A History of Steampunk: Part III - The Birth of Steampunk

As the 1960's drew to a close, so did the anxieties and culture that gave rise to the Atomic Age of Sci-Fi. Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went. The battlefield was no longer space and it wasn't being fought with lasers and atomic weapons... It was the forests of Vietnam, being fought by guerrillas, and the resulting MyLai massacres challenged America's status as the world's moral beacon. 1967 was the Summer of Love and 1969 was Woodstock (and the Stonewall Riots). 1969 was also the year when the Space Race culminated in the awe-inspiring and unparalleled moon landing, then sputtered into irrelevance. For a society embroiled in the greatest social and military revolutions since the end of World War II, both the scientific optimism and the dire atomic warnings of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were as dated as Verne's writings seemed at the beginning of the Great Depression. Yet the romance of the Victorian Era could not be escaped in its entirety, and several threads were fermenting that would, by the late 70's, mark the rebirth and eventual solidification of what would come to be known as Steampunk.

The term "Steampunk" itself came from one of these threads, as an outgrowth of the burgeoning genre of Cyberpunk. Blame or laud for the term goes to pioneer Cyberpunk author K.W. Jeter, who wrote the following letter to Locus in 1987:

Dear Locus,

Enclosed is a copy of my 1979 novel Morlock Night; I'd appreciate your being so good as to route it Faren Miller, as it's a prime piece of evidence in the great debate as to who in ‘the Powers/Blaylock/Jeter fantasy triumvirate’ was writing in the ‘gonzo-historical manner’ first. Though of course, I did find her review in the March Locus to be quite flattering.

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 ‘steampunks,’ perhaps...

Michael Berry, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1987, confirmed it:

Jeter, along with fellow novelists Tim Powers and James Blaylock, seems to be carving out a new sub-genre of science fiction with his new book. Whereas such authors as William Gibson, Michael Swanwick and Walter Jon Williams have explored the futuristic commingling of human being and computer in their ‘cyberpunk’ novels and stories, Jeter and his compatriots, whom he half-jokingly has dubbed ‘steampunks,’ are having a grand time creating wacko historical fantasies.

This antiquated reimagining of Cyberpunk set 100 years in the past rather than 100 years in the future had its antecedents in the works of Ronald Clark, Christopher Priest, Philip Jose Farmer and Michael Moorcock. Moorcock's 1971 The Warlord of the Air began charting the territory, followed by his sequels in the collectively titled A Nomad of the Timestreams. Harry Harrison's 1972 novel A Transatlantic Tunnel Hurrah followed suit, as did comic writer and artist Bryan Talbot with The Adventures of Luther Arkwright in 1972 (to which he returned in 1999's Heart of Empire) and a stint on Nemesis the Warlock in the mid-1980's. Philip Jose Farmer introduced his "Wold Newton Family" - a pastiche that linked a good number of Victorian and Pulp characters to a fictional meteor impact at Wold Newton - with the pseudo-biographies Tarzan Alive in 1972, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg both in 1973. As early as 1967, during the Atomic Age of Retro-Victorian film, historical biographer Ronald W. Clark drew many of the figures he wrote about into an alternate reality tale of a 19th century atomic bomb in Queen Victoria's Bomb.

The work for which Jeter coined the term Steampunk, and which Moorcock et. al. prefigured, was that of himself and his friends and fellow authors James Blaylock and Tim Powers. Jeter, as indicated in his letter to Locus, started it off with a Wellsian pastiche titled Morlock Night in 1979 and followed it up with Infernal Devices in 1987. Powers contributed The Anubis Gates in 1983, On Stranger Tides in 1987 and The Stress of Her Regard in 1989. Blaylock published Homunculus in 1986 and Lord Kelvin's Machine in 1992. This initial triumvate was soon followed by Paul Di Filippo's The Steampunk Trilogy, Stephen Baxter's Anti-Ice, and Diane Duane's To Visit the Queen (also about nuclear arms in the hands of the Victorian British Empire) amongst others.

Perhaps the most popular and well known of these novels also inadvertently legitimized the label Steampunk. In 1990, celebrated Cyberpunk stalwarts William Gibson and Bruce Sterling co-wrote The Difference Engine. Working more feverishly with the Cyberpunk tropes they themselves helped establish, Gibson and Sterling created a gritty mid-Victorian world in which Charles Babbage, the real-life British mathematician-engineer, was able to realize his plans of a programmable, mechanical, analog computer. The Information Age met the Steam Age as the computer revolution happened a century earlier than it did in our world, with the consequent deleterious effects on society, politics and individuals. Though Gibson exclaimed that "I'll be happy just as long as they don't label this one. There's been some dire talk of 'steampunk' but I don't think it's going to stick." the name did indeed stick. Steampunk was as official as if it had been stamped by the Queen herself.

