Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  I want steampunk divorced from the necessity of steam.

  Eighteen Months Later

  This essay originally appeared as a blog post for Tor.com on October 29, 2010. It received dozens of comments, most of which were in excited agreement, but many of which were critical of my stated goal to expand our ideas about what could constitute “steampunk.” When the story in question (“To Follow the Waves,” which also appears in this volume) was broadcast on PodCastle a few months later as part of a special steampunk episode, many listeners chimed in on the forums to say they had enjoyed it—but they didn’t think it was steampunk. When I occasionally asked why not, or pointed them toward the essay, they would respond with protests similar to those voiced by Tor.com’s readers: that I couldn’t just take an established term and personalize it for my purposes. Words have meanings, and I have no business seeking to change them.

  I would also sometimes get asked why I was so invested in steampunk, anyway? Why not call what I was doing “gempunk,” leave steampunk to its steam in an amorphous Victorian setting while I pursued other things?

  The answer is simple: steampunk was popular. Steampunk—at least from 2007 to 2010, in my view—was a very commercially visible, very vibrant site in which these discussions could take place. When grounded in the context of the British Empire of the nineteenth century, steampunk collapsed within itself multiple intersections of marginalization—race, gender, class, disability— which absolutely cried out for new treatment, for examination, for subversion. I wanted my response to those issues in fiction to be called steampunk, to be visible beneath its bronze-handled umbrella; the more reluctant people were to call it so, the more important it became for me. I was trying to participate in a high-profile conversation, and any response that said, “This isn’t steampunk” told me I wasn’t welcome within it.

  I wonder if, now, that’s one of the reasons I haven’t seen much new literary treatment of steampunk in the last two years—that too many people were reluctant to have that conversation. I remember feeling that, at least where the Internet and convention circuit were concerned, the tide was turning even in late 2010, when writers who had been enthusiastic about steampunk in the year or two before seemed to tire of it and of the conversations people like me wanted to have about it, on Tor.com and elsewhere. Go write your own things, seemed the prevailing current, and stop criticizing what’s already there.

  But the latter is absolutely crucial to the former: how can we write new, vibrant things without first examining and then rejecting that which is outworn and problematic? And how can we write our own things, informed by our critiques, when they won’t get read as steampunk specifically because they are informed by our critiques?

  Revolutions, by definition, come from within. Unless we’re willing to take a good hard look at the spirit of steampunk and adapt it to our needs, we’ll continue to be bound by its letters, its cogs, its gears isolated from any productive purpose. I feel like steampunk is, at the moment, an antikytheraean mechanism trapped in amber, only able to generate static electricity by means of that which displays it in pleasing sepia tones.

  I look forward to seeing it break out.

  If you could live in any era, when would it be?

  If you ask a steampunk, the answer might surprise you. Sure, a lot of us are as aware of the politics of the 1880s as the 1980s, and it’s clearly the case that we promote anachronism as a lifestyle. But steampunk is, all told, firmly rooted in the present. Steampunk speaks at least as much to our aspirations for the future as it does to our reverence—and critique—of the past. Retro-futurism is still, at its core, futurism.

  It’s no coincidence, I would argue, that the genre of steampunk took two decades to grow into a subculture and really take off. Because it’s only now that we, as a society, have learned how far back we have to go to start having some hope for our future. Steampunk offers a level-headed (and top-hatted) critique of modernity that is neither blinded by the myth of linear progress nor lost in the romanticization of the pretechnological era.

  In the 1980s when steampunk was just fiction, we didn’t yet know how completely consumerism and industrialized society had failed us. Most environmental problems were seen as localized or surmountable—people were worried about acid rain, hazardous waste disposal, and the threat of nuclear meltdown. These were and still are all valid concerns, but they pale when held up against the apocalyptic vision that climate change threatens to be today. What’s more, most critiques leveled at consumerism two decades ago were on the grounds of homogeny—consumer culture is boring, it limits variety. Mainstream environmentalism was often reduced to “recycle” or even “cut up your six-pack plastic before you throw it out.” And although plastic litter is a wildlife-endangering reality, it still simply can’t compete with the mass extinction that threatens to strike if we don’t mend our ways.

  We’ve always had oil crises, as well. This isn’t the first time oil has become scarce. But things are a scale of magnitude more serious now. As late as the 1840s, streets were lit with whale oil, a clearly limited resource. Then we moved to coal (and its derivative kerosene) and now petroleum. Oil production and availability has cycled historically. But it’s only in the last decade or so that the realization that oil is a finite resource has become widespread and that indeed our oil production might have already peaked. More recently still, climate-change scientists are finally starting to agree with environmentalists that perhaps fossil fuels are best left in the ground, that carbon is best suited sequestered within the Earth and not out in the atmosphere.

  But steampunk isn’t doom and gloom. It lacks the hopelessness and nihilism of cyberpunk, its predecessor. Why? Because at the time it was first being written, cyberpunk wasn’t retro-futurism, it was simple futurism. It was a more realistic approach than that taken by science fiction historically—now that it is the twenty-first century, we’ve got almost no spaceships but we sure have plenty of giant corporations, mercenary armies, and subliminal advertisements. But cyberpunk, while it played and continues to play its part in the imagining of the present and future, is locked into a version of the world that takes the scientific progress of the twentieth century for granted. Because of that, cyberpunk is perfect for societal critique but it isn’t in a place to offer us much in the way of hope.

