What is Steampunk?

What is Steampunk?

- S.F. Winser

There's an easy answer to this question that has already been answered approximately 5,372 times. Steampunk is whatever you want it to be.

Of course, that's a complete cop-out and tells us nothing.

Let's try for a more meaningful, probably slightly less true answer.

Steampunk is Victoriana. It is steamwork. It is clockwork. It is Sci-Fi. It is fantasy. It is a design movement. It is for everyone. It is for nerds. It is found objects. It is elegant and custom-made. It is often one-off.

It is not mass-produced.

In fact, the truest part of the above is: it is not mass-produced.

Steampunk's origins are the distant past - not ancient history, but not modern either - the just-long-enough-ago-to-be-forgotten. Its truest roots, by mass consensus, seem to be Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Steampunk comes from a time when a scientist could make anything in his basement. It might be something clunky-looking, it might be something beautiful - but dammit it would look interesting and it would work. Its more modern stories are usually set in the same eras as those of those two forefathers. 'The Steampunk Trilogy' - the origin of steampunk as a word - even has a story about Queen Victoria herself.

But despite the other iterations, steampunk is, at its refined point, a literary sub-genre. It has proponents as diverse as China Mieville's dense, symbolic and uberdark tales of the depths of humanity and Phil and Kaja Foglios' brightly-coloured 'Girl Genius' graphic novels of wit, dramatic-cool battles and whimsical thoughtfulness. The Foglios even have their own term for it: 'gaslamp fantasy'. A term which is being used now to describe the more fantasy, less sci-fi incarnations of steampunk. D.M. Cornish's wonderful 'Monster-Blood Tattoo' series, for example, is marketed as gaslamp fantasy.

But it's all steampunk for no other reason than that's how most people think of it.

The real root of steampunk is in story. That is where it lives. Even the more manifest, sculptural version in which steampunk appears. These creations tell stories and fire imaginations. Who hasn't seen some inspired sculptor's modification of a pair of binoculars - glass and brass, covered in clockwork - and thought: Who would have designed these if they were 'real'? What else can they do? How do they work? And started writing stories in their heads of mad inventors chasing insane clockwork creatures through fantastic worlds not unlike that of Victoria's Empire. There's no point building these things if there's no story to inspire - just buy a pair of binoculars at the store. They'll probably work better. But it's much cooler if, whenever you look at them, visions of mad monsters hunted down by some repentant creator fill your world.

That's what steampunk does to us. It fires the narrative core of humanity by being something other, something only just remembered or half-understood. Our mind tries to fill in the gaps and story is born.

And like all good story, there is a darkness. The thing that inspired me to write this exploration is reading so many other attempts to refine steampunk into subgenres, to understand it and classify it from its manifold future to its literary past.

And every single attempt I have ever read has missed something.

The darkness.

Steampunk's godfathers were Verne and Wells. But its godmother was Mary Shelly. Its favourite uncle was Robert Louis Stevenson.

Steampunk is twisted. It harbours monsters. Frankenstein and his tragic, un-named monster and Jekyll's ill-considered tampering with his own mind. These are deep, dark veins throughout steampunk. To stick with examples from the two writers above, Mieville's 'Constructs' are these evils made flesh and steel. They are Frankenstein's monster a hundred times more twisted and sad. The Foglio's 'Madboys and Madgirls' are quintessential mad scientists; creators and magicians little concerned with consequences when there is inventiveness in the air. Even the Foglios' 'good' characters unleash creations with unexpected and often explosive consequences.

But I think this is part of why steampunk works. It is, in many ways, a defining characteristic. Steampunk straddles the subtexts of both Verne and Wells' sci-fi, and Shelley and Stevenson's Gothic horrors. Steampunk is about technology. It is about science and the wonderfulness of the world when these two intersect with human intellect. It is about the dangers of creation unfettered by morality. Steampunk is also about beauty. (There have been thousands of words written about the need for craft and aesthetic care in a mass-produced world being an influence on the style of steampunk, so I won't go into that). This is technology, science, humanity. We need to invent, create, tell stories, build computers of marble and filigree and tell more stories. But we need to take care we don't destroy or lose sight of ourselves or other people along the way.

Steampunk is not saying 'Science is evil and deadly and scientists don't know what they are doing'. Though there is a sci-fi subgenre of stories that do this.

It is not 'Science is great, it will save us, let the scientists do what they need to'. Though there's a sci-fi subgenre of that stuff, too.

Steampunk is both. And it also embraces the wonder of knowledge, the great feeling of 'flow' that comes with creativity. It is about being human in the here-and-now. We live in a technological, mass-produced, scientific age and society is ambivalent about all this. We have people who say in dread tones: 'Science is nought but evil', we have people who say in blind faith: 'Science will solve everything'. We have companies who say in greed and with a pathetic lack of irony: 'Technology is boring and same-y but buy our version of boring and same-y to prove your originality'. Steampunk, that fantastic, near-insane meld of science, magic and weird alternate history, is about refuting all these statements.

Steampunk says they're all wrong. It inspires us to make up our own stories of how science works. Science is human, is potentially good, is potentially evil. And the knowledge it brings is beautiful in its own right.