In reviewing The Anubis Gates, Sci-Fi critic John Clute deftly noted that the inspiration for this literary Steampunk came not from Jules Verne so much as from Charles Dickens (and his later imitators), who wrote of industrialized urban London. His commentary is worth quoting at length:

There is no getting away from the man who invented steampunk. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) may not be mentioned by name anywhere in The Anubis Gates (1983), but his shaping presence can be felt everywhere in the populous chortling shadows of the London of 1810 to which the twentieth-century hero of Tim Powers's time-travel fantasy travels, never to return. It does not much matter that Powers sets his tale in a time Dickens could never have directly experienced, and of which he never wrote, because novels like Oliver Twist (1837-1839), which depicts a London not dissimilar to that explored by Brendan Doyle, are a kind of apotheosis of the supernatural melodrama popular at the beginning of the century, so that Dickins's Fagin and Powers's Horrabin share a common source in gran guignol. Similarly, the Gothic fever-dreams of such writers as Monk Lewis or Charles Maturin can be seen to underpin the oneiric inscapes of the greatest achievements of Dickens - Bleak House (1852-53) or Little Dorrit (1855-1857) or Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) - those novels in which the nightmare of London attains lasting and horrific form, though it is almost certainly the case that Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris (1844) developed the "Mysteries" plot - in which the City becomes an almost animate and deeply theatrical edifice - in a more directly useful and definite manner. For Dickens, that nightmare of London may be a prophetic vision of humanity knotted into the subterranean entrails of the city machine, while for Powers the London of 1810 may be a form of nostalgia, a dream theatre for the elect to star in, buskined and immune; but at the heart of both writers' work glow the lineaments of the last world city.

Between Dickens and Powers, of course, much water has flowed down the filthy Thames. Between steampunk - a term which can be used to describe any sf novel set in any version of the previous century from which entropy has been banned as a metaphorical governor of the alternate industrial revolution of choice - and the desolate expressionism of its true founder lies what one might call Babylon-upon-Thames-punk. Fin de siecle writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G K Chesterton attempted to domesticate Dickens's London by transforming it into a kind of Arabian Nights themepark capable of encompassing (and taming) all the strangenesses that an Empire in pullulant decline could possibly import. Even H G Wells was sometimes capable of quasi-Dickensian sentiment (as in novels like Love and Mr. Lewisham [1900]) about the London he more normally wished utterly to destroy. That this enterprise of domestication was deeply suspect, most writers of Babylon-upon-Thames-punk knew full well, and as a result much of what they wrote gave off an air of bad-faith complacency, uneasy nostalgia, weird inanimation. It is from their doomed enterprise (and from other sources as well) that contemporary steampunk authors like K W Jeter and Powers and James Blaylock and others have borrowed not only a vision of a talismanic city, but also (it must be said) some of the complacency and diseased nostalgia of the epigones who thought to tame Dickens.

Though Clute teasingly lauded Gibson and Sterling for the "tough job" of "making London in 1855 worse than it was in fact", he and his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction co-author Peter Nicholls picked up very early on the fact that there has always been a strain of nostalgia to Steampunk. The gilded fairyland of our ancestors which Walt Disney banked on was still present beneath the layers of Dickensian soot and grime. Clute continued:

...Powers has invented a tale of paradise, where entropy lies down with the lamb and the steam yachts always run on time. In The Anubis Gates he has written a book of almost preternatural geniality, a book which it is possible (rare praise) to love. Let us all, it suggests, co-inhabit the Christmas London of Brendan Doyle, and gape like children at the pageant of the world-stage of his triumphs. We do. He is having the time of his life. We join him.

Nicholls articulated what this fantastic London signified for Steampunk authors:

...in essence Steampunk is a US phenomenon, often set in London, England, which is envisaged as at once deeply alien and intimately familiar, a kind of foreign body encysted in the US subconscious... It is as if, for a handful of sf writers, Victorian London has come to stand for one of those turning points in history where things can go one way or the other, a turning point peculiarly relevant to sf itself. It was a city of industry, science and technology where the modern world was being born, and a claustrophobic city of nightmare where the cost of this growth was registered in filth and squalor.

Tat Wood, writer for the sometimes Steampunk prefiguring TV series Doctor Who, suggested that "Americans, especially in the era of Reagan, believed time and space to be interchangeable and West = Future, hence the genuine belief of American tourists that Britain is still physically in the 19th century." London, and by extension the British Empire and the Victorian Era, was a temporal, historical and physical ground zero at which the Industrial and pre-Industrial ages met, be it in the hordes of former English rural farmers migrating to London or wealthy Londoners vacationing along the mountainous rail lines of India and Canada.

Selected Bibliography:

Clute, John. Look at the Evidence. Liverpool University Press 1996.

Clute, John and Nicholls, Peter. Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Orbit 1999.