Speculative Short Fiction Deserves Love discussion
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Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing on a Pin
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Steampunk messes with your head. Its roots are cyberpunk, but it's also alternative history, neo-Victorian (or Wild West), and retro-futurist. It’s not only a sub-genre, it's also a cult culture. It’s the retro that hooks me. Here we are, in 2015, looking back to the nineteenth century, which is, in turn, looking forward with energy and enthusiasm to its bright shiny SFnal future. John DeNardo, the editor of SF Signal, wrote a piece for Kirkus, “Why I Love Retro Science Fiction”, which nails it: ‘the appeal to the glorious days of yesteryear.’ SFWA’s just celebrated it’s golden anniversary; Star Trek’s doing the same this year. That’s a lot of history, but the bright shiny future SF promised didn’t quite come to pass… which leads to ‘dude, where’s my flying car?’ The result is that we look at steampunk with whimsy and nostalgia. It’s the same thing George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois captured in Old Mars and Old Venus.
Or for that matter when you take your child to see The Nutcracker.
That YouTube riff was fun. Also the Rambo short story was fun. I'm not sure that I agree that science fiction of the 19th century was looking forward to a bright and shiny future. I think that's probably more true of the science fiction of the 1940s and 50s. A lot of the forward-looking fiction of the late 19th century was pretty conflicted about the perils and promise of technology.
Bunny writes:I'm not sure that I agree that science fiction of the 19th century was looking forward to a bright and shiny future. I think that's probably more true of the science fiction of the 1940s and 50s. A lot of the forward-looking fiction of the late 19th century was pretty conflicted about the perils and promise of technology.
No doubt. But despite the bleak Dickensian view of the era, it was also a time of great creativity and change. Britain ruled half the world, 'the half that mattered', and Western expansion in the US was manifest destiny. Technical change, embodied by the phrase ‘steam’, was no idle boast. In 1780 the village blacksmith was the height of metalwork; by 1850 machinists often worked to 1/1000th of an inch tolerances. Interchangeable parts, mass production, railroads, and steamboats had transformed both continents. British textile production was the model of how automated an industry could become; every bit of production except cotton picking was mechanized. The self-scouring plow and mechanical reaper had changed agriculture.
Despite the many real downsides- poverty, illness, overcrowded and filthy cities, machines as dangerous as they were amazing, and booms and busts in the economy, the ordinary man shared belief in that brighter future. Real wages rose even as the cost of goods declined. In America, the frontier and free or cheap land made ‘Go West, young man’ a watchword.
Steampunk is even more optimistic than the reality of the era, in both it’s Victorian and Wild West flavors. The danger and challenges of the age add to the excitement. The fiction of 20th century, the era of the Great Depression and World War II, is perhaps similar; Golden Age SF is more optimistic than the fiction of Steinbeck Dreiser, Lewis, and Mailer, for instance.
Cat introduces the story like this:This is a children’s steampunk retelling of Sleeping Beauty; I originally wrote it for the Fairypunk project, but I wanted to get it out here and figured there’s plenty of other fairy tales I can tackle when it’s time.
Add Fairypunk to the long list of things I’ve never heard of. The Fairpunk project, it turns out, was a collaborative mashup of Steampunk and fairy tales, described by Peter J. Wacks, one of its creators, as a creative cooperative of eight writers (including Cat) and three artists (possibly more), and dates back to at least 2012. I think it’s defunct now; it had a website, http://www.fairypunkstories.com/, apparently hijacked by bootleg marketers.
Cyberpunk and its offspring all seem to pick one or two elements as a theme. For cyberpunk it’ s AI and noir, for biopunk and nanopunk, it’s a particular technology, and for steampunk, dieselpunk, and atompunk, it’s an era and utopian vision.
So, how do you mix Steampunk and fairytales?
Steampunk has a generous amount of built-in handwavium. Babbage is shorthand for steam-age computers and AI, nanotech is provided by machines that ‘could even build their own, tinier machines to make tinier machines in turn, and so on and so on’. British landed gentry provides the wealth and serves the same role that multinational corporations do for cyberpunk.
And so we get fairypunk, subgenres begetting subgenres.
I enjoyed the clockwork fairy tale, it was fun. It was interesting how well the Sleeping Beauty story worked as a steampunk tale. I still don't agree at all that steampunk is utopian or nostalgic or looking back to a more hopeful time. For me steampunk speaks to Victorian themes that have become relevant again in our time, of industrialization and environmental degradation, of wide income and class inequalities and social injustice. For me Victorian style isn't whimsical and charming, it's dark and opulent and operatic. But you know, different readers, different readings.
I haven't tried much steampunk beyond the stories I've come across in magazines and anthologies. Usually, they don't do much for me. I like a lot about the style, but they're often missing...something. I don't know. A certain depth I'm looking for? I'm having trouble coming up with useful descriptors. The one memorable, and good, example of steampunk I've read is Rupetta, and I gather it's not so typical.Seven Clockwork Angels was a fun, quick read. I like this reimagining of Sleeping Beauty. It's better than some fairy-tale retellings I've read, not as good as others. At the end, I found myself wondering what happened next. Based on that last sentence, maybe the story's out there. Does anyone else know?
Thinking about it a bit more, I never found out enough about any of the characters or their motivations to really get invested. I remember hearing that, in short stories, there should really only be one or two focal characters or the reader won't be able to become attached to any of them. Here I found myself wanting to know more about The Lord and The Lady, Aurora (and Gizmo), Scuttlepinch, Fleetthought, and the young scholar.
