Secret Histories

The Los Angeles Review of Books explores the world of steampunk.

From the piece...

Rachel Bowser and Brian Croxall, the co-editors of a recent special issue on steampunk in the online journal Neo-Victorian Studies, make much the same point when they suggest that steampunk visual art is a critical response to the “opacity” of contemporary technology, its imperviousness to tinkering, and its discouragement of amateur repair. Rooted in the “maker” and do-it-yourself movements, steampunk rejects planned obsolescence, and this helps explain its propensity for mixing together materials from different time periods, as in the artist Datamancer’s laptop computers fashioned out of wood and leather and ornamented with brass bear-claw feet and a large brass key as the on/off switch. Anachronism, they claim, is steampunk’s primary formal principle: “it creates a new paradigm in which technologies, aesthetics, and ideas mark different times simultaneously, instead of signposting different historical periods; anachronism is not anomalous but becomes the norm.”

Anachronism is as central to steampunk fiction as it is to fashion and visual art. The term “steampunk,” in fact, was originally coined in reference to fiction by the American science fiction writer K.W. Jeter in an April, 1987 essay in Locus magazine: “I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing,” he wrote, “as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for [them] … like ‘steampunk’ perhaps.” Though largely overshadowed by its bigger, slicker brother “cyberpunk,” steampunk fiction did become an interesting development in science fiction over the next two decades. The grand achievement of the early days of the subgenre, by most accounts, is William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1991), a novel that projects a decidedly darker vision than most contemporary steampunk art. It is set in an alternative mid-nineteenth-century London where a technological breakthrough, the invention of mechanical computing machines, has ushered in a radically secular political regime — alternative history in an anachronistic mode. Lord Byron, in this world, has become a powerful Prime Minister rather than a poet. But London’s thriving trade in prostitution is unchanged, and its air pollution is even worse. Other notable examples, ones not necessarily identified as steampunk by their authors but sometimes claimed as part of the subgenre’s genealogy, include Philip Pullman’s highly successful trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000), with its very recognizable Oxford set in a fantastic alternative universe, China Miéville’s critically acclaimed New Crobuzon trilogy (Perdido Street Station [2003], The Scar [2004], and Iron Council [2005]), which clearly models the nation of New Crobuzon on imperial-era England, and even Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth historical novel Against the Day (2006), with its elaborate play upon Victorian speculations about time travel and multiple-dimensional realities.