More on dieselpunk definitions

So the smart kids at the day job showed me this thing called “reddit” that apparently has everything everyone would ever want on the internets. I figured it was something to check out, since I suck at promoting my book and hardly ever interact with people who have the same interests as I do.

There was a dieselpunk discussion about how if steampunk was the intersection of romance and science (I think, anyway), what would dieselpunk be?

This is a pretty nifty question. At least to me. And let’s be real–I find boring things interesting. I get excited about being able to apply some physics comment by an instructor to Bill Bruford’s drumming. By contrast, I find the idea of people dancing to be absolutely horrifying. Yes, engineering school is exactly where I need to be.

To me this is a hell of a lot easier to figure out than any math. I’ve read pieces about high modernism that drop the phrase “function and form.” It seems like a good way to define it in two terms, if we need to play that game.

The answer I wrote  was “art and reason.” Somehow I feel like this might have burrowed out of the Randroid partition of my subconscious. It sounds like something she had probably written once. Again I have to mention that whatever her mistakes, tons of the things she wrote totally reflect what I think dieselpunk is about.

There does seem to be a slight disconnect here with a big chunk of dieselpunkers though. A lot of them don’t go into such philosophical detail and make it about noir stuff and detectives and costumes. I mean that’s okay and fun, don’t get me wrong. I guess as with anything, there’s always going to be a split between pop culture and stuff that’s…not pop culture. This is getting dangerously close to a kitsch-not-kitsch piece, which I’d like to avoid. But seriously, do you get the same vibe from Dick Tracy as you do from The Fountainhead?

Both of those are dieselpunk to me. But in the end they’re worlds apart.

Then again, the pulp detective story does sort of reflect an industrial approach to fiction. Sort of. I mean it’s efficient, makes money, and wasn’t complicated by the pompousness of the previous era. That’s probably why I borrow some aspects of it, but my writing far from tries to bring back the same old dated stories but from a 21st century viewpoint.

Back to the original question–art and reason is the intersection of dieselpunk.  It was a brief, very unique period where shit got done and really well. Given that even some scientists are turning reason into intellectual vomit in this era (like those scientists who are trying to prove that we’re actually a computer simulation), it’s probably going to remain a high point for us hu-mahns.

The art was difficult at times but it still did make sense, and art can make sense. Yes, I’m going to say that Joyce actually makes sense. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than vampire sex novels, that’s for sure.

So what do we have now, then?

I have no idea. If we wanted to ask what the postmodern intersection is, the answer we’d get is probably just something like “Huh? You can’t like, make people stand at an intersection, dude. We’re all just dancing, man.”

That’s all I have. And I just realized after writing this that I actually had a spare 30 minutes to write this post. 30 minutes during which I could have worked on real writing.

Fml.