"The Spirit of the Future" DVD commentary
If "The Innocent's Progress" is a character-driven show-biz story, and "The Pretty Horsebreaker" is a hard-boiled detective story, then "The Spirit of the Future" is a fairy-tale romance, complete with chivalrous knight, evil baron, good witch and lady of the lake.
It starts out with a "boy" (this is the vague age business I talked about earlier) secretly observing the encounter between Miss Ccri and Lord Hough in the Other Library. I retconned this in after "The Pretty Horsebreaker" was already published. It then jumps ahead ten years, when Miss Ccri is semi-retired as a commedia player and Lord Hough is ailing. There's a lot about time in this story, about aging individuals and aging empires. There's also the idea that we perceive the past and future through stories, and stories tend towards legends. Dafydd, the protagonist, knows Miss Ccri primarily as a legend.
My studies of Victorian history made me realize how much we have preconceived notions, or legends, of what the past was like. We're so used to the idea of "Victorian" meaning stuffy and asexual, that it takes a considerable effort to see that sex was just a different thing for the Victorians than it was for us. A lot of people swallow whole the idea that every woman in the 19th century wore solid steel corsets that shaped their torsos into hourglasses with 14 inch waists, and had their ribs removed to attain that. Instead, the typical corset was merely snug and supportive, and those solid steel corsets were worn by women with health conditions that required them. There were tight-lacers who aspired to extreme wasp waists, but they were sex workers, a fringe minority of fetishists, or both. Other anecdotes, like toothed anti-masturbatory devices, or piano legs covered up for modesty sake, turn out to be the province of the eccentric fringe or pure fabrication, once examined closely. We cherry pick the evidence that forms our idea of the past. Can you imagine the people of 2110 AD trying to get an idea of everyday life in North America in the early 21st century, by watching Jersey Shore? Hopefully our descendants will not be as judgmental and prejudicial about us as we are about our ancestors.
To take a more recent example, Mad Men is both nostalgic and anti-nostalgic for the early-to-mid-60s era. People rhapsodize about the stylish clothes and the three-martini-lunch-and-two-packs-a-day lifestyle depicted, but it's also rife with casual racism and sexism. Is this accurate? Or are the creators of Mad Men taking a worst case example to make their point? Even if you're old enough that you were an adult at the time depicted, that doesn't necessarily mean what you say can be trusted, because a major theme of Mad Men is people lying (by omission or commission) about their pasts to look better.
This story also addresses the question of what comes after steampunk? We have a technological revolution earlier than in our history, but does it mean there will be social revolution at the same time? Is it still steampunk if the technology is not juxtaposed with a conservative class hierarchy? Does it become dieselpunk? Then atompunk? I had an idea of a framing story in which an aged Ricar dictates his life story into a new recording device, making him feel that the world has passed him by.
It starts out with a "boy" (this is the vague age business I talked about earlier) secretly observing the encounter between Miss Ccri and Lord Hough in the Other Library. I retconned this in after "The Pretty Horsebreaker" was already published. It then jumps ahead ten years, when Miss Ccri is semi-retired as a commedia player and Lord Hough is ailing. There's a lot about time in this story, about aging individuals and aging empires. There's also the idea that we perceive the past and future through stories, and stories tend towards legends. Dafydd, the protagonist, knows Miss Ccri primarily as a legend.
My studies of Victorian history made me realize how much we have preconceived notions, or legends, of what the past was like. We're so used to the idea of "Victorian" meaning stuffy and asexual, that it takes a considerable effort to see that sex was just a different thing for the Victorians than it was for us. A lot of people swallow whole the idea that every woman in the 19th century wore solid steel corsets that shaped their torsos into hourglasses with 14 inch waists, and had their ribs removed to attain that. Instead, the typical corset was merely snug and supportive, and those solid steel corsets were worn by women with health conditions that required them. There were tight-lacers who aspired to extreme wasp waists, but they were sex workers, a fringe minority of fetishists, or both. Other anecdotes, like toothed anti-masturbatory devices, or piano legs covered up for modesty sake, turn out to be the province of the eccentric fringe or pure fabrication, once examined closely. We cherry pick the evidence that forms our idea of the past. Can you imagine the people of 2110 AD trying to get an idea of everyday life in North America in the early 21st century, by watching Jersey Shore? Hopefully our descendants will not be as judgmental and prejudicial about us as we are about our ancestors.
To take a more recent example, Mad Men is both nostalgic and anti-nostalgic for the early-to-mid-60s era. People rhapsodize about the stylish clothes and the three-martini-lunch-and-two-packs-a-day lifestyle depicted, but it's also rife with casual racism and sexism. Is this accurate? Or are the creators of Mad Men taking a worst case example to make their point? Even if you're old enough that you were an adult at the time depicted, that doesn't necessarily mean what you say can be trusted, because a major theme of Mad Men is people lying (by omission or commission) about their pasts to look better.
This story also addresses the question of what comes after steampunk? We have a technological revolution earlier than in our history, but does it mean there will be social revolution at the same time? Is it still steampunk if the technology is not juxtaposed with a conservative class hierarchy? Does it become dieselpunk? Then atompunk? I had an idea of a framing story in which an aged Ricar dictates his life story into a new recording device, making him feel that the world has passed him by.