  Retro-futurism, however, is. Steampunk lets us trace a path back through history to find places of departure that might be more interesting with which to craft a future. Steampunk denies historical determinism—the idea that what has happened is what must have happened, the idea that history progresses linearly and that what is new is more worthy than what is old. To a steampunk, an airplane is not better than a zeppelin or even a hot-air balloon—it is simply a different thing. Steampunks don’t take the primacy of the internal combustion engine as a foregone conclusion. Steampunks think outside the box because they focus on the age when the box had not yet been built.

  Steampunks love technology, it’s true. And it is humanity’s obsession with technology that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. But what we celebrate in our machinery is entirely different than what the industrialists celebrate in technology. We have no love for economic efficiency. We romanticize an era, perhaps a fictitious one, when individuals and teams built machines with love and attention to detail, sacrificing neither expense nor ornamentation to fill the world with wonders. The assembly line was the wrong direction for us to take, if you ask me—the scale and speed of reproduction are not more important than process. Money is not more important than the mental and physical health of the crafters and workers.

  I’m not arguing for a steampunk world. I don’t think we need to revel in the steam engine or make everyone become a tinkerer. I sincerely doubt we need to wear eye protection all the time. Colors other than brown are excusable. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other on anthropomorphic robots, either. But what I am suggesting is that steampunks are in a brilliant place to apply their anachron
istic skills to the creation of some kind of future worth living in. It’s not a steampunk future I’m looking for, as much as suggesting that steampunk-inspired philosophy might be useful for imagining what ought to come.

  There’s a chance that the airship can become the perfect green form of air travel. A jet is faster, yes. Airplanes are better suited to military use and they’re better suited for a fast-paced economy. But I don’t see that applicability to war or global capitalism ought to be the determining factors of what technology we promote. An airship, once filled with hydrogen or helium, might never need to be refilled when redesigned with a modern understanding of gas—that its density and therefore lifting power can be changed through heating and cooling. An airship uses a lot less fuel than a jet as well and, because it won’t fall from the sky if it stops moving forward, it can make use of alternative sources of energy, such as solar, wind, or biomass. Airships might be safer, too. The most famous airship crash in history, the Hindenburg, left only 35 of its 97 riders dead. I’ll take those odds over a plane crash any day.

  Steampunk culture is also fiercely Do It Yourself and Do It Ourselves. Not only do we celebrate the artisan—a practically revolutionary idea in an age of consumerism—but we expect our artisans to share their skills widely and freely. As science-fiction author Bruce Sterling puts it in “The User’s Guide to Steampunk,” “If you meet a steampunk craftsman and he or she doesn’t want to tell you how he or she creates her stuff, that’s a poseur who should be avoided.”

  But it’s here too that steampunks are not simply looking back blindly and promoting values of the nineteenth century. Before the industrial revolution, artisan-craft was an important part of the economy. But it is in the modern world that more people have access to the means of production and tools with which to create a larger variety of things than they have at any other point in our industrialized society. Maker culture, which overlaps profoundly with steampunk, exists to teach people how to craft. Now you can be a dressmaker and a blacksmith both. A computer programmer and an author. You can record an album in your living room and share it with the world before going back to your leatherwork. What steampunks are doing, though, is challenging modernity to really start taking this culture seriously. What would it mean if we slowly gutted and replaced the whole of industrial civilization? Eating local food, working with horizontally created communications infrastructure, traveling a heterogeneous world of wonder? I’m for it.

  The twin horrors of contemporary life are ecological crisis and the control of society by economic elites. A steampunk is poised to confront both these problems by scavenging the junkyards of history to find the parts needed to construct something new, something better, something more interesting. And that process of crafting something new is maybe the most interesting thing of all. To quote the situationists of May 1968 France, “In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.”

  If I could live at any time in history, I would live right now. Not the 1960s, not the 1880s. I would be living in 2012. The world is changing, for better or for worse, and we get to be part of that. Together, we get to shape history.

  We live in a post-modern era, where everything can be mixed-and-matched; identities can be bought for a price, whether through clothing, or the educational marketplace. People, too, can be mixed-and-matched, traded on the job market, left on the shelf. We work in accordance to deadlines, assignments, quotas, trying to reach productivity levels at ever-increasing rates, just to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves. It is a cruel mix of the Protestant work ethic, bootstrap mythology, and consumerist individualism.

  No wonder the clunky, hand-made, strikingly mismatched look and feel of the steampunk aesthetic is such a draw. Steampunk has grown into a large-scale fashion trend, a cosplaying escapist funfair that has no canon to draw upon except in one’s own imagination. There is comfort in a creative outlet that doesn’t demand accuracy but encourages research into minute detail, that allows us to indulge both in instant gratification through consumerism and the satisfaction of learning a skill to bring a project to fruition. These things are not mutually exclusive; it is simply reflective of the complex, variegated nature of being human.

