Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (598 page)

The millennium has received the following contributions to Steampunk: the short story “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000) by Ted Chiang;
Perdido Street Station (2000) by China Miéville and winner of the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke award; the graphic novel Steampunk (2000–02) by Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo; the Sci-Fi Channel television series The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne (2001); and the short story “A Study in Emerald” (2003) by Neil Gaiman. One of the most recent validations for the Steampunk subgenre has come with Phil and Kaja Foglio’s multiple wins of the 2009 and 2010 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story with their Gaslamp Fantasy comic book series Girl Genius, ongoing since 2001 (and available online at www.girlgeniusonline.com).

While Steampunk narratives are well represented in short fiction, the novel, and the graphic novel, they also feature prominently in big-budget films. In addition to the television series listed previously, some cinematic narratives incorporating the Steampunk aesthetic have included Marc Caro’s and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
La Cité des Enfants Perdus
[
The City of Lost Children
] (1995), Barry Sonnenfeld’s
Wild, Wild West
(1999), Albert and Allen Hughes’s
From Hell
(2001), Stephen Norrington’s
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
, Katsuhiro Otomo’s animé
Steamboy
(2004), Stephen Sommers’s
Van Helsing
(2004), Terry Gilliam’s
The Brothers Grimm
(2005), Neil Burger’s
The Illusionist
(2006), Christopher Nolan’s
The Prestige
(2006), Tim Burton’s
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
(2007), Chris Weitz’s
The Golden Compass
(2007), and Guy Ritchie’s
Sherlock Holmes
(2009), to name only a few.

Since the gaming industry too has latched on to the appeal of Steampunk, fans of the subgenre are not limited to a passive reading or viewing experience—they can actively engage in virtual Steampunk worlds. Traditional role-playing games using a Steampunk motif include Frank Chadwick’s
Space 1889
(1988); William H. Stoddard’s
GURPS Steampunk
(2000); and Alejandro Melchor’s and Scott Clark’s
OGL Steampunk
(2004). In addition to projects based on Hollywood films, personal computer video games with Steampunk elements include Robyn and Rand Miller’s
Myst
(1993) and its sequels; and Looking Glass Studio’s
Thief: The Dark Project
(1998) and its two sequels. A Steampunk Wiki dedicated to the subject—steampunk.wikia.com—has a growing list of many more.

The prevalence of the Steampunk aesthetic in fiction, film, and gaming has given rise to a pop subculture dedicated to the (re)creation and use of costume, jewelry, art and actual machinery inspired by its predominantly retro themes. It should be noted that retro styles, such as Steampunk, that amalgamate characteristics from the present with the iconic themes of a particular past era are not exactly new to the history of Western pop-culture. For example, the Victorian Gothic mode of architecture, a.k.a “The Gothic Revival,” had its roots in late eighteenth-century England, peaking later in the nineteenth-century. The Neo-Gothic movement, which cannot be wholly separated from the medievalist Arthurian Revival—imagine the nineteenth century homes of the British upper-class landscaped with recreations of middle age ruins—competed with other artistic trends that favored a look backward in time for inspiration. An extraordinary study of this particular chivalric revisitation—and the spin-off movements it inspired, such as “Muscular Christianity”—can be found in Mark Girouard’s The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981). Similar-minded movements of note included the Pre-Raphaelites and a neoclassical style of architecture, furniture, and clothing which was popular in England during the Regency period (the era just prior to the Victorian one). The Regency aesthetic corresponded with what was called “Empire” in France, “Federal” in the United States and “Biedermeier” in regions where German was spoken. In each case, a distinct revival of motifs from antiquity—whether, Greco-Roman, Egyptian (as inspired by Napoleon’s adventures there), and even Chinese—was resurrected as a fashion ideal tamed by early nineteenth century discernments. However, the Regency style, since it was fairly mainstream in its heyday, does not qualify as a subculture in the sense that it is understood today.

In his study
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
, Dick Hebdige interprets a subculture “as a form of resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections to [the] ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style” (133). In his disquisition
Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style
, David Muggleton shows how many theorists see a correlation between subculture and art, especially music (69). Fast-forward to the late-twentieth century and a revival of the1950s mores-bending brand of music known as Rockabilly (a fusion of proto-rock and hillbilly musical styles) as a retro music/fashion subculture—as reinvented by groups such as The Stray Cats—merged the sensationalism of old rock-and-roll/country icons such as Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, with their signature leather jackets, boots, pompadours, and ducktail clichés, with the anarchistic, punk rock tropes of the 1980s, e.g., tattoos, piercings, and colored hair. The international Goth subculture, which intersects with the Steampunk one, also began in the 1980s as a derivative of the punk rock scene, adding a distinctive flair for theatrical. The Goth aesthetic is a dark mélange of both horror film and bondage motifs and informed at its core by nineteenth century Gothic fiction. Consequently, a campy Goth enthusiast characterized as a tragic scientist archetype, e.g., Victor Frankenstein, complete with Victorian lab coat, rubber gloves and strapped goggles, might be able to effectively pass in Steampunk where the boundaries of these two subcultures blur.

Much has been written—and is still being written—on the curious Millennial predilection for the so-called “mashup,” i.e., the synthesis of two or more preexisting ideas into an entirely new work that pays homage to both while still receiving credit for a fresh uniqueness. Dominant in the fields of both digital media and amateur musical endeavors, examples of the increasingly popular literary mashup can also be found in such twenty-first-century works as Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies (2009) and its sequel, where a fantastically imagined meeting occurs between the authentically Victorian characters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and the apocalyptic hordes of Hollywood-esque zombies of recent pop-culture, à la director George Romero, as an alternate reality retelling of two traditions.

Steampunk, like the gadgetry its Darwinian tinkerers devise, is an evolving work in progress. It has been criticized, for instance, for being blatantly Eurocentric. It is troubling for some to see the romanticization of an epoch when racism was an institution, women’s suffrage was still a dream, and colonialism and imperialism were mainstream conventions. However, Steampunk’s revisionary sanitization of the past, when contrasted with the genuine, unidealized past, provides the student of SF with yet one more opportunity for scholarly discourse and edification. If those mustachioed Victorian writers who wanted to right the wrongs in their own time were able to time travel to
our
present time, we can only hope that they might approve of, at least, some of the progress they might observe through their lorgnettes as they synchronized their pocket watches after dismounting their penny-farthings.

* * * *

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What’s Next: Top Trends

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