Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (597 page)

Actually I never kept track of what happened to the gold. The title dispute dragged on for years, I think, with the friars swearing there had been a miracle and the rancheros swearing there hadn’t been. The gold may have been returned to Carmel, or it may have gone to Mexico City, or it may have gone into a trunk underneath the Alcalde’s bed. I didn’t care; it was all faked Company-issue reproductions anyway. The Bishop died and the Yankees came and were the new conquerors, and maybe nothing ever did get resolved either way.

But Mendoza got her damned vine and her bonus, so she was as happy as she ever is. The Company got its patent on Black Elysium secured. I lived on at the Mission for years and years before (apparently) dying of venerable old age and (apparently) being buried in the same cemetery as Diego and Maria. God forgave us all, I guess, and I moved on to less pleasant work.

Sometimes, when I’m in that part of the world, I stop in as a tourist and check out my grave. It’s the nicest of the many I’ve had, except maybe for that crypt in Hollywood. Well, well; life goes on.

Mine does anyway.

* * * *

Copyright © 1997 by Dell Magazines.

How might the past have looked had its “future” occurred before it was supposed to? This is the theoretical space inhabited by Steampunk, an intertextual, interdisciplinary movement that is, at once, an aesthetic, a Science-Fiction (SF) and Fantasy subgenre, and the basis for a thriving subculture. Steampunk fiction, a fantastical reimagining of the historical Victorian and Edwardian eras (1837–1910) foments an aesthetic that depicts how a pre-Great War, nineteenth century world may have appeared if “a few key technologies been developed further” and a good bit earlier (Guizzo 48). Steampunk is a neologism (Veale 58) that denotes a burgeoning subgenre of Science Fiction (SF), itself a subgenre of Speculative Fiction, and a near-relative of the well-established SF subgenre known as Alternate History. Because the background and setting of narratives in this category can be characterized as a stylized marriage between contemporary nanotechnology (Dawdy)—in the retro-tech form of steam-power and clockwork—and a revival of Victoriana (Perschon 181), i.e., accoutrements and
objets d’art
from the Victorian epoch, the core concepts of Steampunk have been likened to a more recent movement in academia known as “Neo-Victorianism” (Llewellyn 172).

Since Steampunk technofantasies represent a fabricated world of pseudoscience that is neither, as James Gunn has suggested, “the world of the here and now” nor even a one of “the there and then” but rather a “fantastic world of unfamiliar events or developments” (6) it is justly cast as SF. The irony that the nineteenth-century setting of Steampunk, a contemporary subgenre, coincides with the actual nineteenth-century timeframe that scholars such as M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas associate with the emergence of modern SF “in an identifiable form” (6) should not be ignored. To the degree that Steampunk seems to fulfill a romantic longing for a continuation of the Victorian period zeitgeist, it should be equally recognized as a creative revisitation of the SF genre’s genesis in the form of a “reboot.” In the sense that Steampunk constitutes, as is suggested by Andrew M. Gordon elsewhere in this anthology, a speculative “superhistory” that reconceives history by positing “a change in the past,” rather than in the future, it can also find common ground with the Alternate History and Alternate Universe/Reality subgenres. Most importantly, however, is the particular appeal to pathos that Steampunk tries to establish with its audience. That is, that necessary “sense of wonder” first described by SF historian Sam Moscowitz (Knight 8) for which this anthology is aptly named.

Underlying many Steampunk narratives, on the authority of John Clute, is the influence of Charles Dickens (1812–70). Dickens’s frequently revisited “vision of a labyrinthine, subaqueous London as moronic inferno” surfaces as the same landscape used in “Gaslight Romances,” one of a number of Fantasy subgenres related to Steampunk (895). The late imperialistic and industrial age ethos of Steampunk pays a notable measure of tribute to both Jules Verne (1828–1905) and H. G. Wells (1866–1945), two later European writers who are virtually canonized by the SF community for their legacies as pioneers in the field. Their respective SF protogenres Les Voyages Extraordinaires and Scientific Romances represent a fin-de-siècle paradigm shift that attempts to put lingering enlightenment ideals to rest and modernistic thought to the fore. In a 2007 article for Steampunk Magazine, critic Cory Gross suggested that Steampunk incarnations reeking of stereotypical Victorian sentimentalities demonstrate the influence of Verne while ones that critique society using a more Marxian lens, such as the very magazine he writes for, are inspired by Wells (55). In fact, the dovish “Victorian Socialism” that Wells wrote about (152), is one of the characteristics that differentiates the Steampunk vision from Italian playwright Filippo Marinetti’s (1876–1944) more fascist-leaning and hawkish Futurism movement (1909–18), the name of which is often misappropriated in Steampunk subtitles, e.g. a 2010 art exhibition in San Diego California used the problematic word for its Steampunk: Vintage Futurism (Oceanside) as has a recent book by Korero titled Steampunk: Victorian Futurism (March 2011).

