The Two Faces of Steampunk
When people find out I write steampunk their first question is often “What’s steampunk?”
At its core, steampunk is about technology. Steampunk stories are usually set in Victorian times, granting them technological prowess similar to our modern world, but their computers are mechanical, their power source is steam rather than atomic or internal combustion, and everything is lavishly decorated in the Victorian style.
The term steampunk originated in the late 1980’s when author K.W. Jeter needed a general term to describe the work of himself, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock. At the time cyber-punk was popular and he coined steam-punk as a takeoff on that term.
I wrote a blog post once about the difference between cyberpunk and steampunk. I said that while cyberpunk was cynically dark, depressing and pessimistic, steampunk was optimistic about technology and the future. I got a lot of comments that I was completely wrong. Some even went as far to heap scorn on my definition of steampunk as “shiny happy steampunk,” insisting it was a completely different genre they called “Victorian Fantasy.”
But is steampunk by definition pessimistic?
I'm a great fan of the books of Blaylock, Jeter and Powers, even back in the 1980’s before “steampunk” existed as a genre. Their stories, while often dark, were never the nihilistic “cyberpunk with steam engines” that seems to be the operating definition of steampunk these days. Their villains were evil. Technology was just a means to an end.
In contrast, in Vandermeer’s recently published Steampunk anthology, the stories are dark, edgy and quite depressingly reminiscent of cyberpunk tales, which is why I didn’t like it much. Today, most of the literati define steampunk as “Cyberpunk with steam engines.” They nsist the stories must be dark, with destructive, dangerous, and dehumanizing technology. The hero, if there is one, must end the story worse off than he began. In other words, they're just post-modernist cyberpunk stories set in the Victorian Age.
Cyberpunk is all about the horrors of technology. It features a bleak, dehumanized world dominated by monolithic corporations where computers have granted a lucky few almost magical powers at the expense of their humanity. The future is dark and depressing. Technology has transformed civilization into a barbarous, disease-ridden, urban wasteland without freedom. It’s like George Orwell's 1984 but instead of Big Brother, everything is run by Halliburton or some other huge oppressive corporation—capitalism run rampant.
Cyberpunks vision of the world arose after a century of massive wars made more terrible by science and technology. Entire generations have grown up under the threat of a global nuclear apocalypse. We look around and see atomic waste piling up, threats from terrorists, biological warfare, genetic modification, carbon emissions, and worse, where huge corporations like Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook dominate, controlling what we watch and eat, how we work, and where and what we buy. Even our cars will soon be under their control. We live in a cyberpunk world.
But the real Victorians hadn't lived through that yet. They still had faith in science and technology. They believed science could solve any problem. Progress was always good. Technology was like a magic genie. With it Mankind would end starvation, ignorance and poverty and create heaven on earth. The future would be much better than today. That's what evolution was supposed to be about.
You see this in the work of the original steampunk author, Jules Verne. His heroes were scientists and inventors. Sometimes technology got them into trouble, but it’d eventually get them back out again, too. Rather than an endless murky gray inhabited by anti-heroes, the world had both good and evil, heroes and villains. The hero was somebody worth rooting for because he was fighting for a future worth fighting for. This is what I mean by steampunk.
But H.G. Wells also wrote in the Victorian Age, and what he wrote had a cyberpunk theme. His ideas of the future were gloomy. He wrote the first stories about biological terrorism and atomic war. His novel, The Last War, predicted a global nuclear holocaust before scientists even figured out atomic weapons were even possible! H.G. Wells' novels The Time Machine and Things to Come predicted a series of nuclear world wars destroying civilization. Mankind’s only hope was to surrender its freedom to a cabal of scientific masterminds who would employ technology to rule the ignorant masses with a benevolent fist… forever.
Do stories like that make you hopeful about the future? Although they are probably very popular with scientific masterminds, everybody else would just as soon pass, which is why, while a lot of scientists talk about how visionary H.G. Wells was, the books they mention being the most influential to them were usually written by Jules Verne.
One little known fact about Wells explains the divergent viewpoints toward steampunk, both back then and today. H. G. Wells was most famous for being an author, but he was also a political activist. He was a founding member of the Fabian Socialists, an influential British political group that still exists today.