  Thus, despite the outward appearances of steampunk as a fashion trend, it has a potential to be more, much more, and the dress-up and role-playing are simply scratches on the surface of steampunk’s potential. By rethinking our relationship to technology, we can reclaim and center marginalized identities, create stronger communities and learn accountability for the actions of our ancestors and ourselves. And we can use steampunk to do all this, if we ask the right questions.

  Rethinking Technology

  In steampunk, the most prominent feature is the imaginary technology. At a steampunk event, you’ll see any of the following: goggles, glasses with several lenses, prosthetic limbs, canes with ornate wires and tubes and pipes and whatnot, backpack tanks that could be a jet engine or respirator, and guns. Very, very big guns.

  The German philosopher Heidegger explored the relationship between humanity and nature extensively in his later writing. In a post on technofantasy and military technology, I paraphrased Steve Garlick’s summary of Heidegger’s thesis as follows: “in Europe before the 18th century, we largely saw our relationship to nature as one where we adapted to nature, because nature is its own entity, which we’re a part of. There came a shift in how we viewed nature: rather than seeing it as it is, something to adapt to, we started seeing it as a resource, and considering ways to make it adapt to us. This was right before the Industrial Revolution. So modern technology, or rather, what we think of as technology, is a reflection of a philosophy in which we see nature as something to be conquered, something to be overcome, something to use. In other words, technology is a manifestation of our relationship to nature.”

  Today’s technology, such as iPhones and computers, have somewhat magical workings for a very short lifespan, or, if you wanted to fix it up, requires specialized knowledge that isn’t easily available. One is hard-pressed to see where they begin and end, and are sometimes hailed as space-age, transcendent of crude nature.

  The technologies we dream of in steampunk, however, are not like that. The Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective wrote, in Steampunk Magazine #1: “steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural; it moves, lives, ages and even dies.” We can touch these things: we can make them, we can break them down, we can retool them, we can change them, as organically as life changes itself. The body can change itself; the steampunk machine can be modified. At death, the body will transform, into broken down little minerals and dirt; the steampunk machine can be taken apart, its components finding new use in other machines.

  It’s probably why prop makers like to design their work to look old; it implies a lifespan, and a history. It implies that eventually this thing will fall apart and stop working and will need to be retooled and changed. But moving beyond props, this is a philosophy that acknowledges that even a thing made of steel comes to an end of its purpose. It asks us to consider what technology means to us.

  This in turn leads to us asking, what kind of relationship do we want with nature? What do we expect from the sleek cases that intimidate us from exploring their innards, versus the machine that invites us to take it apart and put it back together again? What does life look like when we have a relationship with technology that’s not based on consumption? In this day and age of copyrighted technology, where brands create products with parts that aren’t interchangeable, it is easy to lose touch with the inner workings of our everyday objects. The film project “Hacking Hope” from Dutch art group Studio Needs Must explores how household machines have become systems that generate more waste
because of our consumer culture of convenience. “Hacking Hope” offers us an understanding of these systems that allow us to live more efficiently. What is the point of getting a machine only to replace it when a small part breaks down?

  Obviously, these are not specifically steampunk questions. The DIY ethos so prevalent in steampunk is easy to enact because the steampunk aesthetic draws inspiration from any pre-postmodern era where machines were still easily taken apart. (It is also why any far-future steampunk usually still has the appearance of rudimentary technology, “as seen by Victorians” as it were.) These are living skills that people learned as part of growing up, before generations of schools rendered these skills specialized and, in many cases, lower-class. Steampunk DIY, then, evokes a longing within us for technology that we are not beholden to, crying in tragic despair when the motherboard crashes because we forgot to backup our hard drive. It calls into question our consumer relationship, pondering another that has us engaging more with the technologies of our lives.

  This is a sentiment that has been around long before steampunk. In her “Musing about Native Steampunk,” Monique Poirier considers Native American attitudes towards technology: “NDN technologies have historically tended to be green and sustainable—not because NDN folks are magically spiritually attached to Mother Earth but because NDN cultures tend to value foresight and cycles, considering generational consequences of technological adoption and understanding of systems over flat utilization of resources.” Is there a way we can relate to nature instead of forcing it to change to suit our desires, so that we can adapt to get the most out of it? Keep in mind that such little projects of using rudimentary technology to better lives is already happening all over the world, in more official capacities: Adlens Ltd. produces and distributes a “universal” eyewear frame with fluid-filled lenses that can be adjusted on the spot. Non-profit organizations are dedicated to getting these kinds of glasses out to areas where optometrists and corrective lenses are expensive. The Amish, famous for being Luddites, often have their own version of technology that enables them to remain “off-grid” as it were, “in the world but not of it”; their embrace of modern technology is slow, to prevent technology from getting the better of them. In the Philippines, the NGO Isang Litrong Liwanag uses the very basic principles of prisms distributing light to create lightbulbs from discarded water bottles. In many neighbourhoods across North America, community gardens bring locals together, helping fill not just physical needs, but psychic ones.