Charles Stross on Steampunk

Award-winning science-fiction author Charles Stross isn't too fond of all the Steampunk novels that are being peddled to the SFF readers these days. The Hard Edge of Empire is a blog post in which he gives his two cents regarding this particular subgenre. Here's a teaser:

It's not that I actively dislike steampunk, and indeed I have fond memories of the likes of K. W. Jeter's "Infernal Devices", Tim Powers' "The Anubis Gates", the works of James Blaylock, and other features of the 1980s steampunk scene. I don't have that much to say against the aesthetic and costumery other than, gosh, that must be rather hot and hard to perambulate in. (I will confess to being a big fan of Phil and Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius.) It's just that there's too damn much of it about right now, and furthermore, it's in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect. (The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist's work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.)

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But there's a dark side as well. We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good. If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It's the world that bequeathed us the adjective "Dickensian", that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It's the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next).

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You probably think I'm going a little too far in my blanket condemnation of a sandbox where the cool kids are having altogether too much fun. But consider this: what would a steampunk novel that took the taproot history of the period seriously look like?

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans' Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn't bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right? Might as well pick Zombies for our single one impossible ingredient.) It would share the empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town during a recession, unwanted children (contraception is a crime) offloaded on a baby farm with a guaranteed 90% mortality rate through neglect. The casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King's shilling to break the heads of union members organizing for a 60 hour work week. The fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forced to labour on steam-powered looms, weaving cloth for the rich. The empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips and breeding stock for their fathers' fortunes. In other words, it's the story of all the people who are having adventures — as long as you remember that an adventure is a tale of unpleasant events happening to people a long, long way from home.

Click on the link above for the full post and the 100+ comments it generated.

Tobias S. Buckell responds via his Facebook page. Here's an extract:

If the industrial revolution was harsh, remember that the peasants fleeing the country-side for the Dickensian, coal-stained air of London were leaving the countryside for a better life, the same pastoral life that people like Tolkien and his later imitators and admirers hold up as a world like ours, but purer and with horses.

However, the period that steampunk holds up so dear is the same period that perfected genocide, racism, wholesale destruction of Africa, manifest destiny, and so on and so forth.

To be true, I hold that steampunk is a just a modern iteration of the previous generation’s pastoralism. Tolkien was looking back a couple hundred years to a time just outside his horizon and thinking of it as ‘a better age,’ which is not uncommon with human beings (it’s been going on since… forever).

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In that manner steampunk is more of an aesthetic rejection of modern aesthetics, it’s primarily a manufacturing/cultural manifestation, as evidenced, I think, by the fact that the bulk of steampunk’s appeal is in the objects (the movies, bulk produced mass consumer objects, have failed to do as well) and the style, which have penetrated further out than the literature objects.

Follow the link for the whole thing.

Buckell points out that Nisi Shawl also wrote a piece concerning some of the literature that has used steampunk while exploring that reactionary/pastoralist nature. Here's an extract:

Because while steampunk’s nonliterary components—fashion, art, music—are some of the most diverse scenes around, steampunk books and stories I was familiar with often seemed nostalgic for an imaginary vanished age of whiteness. Almost without exception they glorified British Victorian imperialism. They did this despite the fact that many of the cultural, scientific, and aesthetic elements steampunk celebrates had been appropriated from nations the British Empire conquered, and the related fact that the machinery steampunk focuses on had primarily been maintained by nonwhites.

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So at this point there is discussion: new ideas are being articulated, new questions are being asked. There is change: new stories are being told. Lately, in the world of steampunk, there is a chance to make a burgeoning art form more inclusive, more intricate, more verisimilitudinous. More fun.

People who move forward physically by walking must fall and catch themselves repeatedly. Moving forward intellectually means being willing to risk falling intellectually: being willing to say stupid things and then catch yourself. You catch yourself intellectually by making those stupid statements true, or restating them so they are right. Repeatedly. And moving forward.

Steampunk is in the process of constantly restating itself.

Not a big fan of Steampunk myself, but I reckon that this might interest many of you. . .