The Fabian Socialists believed in a Marxist revolution. But unlike the Russian Bolshevists, the Fabians didn't think it could be accomplished through violence. The ruling class was too powerful and would simply crush any direct attempt at a communist uprising.
And they were right. Revolution only succeeded in Russia (and later China) because the ruling classes there were fragmented and lacked leadership. The only Western nations that came under communist control fell through the victorious advance of the Soviet Red Army at the end of World War II, never from a violent revolution.
The Fabian solution was a gradual “cultural” revolution. They'd subvert elite universities, introducing Marxist concepts—suitably disguised as fancy modern education theories, of course—to re-educate the youth and change the culture a little at a time. Once they gained a foothold in education, they'd move on into media and entertainment infiltrating movies, books, literature, and eventually even the churches, tearing down traditional ideas and replacing them with theirs. Slowly but surely they'd change society, but never fast enough to provoke a reaction, until a century or so later, Marxist ideas dominated. Then it'd be an easy task to achieve revolution since by then even the ruling class would have been brought up embracing Marxist ideals without, for the most part, recognizing them as Marxist.
The Fabian Socialists took their name from the Roman General Fabius, whose trademark tactic was deception. Their actual symbol, on their organization's seal, is a wolf in sheep's clothing. They are the actual originators of today's Progressive movement.
Even though the founders are all long-dead, their plan worked exactly as outlined. Traditional beliefs--once the foundation of society--have been discarded as outdated and replaced with Marxist tropes. The final stage of this process has been described as a culture war and is pretty much over. People with “Progressive” (Marxist) ideals make up most of those in Hollywood, education and the media. But the Progressive social justice cabal does not yet enjoy absolute power. This is why our social justice themed literati insist that steampunk must follow H.G. Wells' vision rather than Jules Verne's. Just as Soviet science fiction writers had to present the proper ideological vision of the future, so must we, although sometimes the story changes. In the 1950’s, plots were all about how we would be better Red than dead. In the sixties, they became anti-war. In the 1970’s, after flirting with the coming ice age, proper literary stories switched to anti-nuclear themes. Now we have global warming. The story changes but it's always the same voices and the same conclusion—technology will destroy us unless we turn over our final few liberties to a benignly totalitarian State.
But most people read sci-fi and fantasy to escape reality. Today, if you want to read about corrupt politicians, their villainous corporate masters and all the problems with technology run amok, all you have to do is reach for a newspaper or turn on the TV news. (Maybe this is why newspaper subscriptions are in the toilet and the network news audience is shrinking?) Cyberpunk lost its popularity when the 21st century dawned and readers looked around and saw they already lived in a cyberpunk world with all its attendant horrors and despair. They looked for something to take their minds from eternal doom and gloom and found the work of writers like Blaylock, Jeter, and Powers.
Steampunk harkens back to a time when people saw the future with optimism, where science could solve any problem and happily ever after was going to be next week. And while the theme of cyberpunk is doom, steampunk is about hope, or it ought to be.
The original Star Trek series had the essence of steampunk. Sure their technology was far beyond steam power. But they had the steampunk attitude toward progress–it was good. The future was going to be a great place. They’d cured most disease; racism was gone (except among those pesky half black/white Frank Gorshin aliens.) The matter transporter had put an end to poverty. I think that’s why it became so popular. In the midst of the Cold War, with the future looking increasingly like it might come down to a choice between being either Red or Dead, the original Star Trek gave us hope.
At least until Roddenberry died, when Berman and Piller hijacked his vision and transformed it into cyberpunk in space. In Star Trek’s later incarnations technology was no longer benign, and the future was just as dark and corrupt as our present, maybe more so. I blame their rejection of true steampunk essence and the substitution of the bitter, post-modernist dregs of cyberpunk Luddism for those shows’ loss in popularity and subsequent canceling.
I also see this as a warning to steampunk writers. In spite of the literati's scorn, you’ll do a lot better providing readers with the true essence of steampunk–optimism–than if you just write noir cyberpunk horror stories and substitute steam power for computers. There’s more to steampunk than just archaic technology–it’s an attitude.
If you want to see what I mean by steampunk attitude, read my The Queen’s Martian Rifles or The Donuts of Doom. They’re steampunk adventures that Jules Verne would enjoy. And when you do, leave a comment and tell me what you think. I’ll be glad to hear from you.
