Steampunk and the New Weird.
Several years ago, Steampunk made it's first appearance. For those unfamiliar with it, it takes several different forms. In it's literary form, it closely emulates Jules Verne, and the Tom Swift novels about science and technology from near 1900. In order to get the full impact of Steampunk, it pays to be at least aware of that genre of literature. Frequently, the heroes of those novels were in some sort of predicament, often set up as Man vs. Nature. For example, Verne's novel The Mysterious Island the heroes are castaway on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. The main character, an engineer, essentially rebuilds a mini version of their society, building smelting furnaces, manufacturing gunpowder, and other feats of science and technology. In this way, they are able to overcome a variety of natural catastrophes. In this view of science and technology, there is no pollution, no maimings from hot steel or mishandled gunpowder, no toxins leaching in through skin or food.
Steampunk is a complex response, both to that genre, and to our own current state of technology. To Verne and his compatriots, it says that they are aware that nature and technology need to co-exist. Steampunk frequently objects to the stereotypical portrayals of native populations shown in the Tom Swift novels, deliberately humanizing the opponent wheneve possible. Additionally, in many Verne novels, electricity is the new wonder technology that will be the salvation of mankind. Steampunk makes a supposition that is nearly opposite: how would technology have evolved without electricity, where all of your contraptions where coal or wood fired, steam-powered behemoths. Huge mechanical computers instead of our miniturized transistors, hand crafted consumer goods instead of mass produced plastic, craftsmanship, flourishes and details on even the largest and most utilitarian of machines. Usually associated with these wonders is the low-lying smog, the smoke and pollution that would come from wood or coal burning on such a scale.
Steampunk is expressing dissatisfaction with our own current technology, and that aspect is shown by the wild popularity it saw, at least initially, on the internet. People all over the world began remaking their mundane technological gizmos into steampunked artefacts, re-introducing their own touch of decoration and craftsmanship, and in the better cases, trying to imagine and demonstrate how such a steam-powered device would actually work. The choice to return to the Victorian aesthetics wasn't just a matter of what looked pretty. The return to the Verne formulas is telling in today's world. Steampunk originated largely in the Western world, a world that has been focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 7, nearly 8 years. This conflict, in some ways, may have helped catalyze the steampunk movement. In these conflicts, a technologically superior power has been severely stymied by technologically inferior but determined resistance. The ever-growing problems of clean water, cancer, and AIDS have rolled over, virtually unchecked by even our most recent technological advances, and there doesn't appear to be any sort of golden bullet on the horizon. The effects of our own technological growth spurts have even come back to haunt us, in the form of lingering pollutants and global warming. Toss in spam, DRM, NSA wiretapping and the growth of Big Brother states (like Britain) and technology doesn't seem nearly as appealing as it did a century ago. Steampunk returns to that era when anything seemed possible to mourn for, and attempt to recapture, that hope. However, the writers can't just accept the world as Verne wrote it. If they could, there would be a resurgence in reading Verne, not neccessarily in writing Steampunk. The elements of pollution, and the turning of man's machines against man make an appearance in Steampunk, and with good reason. As a society, we feel that we are no longer nearly so naive as to believe that we won't have any impact on the world around us. The portrayal of native populations and nature is generally much more positive; they are not always foes to be mercilessly vanquished.
Steampunk is also about visualization. Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In our society, we're approaching that level of technology. You can routinely interact with people thousands of miles away, send messages instantly from one side of the globe to the other, and so on. One of the features of Steampunk is that all the technology is mechanical, assembled out of clockwork. There's the feeling that not only is it fascinating to watch, any person with a sufficient attention span and magnifying glass could trace the motion of all the cogs. Yes, it's still mysterious, but the barriers to entry are apparently much lower than our current technology. How many people these days could sit down and figure out how their cell phone worked, identify all the components, what they do, and how they do it? The visualization metaphore extends further, of course. As I mentioned before, pollution plays an important part in many steampunk stories. The pollution also factors into this visualisation. The metaphor is simple: if creating all this mechanically creates this much pollution, this much smoke and oil, what is our current technology doing? How is it doing it? Are there ramifications to the widespread use of electronic devices and electromagnetic communication that we haven't identified, or that we can't see yet? It's hard to say of course, but it a question to keep in mind.
