The (Not So New) Steampunk Revolution by James Roy Funny, the way trends go. Wizards and witches, pirates, vampires. Each of these was around long before Harry Potter, Jack Sparrow and Edward Cullen turned up. And yet each generation seems to see their own take on a particular trend as the origin of that trend, without realising that before Harry Potter was Sparrowhawk of Earthsea, before Pirates of the Caribbean (the theme-park ride, the movie and the book spin-offs) was Treasure Island, and Bram Stoker wrote Dracula over a hundred years ago. And now, here we are, with the ostensibly new kid on the literary block; steampunk. Five years ago, you might never have heard of it, unless you frequented Galaxy Bookshop or the like. But now. Now! Why, it's positively de rigeur, don't you know! I wonder if anyone thought to mention that to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells... Mapping the origin of steampunk is problematical, since pegging down any kind of definition for the genre — or is it a subgenre? — is also difficult. Michael Pryor, author of the four Laws of Magic books, with two more to come, defines steampunk in this way: 'Think gaslights, real historical figures, nefarious deeds, stiff upper lips, secret societies, dirigibles, the electric telegraph, frock coats and top hats, machinery dripping with brass and steam and electricity, and constructed artefacts that are daring and visionary. It's an era where machines had style'. Richard Harland, whose Worldshaker has been sold into the French, UK and US markets, says: 'I think of steampunk fiction as fiction that's in love with old-fashioned gadgets and machinery. As Jake von Slatt said, it's the intersection of technology and romance. It's when you stop thinking of machinery in terms of its function and start thinking about its look and aesthetic quality'. Author and reviewer Dawn Meredith, when asked what it is about the genre that appeals to her, gives a very succinct answer: 'The gadgets. And the clothes.' Interestingly, even Scott Westerfeld, whose Aurealis Award-winning Leviathan features not only European politics and mechanical invention, pre-invention and re-invention, but also strands of biology that allow scientists to create strange hybrid creatures - or beasties — heads straight for the technology. 'With a steam engine ... you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine. But he also says: [Steampunk is] a nostalgia for the futures of the past - the Victorian science fiction of Wells, the mad scientists of Verne. Steampunk is also a reminder of a time when the entire globe hadn't been explored yet, when a lone adventurer might find the source of the Nile, or perhaps build an aetherium-powered craft and go to Mars.' I suspect that this might be the heart of steampunk — nostalgia. Or perhaps, in keeping with some of the 'wyrd' science populating many examples of the genre, it’s more accurate to say that it’s one of the several hearts of steampunk. It is hard to know how far back one goes to find the true origins of steampunk, a term first used publicly by K.W. Jeter in 1987. Jeter said, in Locsu: 'Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like 'steam punks', perhaps...' But the ideas, and capital-S 'style' of steampunk were around long before Jeter coined the word. As far back as the 1960s Joan Aiken and Keith Roberts were including 'modern' steampunk elements in their books; (in the case of Aiken, these included children's books). Harland says, 'William Gibson and Bruce Sterling came soon after, and helped give the movement cred with science-fiction readers. Still, there was no big take-off in popularity for a long time; the steampunk of that era was definitely a small branch of SF. It's only in the last 10 years that steampunk has really expanded and spread — into movies, into fashion'. Then, just in case anyone thinks back to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or Journey to the Centre of the Earth and wants to pin the steampunk tag on those books, he adds, 'Jules Verne looks like steampunk to us now, but he was seriously predicting the future in his own time'. So after experimental and rather niche forays into a time when things were more stylish, more simple, more beautiful, more... possible, we now have the exploding boiler of the steampunk genre. Increasingly more writers are cracking their knuckles, lighting their gas reading lights, filling their fountain pens and plunging into a world of brass, velvet and polished buttons. But isn't nostalgia dependent on having lived through something? Most of the current crop of steampunk writers were born in the middle of the twentieth century. So is nostalgia really the right word to use? Is it really vicarious yearning for times past? Idealism, perhaps? I remember that in 2003 when I was writing my first steampunk book, Ichabod Hart and the Lighthouse Mystery, I was forced to think about this nostalgia to which Westerfeld refers. My book was what I preferred to call 'steampunk-lite': my personal reading preferences had never really included sci-fi or fantasy, so I was happy to keep within mechanical invention that was plausible, if not entirely possible. So I was focusing more on locomotives than the biological bastardry of Westerfeld or the giant mobile cities of Philip Reeve or Harland (although I did include a laptop version of Charles Babbage's famous Difference Engine, which I called the 'abbacator'). As I went about my research of steam locomotives and the sometimes odd characters who keep the technology alive, I did begin to feel that nostalgia. And not just the nostalgia, but the romance. Perhaps it's because steam locomotives are almost organic in the way they run perfectly one day and stutter along the next, or it could be that once you board a train you largely hand over the responsibility for where you're going to someone you can't even see from your seat. I’d never been a train-nerd, yet I felt 'it'. I found myself hanging around engine sheds, and breathing deeply as the 3801 steamed through Hazelbrook station, and visiting dusty, rusty rail museums. I was nostalgic. (Interestingly, I stopped feeling so nostalgic when I visited the dentist: sometimes it’s good to live in the modern world!) Of course it’s more than just nostalgia and technology and style. It has to be. Even though technology is the entry point for most observers, readers and writers, there is a great deal more to steampunk than brass goggles, walking cities