A History of Steampunk: Part V - Putting the Punk into Steampunk

Steampunk's increasingly public profile and Internet presence brought in more people from the Gothic, Cyberpunk and Rivethead lifestyles, who in turn brought their interest in music and fashion. These interweaving strands of Steampunk were suddenly being given a look and a sound thanks to D.I.Y. fashionistas and musicians like Abney Park and Vernian Process. Tinkerers and artists, like Crabfu Steamworks and the creators of the Neverwas Haul had also been discovering Steampunk.

While several websites, databases and e-mail groups had existed previously, the Internet presence of Steampunk reached a critical mass with the creation of The Steampunk Forum. This message board served as an outgrowth of the Brass Goggles weblog - purporting to chronicle "the lighter side of Steampunk" - and the Aether Emporium user-edited "wiki" encyclopedia. Indicative of its role as an online catalyst, The Steampunk Forum gained over 600 members within two months of officially opening in late February of 2007, an unprecedented number. The board also served as the main stage for an often vicious and personal debate over the nature and definition of Steampunk.

The genesis of the controversy can be traced to the sentiment behind a 2007 Wired interview with Jake von Slatt, one of the preeminent spokespeople of the new Steampunk subculture:

The Victorian era was really the last era in which a high school graduate was given the complete set of scientific concepts to fully understand the technology of the age," von Slatt says. "Because of this, part of what I wanted to do was to co-opt the term 'steampunk' and imbue it with this DIY component. DIY wasn't part of the definition of steampunk … but I wanted it to be.

This admitted co-option led to a debate between older and newer fans over the extent to which a DIY and Punk ethos was necessary, required or even wanted of Steampunk. The view that they were, championed by "makers" such as Jake von Slatt and Datamancer and media such as Steampunk Magazine, won out in short order and the dynamics of Steampunk as a subcultural movement were regimented.

One of the clearest articulations of this new ethic was voiced by the Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective in the first issue of Steampunk Magazine:

Steampunk is a re-envisioning of the past with the hypertechnological perceptions of the present. Unfortunately, most so-called “steampunk” is simply dressed-up, recreationary nostalgia: the stifling tea-rooms of Victorian imperialists and faded maps of colonial hubris. This kind of sepia-toned yesteryear is more appropriate for Disney and suburban grandparents than it is for a vibrant and viable philosophy or culture.

They continue:

Too much of what passes as steampunk denies the punk, in all of its guises. Punk—the fuse used for lighting cannons. Punk—the downtrodden and dirty. Punk—the aggressive, do-it-yourself ethic. We stand on the shaky shoulders of opium-addicts, aesthete dandies, inventors of perpetual motion machines, mutineers, hucksters, gamblers, explorers, madmen and bluestockings. We laugh at experts and consult moth-eaten tomes of forgotten possibilities. We sneer at utopias while awaiting the new ruins to reveal themselves. We are a community of mechanical magicians enchanted by the real world and beholden to the mystery of possibility. We do not have the luxury of niceties or the possession of politeness; we are rebuilding yesterday to ensure our tomorrow. Our corsets are stitched with safety pins and our top hats hide vicious mohawks. We are fashion’s jackals running wild in the tailor shop.

Speculation suggests that part of the reason for this idea was that much of the new audience for Steampunk came from a background of alternative and counter-cultural movements such as Punk, Goth-Industrial, and DIY hobby groups, rather than from a background in Science Fiction and role-playing game fandom (and thus marginalizing, consciously and unconsciously, the latter). However, as a direct consequence of Steampunk gaining popularity as an alternative, counter-cultural movement, it gained the notice of the mainstream media and cultural consciousness. Google Trends, an engine that tracks searches for and instances of a term on Google over time, records an exponential rise in the term "steampunk" over 2007 and into 2008. Steampunk was regularly featured in Wired, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Forbes, Spin, the New York Times, and other newpapers, television programs and talk radio outlets.

Ironically, as a New York Times piece on Steampunk was published, Bruce Sterling prophesied the impending "death of steampunk" on account of its recognition by a newspaper of the highest echelon. This was one sentiment amongst many ambiguous and conflicting opinions surrounding the emergence of Steampunk as a subculture. Complaints of it being co-opted by the mainstream culture were answered by complaints that it already had been co-opted by the alternative culture movement. Meanwhile, non-Steampunk culture began reacting against the Steampunk trend through criticisms on forums like Boing Boing and Metafilter, articles like Randy Nakamura's Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design and satirical videos such as Merlin Mann's Steampunk DIY, in which he critiqued the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of the Steampunk movement by describing at length his credentials as a DIY enthusiast by way of a "Steampunk" masturbatory device (or put more simply, the assertion that Steampunks are wankers).

Most telling, perhaps, was that newer movies that could be legitimately described as Steampunk were avoiding that designation. Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige was adapted into one of two period films about Victorian stage magicians released in 2006 (the other being the vastly inferior The Illusionist). Advertisements which presented it as a story about rival magicians (played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) vying for the affections of an assistant (Scarlett Johansson) did it a gross disservice. Instead, The Prestige is an exceptional exploration into obsession and revenge which leads one of the magicians to the doorstep of David Bowie’s Nikola Tesla. Two Oscar nominations for art direction and cinematography made it perhaps the best genre film out of Hollywood since Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Prior to that, the 2002 remake of The Time Machine, Universal Studios' monster-revamping Van Helsing and the 2003 adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (or "LXG") were effectively ignored, having been just ahead of Steampunk's breaking into mainstream awareness. Unfortunately for LXG, a shoddy script that departed significantly from the original comic served to alienate both an uninterested public and fans of Moore's work. 2007's The Golden Compass, adapting the first book of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, was more honest about its Steampunk influences but whithered under religious controversy.

