian box, the Imperial box. I want to read steampunk where the Occident is figured as the mysterious, slightly primitive space of plot-ridden possibility.