In both the historical Victorian era (1837–1901) and the anachronistic, pseudo-historical world of Steampunk, mechanical novelties continue to be manufactured with clunky gears and cogwheels while a prophetic eye is aimed toward the engineering possibilities of electromagnetism. The technological spaces explored in Steampunk narratives reflect, for the most part, an atomic-free zone in a pre-postmodern atmosphere. In a twenty-first century world traumatized by genocide, i.e., the Holocaust, international terrorism, and a fear of planetary annihilation by either nuclear war or global warming, the Victorian era, even with its faults, seems relatively innocent by comparison and that may be part of its unique appeal.

Theories abound to explain the interest in what
Weird Tales
contributor Cherie Priest has described as a “retro-tech SF via a Victorian sensibility” (12). For example, in her work “Reclaiming the Machine,” Rebecca Onion posits that Steampunk evokes “a desire to regain a human connection with the machine world” and “seeks to restore coherence to a perceived ‘lost’ mechanical world” (138). Richard Watson, author of
Future
Minds
(2010), has stated that Steampunk “is highly relevant to our times” because it “is a response to the realities of modern life” particularly the ever-increasing reality that the individual’s sense of control has been lost. Steampunk offers “a counter-trend to the fact that life, especially in developed nations, is atomised, fast-paced, [and] over-loaded with information, choice and needless innovation.”
Weird Tales
editorial director Stephen H. Segal, writing for
Fantasy Magazine
, speculated that one appeal of Steampunk is that it tears down genderized walls. By “masculiniz[ing] romance,” writes Segal, the Steampunk narrative “takes something stereotypically feminine that most boys hate—Victorian lace and frills and tea and crumpets—and says, ‘Hey, how about some robots with that?’”

Steampunk’s place in the blurry spectrum of SF subgenres lies among several others that emphasize the notion of “retro” or backward-looking ideals and aesthetics. Although the retro thread is there, Steampunk is detached from other retro-nostalgic styles that predicted a highly streamlined aesthetic of personal jetpacks, flying automobiles, and glass domes as epitomized, satirically, in animated serials such as Hanna-Barbera’s
The Jetsons
(1962) and Matt Groening’s
Futurama
(1999). In her book
Retro
, Elizabeth Guffey explains retro-futurism as an oxymoronic “discrepancy between what the future once represented and what it no longer means” (152). Steampunk, and similar SF movements, seems to have a reverse approach. Rather than celebrating the past’s hopes and speculations on the future, the “futuristic-retro” aesthetic, which may or may not prove to be a suitable term, imagines how an alternate past would have looked if a pastiche of ideas from both the present and the present’s imagined future are fused with those the past. For example, Dieselpunk, a term popularized by game designer Lewis Pollak for his SF role-playing game
Children of the Sun
(2002), is an evolutionary outgrowth of Steampunk that moves the time setting from the end of World War I to World War II (roughly 1920 to 1945). Prime examples of the Dieselpunk paradigm in narrative can be found in Dave Stevens’ comic book Rocketeer (1982) and Kerry Conran’s film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). A host of other “punk” subgenres, too long to list here, exemplify the millennial generation’s unique ability—and willingness—to unashamedly synthesize existing ideas into imaginative new concoctions.