Much like the predecessors to literary Steampunk, a great deal of the public presence of Steampunk is found in influences that are played off against other genres. Emergent Steampunk fashion is like this, with Steampunk and Victorian influences on (or variations of) what is otherwise standard Gothic, Cyber, Punk and Rivet style. Video games are another major area: Steampunk in one form or another is exploited in numerous games including the Final Fantasy, Thief, Tomb Raider, City of Heroes, Breath of Fire, Magic: The Gathering, The Elder Scrolls, Warcraft, Ultima, Myst, Castlevania, Ragnarok Online and Second Life franchises. One properly Steampunk game that received some press was Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which the comic strip PVP humorously summarized as "dwarves with guns!"

However, in the underground, Steampunk fulfilled Jeter's prognostications largely amongst those who produced works with little to no conscious recognition that they were creating "Steampunk". That musicians like Vernian Process and Abney Park were even attempting something like "Steampunk music" testified to it, as did the informal designation of the term "Sepiachord", applied by the online journal of the same name, to musicians and performance artists reflecting Steampunk interests. In 2007, the French band Dionysos released a concept album, La Mécanique du Coeur, telling the story of a boy with a clockwork heart. The highly artisic 1995 French film The City of Lost Children followed in the European Steampunk tradition and set the stage for other art-film experiments like the award-winning (and Academy Award nominated) Australian Mysterious Geographical Explorations of Jasper Morello series of animated shorts. Blur Studios also created a computer generated short about a British and a French aristocrat battling with steam-powered robots over the affections of a buxom young lady in A Gentlemen's Duel. Mike Mignola, whose Hellboy and Batman: Gotham by Gaslight comics have Steampunk influences, wrote and drew the very odd Amazing of Screw-On Head, which was later picked up by the Sci-Fi Network as a pilot. Steampunk has proven to be a perennial favorite of DC Comics' Elseworlds line, which puts various superheroes in alternate realities. Comic publisher IDW chose Steampunk as the setting for their first Transformers: Evolutions series, Hearts of Steel, which turned the popular 80's toy and cartoon characters into steam trains and zeppelins. Studio Foglio's Girl Genius comic has remained popular, even after transitioning from print to online.

The cultural imprint of Steampunk continues to grow as the aesthetic fuels events in different venues, such as the Dances of Vice Festival, the Contraptors' Lounge at the 2008 Maker Faire, and the Malediction Society nightclub in Los Angeles. The aesthetic fueling events and fashion lent itself out to the exercise of DIY projects that regularly made the news. One of the first was the Steampunk Treehouse, making appearances at the Burning Man festival where Steampunk is becoming more and more common. The Forevertron, a massive roadside scrap metal sculpture park built by Tom "Dr. Evermore" Every, attracted much attention. A popular subject was the modification of computer cases and devices with a Steampunk aesthetic, including ongoing projects featured on von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop and Datamancer's weblogs.

As a subcultural exercise, the future of Steampunk is essentially forged in iron as it prepares to move through the same cultural life cycle that affected its predecessor cultures of Goth, Punk and Rivet. The pattern begins with a lengthy period of exploration and development falling under the cultural radar until it is "discovered" or "consolidated". This phase sees a sharp rise in both underground and mainstream attention as the culture escalates rapidly towards its critical mass. Steampunk's present standing of attracting new adherents, a flourishing "scene" landscape and acting as the latest "alternative" trend charted by media outlets reflects this phase. A plateau will eventually be reached in which the essential tropes, rhetoric and style of the culture become immovably codified and the system runs on automatically through a period of stagnation. Early adopters who entered at the beginning of the consolidation phase will, with cries of the culture being found out and sold out, give way to the early majority who segue the transition to the formalized and stagnant version of the culture as pioneered by the early adopters. Following this is inevitable decline as subsequent generations find the subculture irrelevant to their needs, interests, tastes and values, finding an appeal only amongst the hangers-on, latest majority and cultural laggards for whom Steampunk will itself be "retro-2000's".

What bearing this development, consolidation, stagnation and decline of a Steampunk subculture will have on Retro-Victorian Science Fiction remains to be seen. Given that the genre has persisted in ebbs and flows since the Victorian Era itself, it is easy to imagine that it will go nowhere far in the coming decades. This nostalgic fairyland of Verne, Wells, Melies, Disney and Zeman in which "entropy lies down with the lamb" will resist that entropy as well as its fantastical contents do. As long as modern society exists, its crucible in the 1900's will be an arena for self-examination.

Selected Bibliography:

Brownlee, John. "Mr. Steampunk: Jake von Slatt". Wired. http://www.wired.com/culture/design/news/2007/06/vonslatt.

Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective (NYC). "What Then, Is Steampunk?" Steampunk Magazine. Issue 1.