The Donuts of Doom
The Queen's Martian Rifles
At its core, steampunk is about technology. Steampunk stories are usually set in Victorian times, granting them technological prowess similar to our modern world, but their computers are mechanical, their power source is steam rather than atomic or internal combustion, and everything is lavishly decorated in the Victorian style.
The term steampunk originated in the late 1980’s when author K.W. Jeter needed a general term to describe the work of himself, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock. At the time cyber-punk was popular and he coined steam-punk as a takeoff on that term.
I wrote a blog post once about the difference between cyberpunk and steampunk. I said that while cyberpunk was cynically dark, depressing and pessimistic, steampunk was optimistic about technology and the future. I got a lot of comments that I was completely wrong. Some even went as far to heap scorn on my definition of steampunk as “shiny happy steampunk,” insisting it was a completely different genre they called “Victorian Fantasy.”
But is steampunk by definition pessimistic?
I'm a great fan of the books of Blaylock, Jeter and Powers, even back in the 1980’s before “steampunk” existed as a genre. Their stories, while often dark, were never the nihilistic “cyberpunk with steam engines” that seems to be the operating definition of steampunk these days. Their villains were evil. Technology was just a means to an end.
In contrast, in Vandermeer’s recently published Steampunk anthology, the stories are dark, edgy and quite depressingly reminiscent of cyberpunk tales, which is why I didn’t like it much. Today, most of the literati define steampunk as “Cyberpunk with steam engines.” They nsist the stories must be dark, with destructive, dangerous, and dehumanizing technology. The hero, if there is one, must end the story worse off than he began. In other words, they're just post-modernist cyberpunk stories set in the Victorian Age.
Cyberpunk is all about the horrors of technology. It features a bleak, dehumanized world dominated by monolithic corporations where computers have granted a lucky few almost magical powers at the expense of their humanity. The future is dark and depressing. Technology has transformed civilization into a barbarous, disease-ridden, urban wasteland without freedom. It’s like George Orwell's 1984 but instead of Big Brother, everything is run by Halliburton or some other huge oppressive corporation—capitalism run rampant.
Cyberpunks vision of the world arose after a century of massive wars made more terrible by science and technology. Entire generations have grown up under the threat of a global nuclear apocalypse. We look around and see atomic waste piling up, threats from terrorists, biological warfare, genetic modification, carbon emissions, and worse, where huge corporations like Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook dominate, controlling what we watch and eat, how we work, and where and what we buy. Even our cars will soon be under their control. We live in a cyberpunk world.
But the real Victorians hadn't lived through that yet. They still had faith in science and technology. They believed science could solve any problem. Progress was always good. Technology was like a magic genie. With it Mankind would end starvation, ignorance and poverty and create heaven on earth. The future would be much better than today. That's what evolution was supposed to be about.
You see this in the work of the original steampunk author, Jules Verne. His heroes were scientists and inventors. Sometimes technology got them into trouble, but it’d eventually get them back out again, too. Rather than an endless murky gray inhabited by anti-heroes, the world had both good and evil, heroes and villains. The hero was somebody worth rooting for because he was fighting for a future worth fighting for. This is what I mean by steampunk.
But H.G. Wells also wrote in the Victorian Age, and what he wrote had a cyberpunk theme. His ideas of the future were gloomy. He wrote the first stories about biological terrorism and atomic war. His novel, The Last War, predicted a global nuclear holocaust before scientists even figured out atomic weapons were even possible! H.G. Wells' novels The Time Machine and Things to Come predicted a series of nuclear world wars destroying civilization. Mankind’s only hope was to surrender its freedom to a cabal of scientific masterminds who would employ technology to rule the ignorant masses with a benevolent fist… forever.
Do stories like that make you hopeful about the future? Although they are probably very popular with scientific masterminds, everybody else would just as soon pass, which is why, while a lot of scientists talk about how visionary H.G. Wells was, the books they mention being the most influential to them were usually written by Jules Verne.
One little known fact about Wells explains the divergent viewpoints toward steampunk, both back then and today. H. G. Wells was most famous for being an author, but he was also a political activist. He was a founding member of the Fabian Socialists, an influential British political group that still exists today.
The Fabian Socialists believed in a Marxist revolution. But unlike the Russian Bolshevists, the Fabians didn't think it could be accomplished through violence. The ruling class was too powerful and would simply crush any direct attempt at a communist uprising.