While much of the subject matter in the fantasies of Jane Austen, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and even Mark Twain (particularly,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
) provides the visual modeling for Steampunk, the fact that these texts were composed in the nineteenth century—for a nineteenth century audience—precludes them from qualifying for the retro-facing Steampunk epithet. Strictly speaking, that is reserved for their twentieth and twenty-first century imitative adaptations. Nonetheless, these authors’ works are undeniably prerequisite reading for anyone who wishes to fully comprehend the inspiration behind Steampunk fiction. It would not be until English novelist Georgette Heyer (1901–74) propagated the historical romance novel (a genre-bending amalgamation of the previously established subgenres: the historical novel and the romance novel), in particular her twenty-six examples of Regency romance for which she is credited as inventor (Kloester xvi), that later writers of Steampunk fiction would have a pioneer to herald them. To a large extent, Heyer’s highly detailed narratives of the Regency era’s (1811–20) inner-workings—right down to avid descriptions of the technology used—and the Horatio Hornblower and Aubrey–Maturin series of nautical historical novels set in the Napoleonic Era (1799–1815), authored respectively by C. S. Forester (1899–1966) and Patrick O’Brien (1914–2000), created a benchmark for Steampunk which certainly demonstrates some overlap in subject matter.

Although the parameters of Steampunk, including the very label itself, were not identified until the late 1980s, contemporary enthusiasts have (re)discovered more than a few examples of Steampunk SF and Fantasy that actually predate the existence of the term. To place Steampunk narrative into historical perspective, some twentieth century predecessors—to be cross-referenced as proto-Steampunk— include, in order of appearance: the early twentieth century pulp fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs;
The Crisis in Bulgaria, or Ibsen to the Rescue!
(1956) by Jocelyn Brooke; the CBS television series
The Wild, Wild West
(1965–69);
Queen Victoria’s Bomb
(1967) by Ronald W. Clark;
Pavane
(1968) by Keith Roberts;
The Warlord of the Air
(1971) by Michael Moorcock;
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
(1972) by Harry Harrison;
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
(1973) and
The Adventures of the Peerless Peer
(1974) both by Philip José Farmer;
Into the Aether
(1974) by Richard A. Lupoff;
Transformations
(1975) by John Mella;
Sherlock Holmes’ War of the Worlds
(1975) by Manly Wade Wellman;
The Space Machine
(1976) by Christopher Priest; the short story “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole” (1977) by Stephen Utley and Howard Waldrop; Fata Morgana (1977) by William Kotzwinkle; Morlock Night (1979) by K. W. Jeter; The Digging Leviathan (1984) and Homunculus (1986) by James P. Blaylock; and The Anubis Gates (1983) and On Stranger Tales (1987) by Tim Powers.

Even though K. W. Jeter is traditionally credited for whimsically inventing the expression “Steampunk,” it is worth acknowledging that Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer for the
Oxford English Dictionary
(2003), traces the first documented usage of the word to a 1987 interview with James Blaylock from the May edition of
Locus
, a trade magazine dedicated to the SF and Fantasy publishing industry. Whoever said it first, according to F. Brett Cox, the word was coined to formalize a grouping, by subject matter and style, of the previously listed novels of Powers, Blaylock, and Jeter, including the latter’s
Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy
(1987). Each of these narratives bridged twentieth-century SF and Fantasy with the “early industrial landscape” of nineteenth-century London (756). Furthermore, the etymology of “Steampunk” is inextricably linked to the word “Cyberpunk,” a portmanteaux combining the word “punk” with “cybernetics,” discussed elsewhere in this anthology.

After 1987, Steampunk SF and Fantasy gathered momentum and produced
The Stress of Her Regard
(1989) by Tim Powers;
Gotham by Gaslight
(1989), a DC Comics alternate history graphic novel by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola; The Hollow Earth (1990) by Rudy Rucker; The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; The Werewolves of London (1990) and The Angel of Pain (1991) by Brian Stableford; Lempriere’s Dictionary (1991) by Lawrence Norfolk; the graphic novel From Hell (1991–96) by Allan Moore and Eddie Campbell; Anno Dracula (1992) by Kim Newman; Is (1992) by Joan Aiken; Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992) by James Blaylock; Anti-Ice (1993) by Stephen Baxter; the Nomad of the Time Streams series (1993) by Michael Moorcock; the FOX television series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993–94); Harm’s Way (1994) by Colin Greenland; The Carnival of Destruction (1994) by Brian Stableford. In 1995, Steampunk fiction presented its reading audience with Northern Lights (known as The Golden Compass in North America) by Philip Pullman; The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter; The Steampunk Trilogy by Paul Di Filippo; and The Prestige by Christopher Priest. The end of the decade introduced The Cockatrice Boys (1996) by Joan Aiken; the short story “The Secret History of Ornithopter” (1997) by Jan Lars Jensen; To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) by Connie Willis; and the graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–2003) by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill.