Punkpunk
"Punk" used to evoke a specific set of images for me. The spouse (then a sweetie) and I used to attend punk concerts in L.A. around 1980; our favorite band was X, and the song that seemed to exemplify them was "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline," a fast, tightly harmonized, curiously elegiac piece.
At the other end of that decade punk got added to cyber, some say at first as a joke, but it stuck. The term evoked--maybe inspired--stories featuring long, tense nights in ugly cityscapes, where all the high tech goes to distant druglords or rotten government officials, or to getting high on the Net in order to escape the grim reality. Blade Runner is sometimes cited as the look of cyberpunk, though it was about A.I.s and not wetware.
'Punk' as suffix was so effective it migrated. 'Punk' clothes were still in, and so was posing for author photos in urban blight areas; the work punk landed next on manners, as in mannerpunk. I've seen any number of fantasies called mannerpunk; sometimes I suspect it depends which cool circles you move in. The work most commonly cited across these various lists, I think, is Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint which features a tension-fraught, aging vaguely European city ruled by elitist, stylish aristocrats. Their lethal passions and hatreds cause sudden death, sometimes by duel, and the coolest of them are not free from emotional anxiety. In feel that novel owes a lot to Dorothy Dunnett's historical Lymond Cycle--beautifully researched sixteenth century adventure novels with wit to spare, imbued with the tiniest touch of fantasy, and boy howdy the emo anxiety of the eponymous hero. (That he then causes in everyone he encounters.)
Now steampunk (which has been around for a while) is "the" thing. It's curious to me that so much of it has a fin de siecle feel--as if the "end of an era" is ten years late. Though there are plenty of ugly cityscapes below the exquisitely designed, phlogiston-powered zeps, mostly what I sense is a looking back, in exactly the way that George Elliott and Thackeray and the mid-Victorian writers looked back, at an 'easier' time, while meshing it with modern attitudes and ideas.
This hit me just a few days ago when someone much older than me was exclaiming about the stupidity of "girls" of thirty swanking around in tight corsets. "I remember when my mother got rid of hers in the twenties. Then those girdles came back in the fifties." She went on about how horrible it was to sit in those things in hundred degree heat, in tight shoes, silk stockings, gloves, and a hat, just because you didn't dare not. "Your pancake makeup would sweat right off your face," she said.
I tried to explain that the nifty thing about the girls swanking around in corsets is that that they chose to do so--they can dress up in all those cool old clothes, picking and choosing those that best express their style--but the next day, if it's 100 degrees outside, they can wear a sensible cotton sun dress, and nobody cares.
The thing I'm feeling my way toward is this sense of 'punk' changing. Or maybe it isn't. The cyberpunk was set in a grim future, but the stories were about escape from it. Now steampunk is set in a past that never happened, again another type of escape. But so many of the ideas in the best stuff is not 'escapist' so much as trying new social and cultural ideas out, and having the characters go on as if the changes are accepted. That was one huge appeal of the Dunnett books--that in crucial ways, the main characters spoke to modern people, yet Dunnett was skilled enough to make them seem of their time for most readers. Same with Patrick O'Brian. Maybe they were the first to do historypunk.
At the other end of that decade punk got added to cyber, some say at first as a joke, but it stuck. The term evoked--maybe inspired--stories featuring long, tense nights in ugly cityscapes, where all the high tech goes to distant druglords or rotten government officials, or to getting high on the Net in order to escape the grim reality. Blade Runner is sometimes cited as the look of cyberpunk, though it was about A.I.s and not wetware.
'Punk' as suffix was so effective it migrated. 'Punk' clothes were still in, and so was posing for author photos in urban blight areas; the work punk landed next on manners, as in mannerpunk. I've seen any number of fantasies called mannerpunk; sometimes I suspect it depends which cool circles you move in. The work most commonly cited across these various lists, I think, is Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint which features a tension-fraught, aging vaguely European city ruled by elitist, stylish aristocrats. Their lethal passions and hatreds cause sudden death, sometimes by duel, and the coolest of them are not free from emotional anxiety. In feel that novel owes a lot to Dorothy Dunnett's historical Lymond Cycle--beautifully researched sixteenth century adventure novels with wit to spare, imbued with the tiniest touch of fantasy, and boy howdy the emo anxiety of the eponymous hero. (That he then causes in everyone he encounters.)
Now steampunk (which has been around for a while) is "the" thing. It's curious to me that so much of it has a fin de siecle feel--as if the "end of an era" is ten years late. Though there are plenty of ugly cityscapes below the exquisitely designed, phlogiston-powered zeps, mostly what I sense is a looking back, in exactly the way that George Elliott and Thackeray and the mid-Victorian writers looked back, at an 'easier' time, while meshing it with modern attitudes and ideas.
This hit me just a few days ago when someone much older than me was exclaiming about the stupidity of "girls" of thirty swanking around in tight corsets. "I remember when my mother got rid of hers in the twenties. Then those girdles came back in the fifties." She went on about how horrible it was to sit in those things in hundred degree heat, in tight shoes, silk stockings, gloves, and a hat, just because you didn't dare not. "Your pancake makeup would sweat right off your face," she said.
I tried to explain that the nifty thing about the girls swanking around in corsets is that that they chose to do so--they can dress up in all those cool old clothes, picking and choosing those that best express their style--but the next day, if it's 100 degrees outside, they can wear a sensible cotton sun dress, and nobody cares.
The thing I'm feeling my way toward is this sense of 'punk' changing. Or maybe it isn't. The cyberpunk was set in a grim future, but the stories were about escape from it. Now steampunk is set in a past that never happened, again another type of escape. But so many of the ideas in the best stuff is not 'escapist' so much as trying new social and cultural ideas out, and having the characters go on as if the changes are accepted. That was one huge appeal of the Dunnett books--that in crucial ways, the main characters spoke to modern people, yet Dunnett was skilled enough to make them seem of their time for most readers. Same with Patrick O'Brian. Maybe they were the first to do historypunk.