Unfortunately for the genre, Steampunk says all of this simply by existing. After the initial wave, not a lot has been added to the Steampunk scene. Individual stories and novels continue to have real merit, of course, but there's the sense that it has been co-opted by the public at large, and the ramifications identified are being ignored in favor of the aesthetics. This shows up in the so-called "Gaslight Fiction" which is often set in the Victorian era, with some Steampunk elements, but which leaves out large chunks of what Steampunk has to say. It's also evident in the reactions that Steampunk computer/gadget mods are garnering on the internet. There appear to be two camps of nay-sayers there. The first regard Steampunk with the same disdain normally reserved by the public for Live Action Role Players (ie, it's extremely nerdy, and a bit antisocial), and the reaction stems from the same sense that the creators/participants are trying to bring an alternate reality into being, and that they're refusing to live in the "real" reality. The second group of nay-sayers are more localized, harping on individual examples because the particular pieces in question break the illusion of their particular steampunk reality. There isn't really a whole lot more that Steampunk can directly and coherently address that can't be addressed equally well in other forms. Individual authors can use it to examine whatever catches their fancy, much as the authors of realist and modern authors continue to do with their forms.
So, if Steampunk said what it had to say simply by exisiting at a particular moment in time, then what's next? Many of the authors who wrote Steampunk have moved on to something that has been termed the New Weird. The focus of the New Weird is a little harder to pin down. Some Steampunk elements remain, but the overall focus seems to be on breaking down the current divisions in Science Fiction literature. For a long time, SciFi could be broken down into Fantasy, Robots (Asimov, for example), Victorian (with our friend Verne), Cyberpunk (William Gibson is a primary author, and often deals with the Singularity), Space Opera (a follow-on to cyberpunk, with elements of Opera set in high-technology space), and the Near Future (Charles Stross is a primary writer, and his focus varies from 20 years out to a hundred or more, depending). Each of these genres gradually reached the point that a number of follow-on writers were able to create universes with broad strokes; they didn't need details to get a universe fixed in the reader's mind. A dwarf was a dwarf, a wizard a wizard, an android an android, and the Singularity is the Singularity. The New Weird authors are understandably bored by this. They create new, bizarre universes that don't follow any of the rules and templates set out by the other genres. That is, for the most part, the only unifying characteristic among the stories. Some particular subset may share features, such as a resurgence of magic after a technological society, or interdimensional beings and travel, but beyond that only the fact that they're novel and bizarre tie them together (hence the name). Some of the authors are turning out entertaining stories with little second or third level meaning, others are turning out stories that are constructed specifically to heighten those levels of meaning. In either case, this level of freedom is relatively new in the literary world (at least in the published literary world), and they're still stretching their wings or getting their footing.
Again, I don't think the New Weird will exist very long on it's own, but I think the authors that are participating are on their way to something very new, and very interesting in literature in the next 15-20 years. Steampunk shows an awareness of society and our own literary history. The New Weird shows that they are willing to test boundaries, and ignore the old tropes when they need to. I think that once the authors have experimented for some time in the New Weird, we will begin to see some more sure-footed, unusual pieces of literature, and once that in turn matures, we will see some truly fantastic, ground-breaking writing.
Steampunk is a complex response, both to that genre, and to our own current state of technology. To Verne and his compatriots, it says that they are aware that nature and technology need to co-exist. Steampunk frequently objects to the stereotypical portrayals of native populations shown in the Tom Swift novels, deliberately humanizing the opponent wheneve possible. Additionally, in many Verne novels, electricity is the new wonder technology that will be the salvation of mankind. Steampunk makes a supposition that is nearly opposite: how would technology have evolved without electricity, where all of your contraptions where coal or wood fired, steam-powered behemoths. Huge mechanical computers instead of our miniturized transistors, hand crafted consumer goods instead of mass produced plastic, craftsmanship, flourishes and details on even the largest and most utilitarian of machines. Usually associated with these wonders is the low-lying smog, the smoke and pollution that would come from wood or coal burning on such a scale.
Steampunk is expressing dissatisfaction with our own current technology, and that aspect is shown by the wild popularity it saw, at least initially, on the internet. People all over the world began remaking their mundane technological gizmos into steampunked artefacts, re-introducing their own touch of decoration and craftsmanship, and in the better cases, trying to imagine and demonstrate how such a steam-powered device would actually work. The choice to return to the Victorian aesthetics wasn't just a matter of what looked pretty. The return to the Verne formulas is telling in today's world. Steampunk originated largely in the Western world, a world that has been focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 7, nearly 8 years. This conflict, in some ways, may have helped catalyze the steampunk movement. In these conflicts, a technologically superior power has been severely stymied by technologically inferior but determined resistance. The ever-growing problems of clean water, cancer, and AIDS have rolled over, virtually unchecked by even our most recent technological advances, and there doesn't appear to be any sort of golden bullet on the horizon. The effects of our own technological growth spurts have even come back to haunt us, in the form of lingering pollutants and global warming. Toss in spam, DRM, NSA wiretapping and the growth of Big Brother states (like Britain) and technology doesn't seem nearly as appealing as it did a century ago. Steampunk returns to that era when anything seemed possible to mourn for, and attempt to recapture, that hope. However, the writers can't just accept the world as Verne wrote it. If they could, there would be a resurgence in reading Verne, not neccessarily in writing Steampunk. The elements of pollution, and the turning of man's machines against man make an appearance in Steampunk, and with good reason. As a society, we feel that we are no longer nearly so naive as to believe that we won't have any impact on the world around us. The portrayal of native populations and nature is generally much more positive; they are not always foes to be mercilessly vanquished.