and a steam-powered internet. The other great heart of steampunk is the fascination with asking 'what if?' The Victorian period contained such an explosion of invention and discovery that it seems a completely obvious place to start. Factor in the suffragette movement, the political maneuvering in and around Europe, plus a healthy smattering of colonialism, and suddenly asking 'what if?' makes perfect sense within that context. An example of this political 'sandbox play' is Ronald W. Clark's 1967 novel Queen Victoria's Bomb, wherein he considers how the global political landscape might have looked had Britain possessed a nuclear weapon in the time of the Crimean War. The parallel history — the alternate history — of Harland's Worldshaker diverges at the point where Napoleon planned to build a tunnel under the English Channel, so an invasion would not be held up by that pesky British navy. In Harland's version of world history, the tunnel is successfully built, and from that point on, working within certain constraints, he can do pretty much whatever he likes. And he does: on his website, Harland presents a timeline that divides at that point into 'real history' and 'steampunk history'. The assurance with which he outlines Napoleon’s alternative life (twenty-one years longer) and a scarcely recognisable European timeline is suggestive more of 'proper' research than 'making stuff up'. But much of that research is, of course, completely speculative. Westerfeld starts at a different point, or with a different question. At the beginning of Leviathan we meet the teenaged son of Franz Ferdinand as he learns that his parents have been assassinated in Sarajevo. But the political landscape remains relatively untouched, at least at the beginning of the book, since Westerfeld’s real divergence is mostly centred around science. The Clankers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans — use diesel and steel and huge walking cruisers bristling with cannon and Spandau guns. The Darwinists — Britain, France, Russia — rely on the unlikely biological amalgamation of various kinds of beast. So the divergence has clearly occurred some time before the first page. But considering all this military and diplomatic manoeuvring, is steampunk just one big game of tin soldiers, like teenagers hunched around a Games Workshop table, or is there some kind of deeper examination of the human psyche at play? Westerfeld sees the genre as being about far more than rewriting history. In many ways, it's about taking a second look, but from a completely new angle. 'In the case of Leviathan, I wanted the two kinds of technology to represent the two parts of why [the First World War] was so brutal. All these old ideas about valour and manhood were colliding with technological realities (like, machine guns) in a way that destroyed two things: our illusions about warfare being a glorious thing, and our illusions about technology bringing us to a utopia. So the Clankers and Darwinists make literal that collision of metal and flesh.' Harland agrees. 'I think explorations of historical/political what-ifs tend to tie in with alternative history aspects. In Worldshaker, I was more interested in exploring the nature of all repressive and/or hypocritical societies. That's the beauty of speculative fiction, that you can see things more clearly when you carry them to extremes. Though I have to admit, the juggernauts of Worldshaker came first; the social and psychological explorations just grew out of the scene I’d already set up.' Pryor says that writing within the world of steampunk brings together two of his great interests - history and technology. 'It allows me to explore how people cope with times of great change, and how some people make the most of those as exhilarating opportunities. It's nostalgic, too, and a wistful look back at a world that might have been, and at the sort of world we might have had.' This makes me wonder if now, in the post-industrial age of digitalisation and global warming and 'clean' technology, the nostalgia is even more quaint and removed. Little more than ten years ago, it would have been entirely possible to imagine a world run on steam, where the only consideration would have been the amount of coal available to maintain it, and whether the technology could actually do the desired job. Now, contemplating such an idea requires giving due consideration to the implicit diplomatic, economic and environmental politics. This is all well and good if politics is your bag. But even if it isn’t, there are still so many options for the steampunk writer and reader. Interestingly, none of the interviewed writers claim to write steampunk because 'that's what their readers like'. Rather, each of them speaks with great passion about what they get out of steampunk. They seem to write it because they love sinking into a world that is in many ways comforting and 'familiar', and yet full of possibilities, in so many different ways and on so many different scales. Pryor says, 'I love steampunk because it’s retro and fun, and these are the key elements'. Of course he is right. Writers in any genre are able to play around with the possibilities. But how many genres offer the opportunity to twist world history, 'research' how things might have worked out, and then plunge in to see what happens? It’s an adventurous idea. Perhaps it's because readers feel that sense of adventure and passion in its writers that steampunk is being lapped up. But I suspect it's more than that: like the broader genres of science-fiction and fantasy, there is a rich diversity of focus that caters for a wide range of tastes. As Westerfeld says: 'In steampunk, you can decide what to include or not include based on visual appeal, story needs, world building pleasures, politics (challenging colonialism and sexism is big in steampunk), or whatever… Really, steampunk [is] the only genre flexible enough to incorporate all these. It's a literature of collage, in a lot of ways.' Harland refers to 'incongruous hybrids' — Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy explores a spiritual-mechanical melding, just as Westerfeld plays with zoology and mechanics, and China Miéville coins odd-sounding names like chymical, elyctric, and chirurgeon (the kind of doctor who performs elective amphibian-reassignment surgery in The Scar, in a scene that still keeps me awake some nights). Article continues...

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