The Steampunk User's Manual by Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Jeff VanderMeer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2014-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

Étienne Barillier and Arthur Morgan. Photo by ActuSF.

Le Guide Steampunk by Étienne Barillier and Arthur Morgan. Cover designed by Alexandre Bourgois.

Morgan’s colleague Étienne Barillier echoes Dasi’s take: “Steampunk was around long before K. W. Jeter coined its name,” he says. “Most people who actually love Steampunk loved it before they even discovered the name. . . . I’ve never met a French person my age who doesn’t remember watching Wild Wild West as a kid. You know H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, even if you never read their books. You know them because they belong to your culture, the very same culture Steampunk is building itself upon. Explaining Steampunk to your grandma is easy!”

Because Steampunk is a broad church, it tends to cannibalize works that aren’t necessarily Steampunk. For example, China Miéville doesn’t think of his Bas-Lag novels (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council) as Steampunk, and yet a certain level of technology on display in those books means that some readers do use that label to describe Miéville’s work.

Paolo Bacigalupi, author of the best-selling The Windup Girl, describes a similar experience. The Windup Girl had been out for a while when reviewers began describing it as Steampunk. “Honestly, I was perfectly happy to have it adopted, because if someone sees something they like in one of my books, then I’m happy they’re happy,” he says. “But I never thought of it as Steampunk when I was writing it.

“In my mind, Steampunk feels nostalgic. It’s a looking back to a history that’s cooler and more intricate and fetishized than our own true past. Fundamentally, it seems to me to be an exploration of fantastical histories that never were, but would have been wild and wonderful if they just could have been. So while The Windup Girl has dirigibles and intricate muscle-powered engines, at its root, it’s explicitly not about an alternate past. It is intended as an extrapolation into the future, and as a prod for readers to consider our present moment. It’s very specifically about now, and where we’re headed from here. My sense is that this isn’t Steampunk’s prime directive.”

It’s clear that Steampunk has the ability to address big, complex issues. Has it realized that potential yet? It might have started to.

As author Richard E. Preston notes, “Steampunk’s pretty, and that always has appeal. But Steampunk is also laden with vast potential to explore the modern world, and people are beginning to recognize its power as allegory. The Victorian/Edwardian era (Steampunk embraces this period, and also roughly extends back into the late eighteenth century and forward to the end of the Great War) was a time of immense progress, darkness, and contradiction. Most of its conflicts are still with us today: man versus machine, economic progress/empire versus exploitation/colonialism, industrialization versus nature, hedonism versus sexual repression, sexism versus female suffrage and equality, Darwinism versus creationism, utopianism versus disillusionment, and on and on. A writer can really tackle our modern life through Steampunk, and I think readers will continue to respond to that.

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