And they were right. Revolution only succeeded in Russia (and later China) because the ruling classes there were fragmented and lacked leadership. The only Western nations that came under communist control fell through the victorious advance of the Soviet Red Army at the end of World War II, never from a violent revolution.
The Fabian solution was a gradual “cultural” revolution. They'd subvert elite universities, introducing Marxist concepts—suitably disguised as fancy modern education theories, of course—to re-educate the youth and change the culture a little at a time. Once they gained a foothold in education, they'd move on into media and entertainment infiltrating movies, books, literature, and eventually even the churches, tearing down traditional ideas and replacing them with theirs. Slowly but surely they'd change society, but never fast enough to provoke a reaction, until a century or so later, Marxist ideas dominated. Then it'd be an easy task to achieve revolution since by then even the ruling class would have been brought up embracing Marxist ideals without, for the most part, recognizing them as Marxist.
The Fabian Socialists took their name from the Roman General Fabius, whose trademark tactic was deception. Their actual symbol, on their organization's seal, is a wolf in sheep's clothing. They are the actual originators of today's Progressive movement.
Even though the founders are all long-dead, their plan worked exactly as outlined. Traditional beliefs--once the foundation of society--have been discarded as outdated and replaced with Marxist tropes. The final stage of this process has been described as a culture war and is pretty much over. People with “Progressive” (Marxist) ideals make up most of those in Hollywood, education and the media. But the Progressive social justice cabal does not yet enjoy absolute power. This is why our social justice themed literati insist that steampunk must follow H.G. Wells' vision rather than Jules Verne's. Just as Soviet science fiction writers had to present the proper ideological vision of the future, so must we, although sometimes the story changes. In the 1950’s, plots were all about how we would be better Red than dead. In the sixties, they became anti-war. In the 1970’s, after flirting with the coming ice age, proper literary stories switched to anti-nuclear themes. Now we have global warming. The story changes but it's always the same voices and the same conclusion—technology will destroy us unless we turn over our final few liberties to a benignly totalitarian State.
But most people read sci-fi and fantasy to escape reality. Today, if you want to read about corrupt politicians, their villainous corporate masters and all the problems with technology run amok, all you have to do is reach for a newspaper or turn on the TV news. (Maybe this is why newspaper subscriptions are in the toilet and the network news audience is shrinking?) Cyberpunk lost its popularity when the 21st century dawned and readers looked around and saw they already lived in a cyberpunk world with all its attendant horrors and despair. They looked for something to take their minds from eternal doom and gloom and found the work of writers like Blaylock, Jeter, and Powers.
Steampunk harkens back to a time when people saw the future with optimism, where science could solve any problem and happily ever after was going to be next week. And while the theme of cyberpunk is doom, steampunk is about hope, or it ought to be.
The original Star Trek series had the essence of steampunk. Sure their technology was far beyond steam power. But they had the steampunk attitude toward progress–it was good. The future was going to be a great place. They’d cured most disease; racism was gone (except among those pesky half black/white Frank Gorshin aliens.) The matter transporter had put an end to poverty. I think that’s why it became so popular. In the midst of the Cold War, with the future looking increasingly like it might come down to a choice between being either Red or Dead, the original Star Trek gave us hope.
At least until Roddenberry died, when Berman and Piller hijacked his vision and transformed it into cyberpunk in space. In Star Trek’s later incarnations technology was no longer benign, and the future was just as dark and corrupt as our present, maybe more so. I blame their rejection of true steampunk essence and the substitution of the bitter, post-modernist dregs of cyberpunk Luddism for those shows’ loss in popularity and subsequent canceling.
I also see this as a warning to steampunk writers. In spite of the literati's scorn, you’ll do a lot better providing readers with the true essence of steampunk–optimism–than if you just write noir cyberpunk horror stories and substitute steam power for computers. There’s more to steampunk than just archaic technology–it’s an attitude.
If you want to see what I mean by steampunk attitude, read my The Queen’s Martian Rifles or The Donuts of Doom. They’re steampunk adventures that Jules Verne would enjoy. And when you do, leave a comment and tell me what you think. I’ll be glad to hear from you.
The Donuts of Doom
The Queen's Martian Rifles
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