With steampunk in general, one of my frustrations is that the stories so often are about people of means (this can be leveled against a lot of science fiction as well). It makes sense in a way, since that's the main way people will get their hands on all the cool gizmos, but it's a trope I'd like to see addressed.
Ben's comment brings up something I've run across before in other short fiction discussions in other groups. I often hear the comment that people want to know more and/or feel like they didn't get enough about the characters, or setting, or action to really enjoy the story. But in short fiction is there really room for more? Isn't that really just saying you want the story to be longer? Or are there ways to do more while staying in the same small space?
Bunny writes:“I still don't agree at all that steampunk is utopian or nostalgic or looking back to a more hopeful time. For me steampunk speaks to Victorian themes that have become relevant again in our time, of industrialization and environmental degradation, of wide income and class inequalities and social injustice. For me Victorian style isn't whimsical and charming, it's dark and opulent and operatic. But you know, different readers, different readings.”
Okay, I give up. I grant you that not all steampunk stories are utopian or nostalgic. Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine has an if not dystopian at least ambivalent ending, and Michael Swanwick’s Jack Foust isn't even ambivalent.
As you say, different readers, different readings. The reader’s a part of the act, and a reader’s beliefs, likes, opinions and biases certainly affect his reading choices. My preferences lean me towards lighter steampunk. One reason, perhaps, is that the Victorian era is what one commentator called ‘at a fine remove’, safely far enough away to be played with or even mocked, but also close enough to our time to deflate our foibles with pinpricks. The evils of the era you mention are all still with us, I notice.
This debate isn’t a new one. For example, this: http://leaguewriters.blogspot.com/201...
Ben writes:Thinking about it a bit more, I never found out enough about any of the characters or their motivations to really get invested. I remember hearing that, in short stories, there should really only be one or two focal characters or the reader won't be able to become attached to any of them. Here I found myself wanting to know more about The Lord and The Lady, Aurora (and Gizmo), Scuttlepinch, Fleetthought, and the young scholar.
Writers over the decades (usually short story writers) have commented that short stories are harder to write than novels. Damon Knight said this: The problem of compression in a short story is so acute that every passage must perform three or four things at the same time- advance the plot, add to the characterizations, introduce background information, and so on.
I think it’s the higher bar that makes short fiction so much fun to read. I can also see why some people believe the novella is the perfect length for fiction; it has just a bit more room for development, but not enough to get lost in subplots or Barbara Cartland dinner party descriptions.
The Eurora Welty short stories I've read were memorable because of the characters she drew. Of the stories we’ve discussed here, I’d have to say Kelly Link’s “I Can See Right Through You” has the best characterization.
Terry wrote: "Damon Knight said this: The problem of compression in a short story is so acute that every passage must perform three or four things at the same time- advance the plot, add to the characterizations, introduce background information, and so on."Lots of writing is magic, but when an author can do this, they're truly one of the masters. It's like when a magician watches another magician, and, even though they know how the slight works, the execution is so flawless it renders the watches speechless.
When I read one of these stories, I'm always amazed by how it seems simple but unfolds in my mind into this wonderfully complex thing.
Bunny wrote: "Ben's comment brings up something I've run across before in other short fiction discussions in other groups. I often hear the comment that people want to know more and/or feel like they didn't get ..."It's not that I want the story to be longer. As Terry refers to, I want everything in the story to be doing triple or quadruple duty, rather than the double duty I hear people recommend for longer works.
And short fiction doesn't just have to be about one or two characters like I mentioned above. I want to connect with something in the story, whether it's the characters or something else that evokes a strong feeling. I love being surprised when an author finds a new way (to me) of doing that.
Not to denigrate longer writing, but as long as an author's competent, the time I spend with their characters will often make me invested. That particular skill has to be better for it to work well in short stories.
Of course, this is just how I feel about short fiction. I'm sure other people react to different things.
As a certified Old Fart, I’m used to being behind the times. Oh, I know all about how the Internet’s transformed publishing, and ebooks and ezines, and Amazon versus the Big Five and blah blah. But as Dylan says, the wheel's still in spin, and Cat’s use of Patreon to distribute some of her short fiction was a few revolutions ahead of me. Not that I haven’t heard of crowdfunding. I mean, there’s Neal Clarke’s Chinese Science Fiction Translation project and Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction and Women Destroy Science Fiction (which Cat guest-edited). But I got tripped up by the differences between a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo project and Patreon. Everybody else in this group probably already knows this, but they aren’t the same thing at all.
Patreon is a crowdfunded version of the arts patronage system, in which fans support artists by pledging small regular contributions. Cat’s asking for a commitment per short story and producing stories directly for her patrons as an experimental alternative to traditional publishing. Starting in mid-2014, she now has pledges of $180 per short story and has provided fourteen stories in that period.
Most Patreon artists are online content creators- bloggers, Youtubers, or webcomic artists- and just ask their supporters to donate a regular amount monthly. Used this way, it’s a tip jar: http://www.comixtribe.com/2014/03/31/...
However it’s used, it’s certainly something writers with a fan following should consider.
Like you, Terry, I am a certified Old Fart. ;)What's happening now, with Patreon and everything else, has an undeniable niche and is growing. But I gave up trying to predict the future many moons ago. Everything is moving too fast for creaky old me to keep up. I won't state anything more on this.
As for the story, it was a fun, charming read. Like others here, I am not overly familiar with "steampunk", nor am I familiar enough with its tropes to spot and identify it without question. I believe it involves early mechanical technology with magical undertones, but beyond that, I don't know for certain.
But I do know well-written, entertaining stories when I read them. And this is one.
http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2016/...
There's a lot to discuss, about the story, the genre, and the way it's distributed. Any initial thoughts?