Steampunk is also about visualization. Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In our society, we're approaching that level of technology. You can routinely interact with people thousands of miles away, send messages instantly from one side of the globe to the other, and so on. One of the features of Steampunk is that all the technology is mechanical, assembled out of clockwork. There's the feeling that not only is it fascinating to watch, any person with a sufficient attention span and magnifying glass could trace the motion of all the cogs. Yes, it's still mysterious, but the barriers to entry are apparently much lower than our current technology. How many people these days could sit down and figure out how their cell phone worked, identify all the components, what they do, and how they do it? The visualization metaphore extends further, of course. As I mentioned before, pollution plays an important part in many steampunk stories. The pollution also factors into this visualisation. The metaphor is simple: if creating all this mechanically creates this much pollution, this much smoke and oil, what is our current technology doing? How is it doing it? Are there ramifications to the widespread use of electronic devices and electromagnetic communication that we haven't identified, or that we can't see yet? It's hard to say of course, but it a question to keep in mind.
Unfortunately for the genre, Steampunk says all of this simply by existing. After the initial wave, not a lot has been added to the Steampunk scene. Individual stories and novels continue to have real merit, of course, but there's the sense that it has been co-opted by the public at large, and the ramifications identified are being ignored in favor of the aesthetics. This shows up in the so-called "Gaslight Fiction" which is often set in the Victorian era, with some Steampunk elements, but which leaves out large chunks of what Steampunk has to say. It's also evident in the reactions that Steampunk computer/gadget mods are garnering on the internet. There appear to be two camps of nay-sayers there. The first regard Steampunk with the same disdain normally reserved by the public for Live Action Role Players (ie, it's extremely nerdy, and a bit antisocial), and the reaction stems from the same sense that the creators/participants are trying to bring an alternate reality into being, and that they're refusing to live in the "real" reality. The second group of nay-sayers are more localized, harping on individual examples because the particular pieces in question break the illusion of their particular steampunk reality. There isn't really a whole lot more that Steampunk can directly and coherently address that can't be addressed equally well in other forms. Individual authors can use it to examine whatever catches their fancy, much as the authors of realist and modern authors continue to do with their forms.
So, if Steampunk said what it had to say simply by exisiting at a particular moment in time, then what's next? Many of the authors who wrote Steampunk have moved on to something that has been termed the New Weird. The focus of the New Weird is a little harder to pin down. Some Steampunk elements remain, but the overall focus seems to be on breaking down the current divisions in Science Fiction literature. For a long time, SciFi could be broken down into Fantasy, Robots (Asimov, for example), Victorian (with our friend Verne), Cyberpunk (William Gibson is a primary author, and often deals with the Singularity), Space Opera (a follow-on to cyberpunk, with elements of Opera set in high-technology space), and the Near Future (Charles Stross is a primary writer, and his focus varies from 20 years out to a hundred or more, depending). Each of these genres gradually reached the point that a number of follow-on writers were able to create universes with broad strokes; they didn't need details to get a universe fixed in the reader's mind. A dwarf was a dwarf, a wizard a wizard, an android an android, and the Singularity is the Singularity. The New Weird authors are understandably bored by this. They create new, bizarre universes that don't follow any of the rules and templates set out by the other genres. That is, for the most part, the only unifying characteristic among the stories. Some particular subset may share features, such as a resurgence of magic after a technological society, or interdimensional beings and travel, but beyond that only the fact that they're novel and bizarre tie them together (hence the name). Some of the authors are turning out entertaining stories with little second or third level meaning, others are turning out stories that are constructed specifically to heighten those levels of meaning. In either case, this level of freedom is relatively new in the literary world (at least in the published literary world), and they're still stretching their wings or getting their footing.
Again, I don't think the New Weird will exist very long on it's own, but I think the authors that are participating are on their way to something very new, and very interesting in literature in the next 15-20 years. Steampunk shows an awareness of society and our own literary history. The New Weird shows that they are willing to test boundaries, and ignore the old tropes when they need to. I think that once the authors have experimented for some time in the New Weird, we will begin to see some more sure-footed, unusual pieces of literature, and once that in turn matures, we will see some truly fantastic, ground-breaking writing.