Forgive me, madam, but the strings of your gas-mask have come undone.
Steampunk is much on my mind these days, thanks to recent headlines plus an exchange with hatofhornigold . On Thursday, the Boston Globe ran an excellent article in their little local-arts mini-paper. Here it is on boston.com: "Mashing modern days with the Victorian era." There are some lovely pictures, too. I like everything about this article: the tone of genuine curiosity and pleasure, the people interviewed, and the focus on the ways steampunk's ethos can encompass multiple genres and inform real life as well as recreation. It's refreshing to read:
It’s not just the Rosenbaums cobbling together computer workstations from vintage cameras and manual typewriters. Local enthusiasts are mounting steampunk exhibits, writing books, creating objets d’art, and dressing up in steampunk garb for live-action role playing games.
To be sure, steampunk has been part of the cultural conversation for the past several years, as DIY-ers embraced the hand-wrought, Steam Age aesthetic over high-tech gloss. But recently, it seems to be gaining a wider appeal, especially here.
“Boston lends itself to steampunk,’’ said Kimberly Burk, who researched steampunk as a graduate student at Brandeis. “You have the MIT tinkerers, the co-ops in JP, the eco-minded folks.’’
That's a far cry from the usual "Pimply, Unloved Nerds Beam Down From Klingon" boilerplate lines that the press usually loves to hand the non-fannish public about any set of fans, from Worldcon-goers to Discworld enthusiasts to Anne Rice's readers. Dave Langford keeps a running tally of such depressing cinderblocks of thought in the "As Others See Us" column in his newsletter Ansible. I believe I'll start a counterpart, the (probably much tinier number of) positive press mentions for SF and genre fans. (The author here seems to be a SF fan himself, which may explain the positive tone and good nature.)
I also read a post by Scott Westerfeld, "Genre Cooties", an articulate rant in favor of steampunk. He's defending the genre against the accusation that it's a mere escapist playground where dewy-eyed idealists can rejoice in a bogus 19th century idyll. Wow. It takes a special kind of willful blindness for other genre writers to level those accusations. It's a situation where I want to shout, "Dudes! Outside the genre's city walls there are hordes of non-fans who would dismiss both you and me, and every single genre writer, as escapist nerds. And you sit in here throwing pebbles at your peers." I'm not linking to the earlier debate, but you can find it through Westerfeld's post.
Mostly, I'm happy to see steampunk's glory acknowledged. It can be both a home for lighthearted escapism and heavy-duty deconstructionism. I like steampunk because it allows you to do lots of stuff I love, which is otherwise mostly ghetto-ized in different genres. Zeppelins and zombies and mad scientists and werewolves and seances and robots and undersea exploration and imaginary foreign countries and Elder Gods and... the list goes on and on. About the only common steampunk motif that I don't like is time travel--stories about time travelers always feel bogus and wrong to me in a way I can't quite define. I read even time-travel stories when they're well-written, though, as witness Narbonic. Anyhow, steampunk felt like home to me, even years ago when I'd never heard the word, because it's pretty much made of the stuff I love already. (This is a big part of why I fell in love with The Amazing Screw-On Head.)
Some of my favorite lines of Westerfeld's:
Now, agreed, many steampunk cosplayers aren’t engaging with the greater questions inherent in the subgenre. Some even dare to dress up as aristocracy, and inherited titles are a bad thing.
But, dude, in mainline SF the single most popular costume is an imperial stormtrooper. And imperial storm trooping is RATHER MORE BAD than inheriting titles.
There's a stack of excellent discussions of the broader implications of steampunk historical revision, linked from Westerfeld's post. They're all worth reading, but this is my favorite: "Stupid Things We Say", in which Nisi Shawl lays out her reasons for using steampunk to deconstruct colonialism and the slaveholding world. Doselle Young coined the expression "cotton gin punk" in a discussion which led to the post. In Shawl's words: I love this term-it’s so evocative of one of the important differences in how people of color relate to Victorian-era technology. Many times, our ancestors were quite literally chained to it. Is the discussion of slavery and racism a task suited to steampunk? I say yes, absolutely so.
I want to become more involved in steampunk as a fandom, for both reasons: frivolous escapism, which is a legit reason all by itself, and discussion of Age of Steam-era cultural mores. Even short of the thorniest issues of being a nineteenth-century human being, there are plenty of heavy-duty topics I'd like to approach. Mill girls in the advent of large-scale female employment, for one thing, and early feminism and women's suffrage, for another. Not to go from the sublime to the fluffy, but I wonder where to start. RPG-ing? Steampunk dances? Just plain reading and con-going, definitely, but I need to do something a little different from my usual fannishness. Through steampunk, I could potentially do the things I wanted to do with historical re-enacting: storytelling and interpreting popular history. I never really got into re-enacting because most of the people I know who are into it are stuffy and set in their ways and never really do much of anything but sit around in costume.
This might be a good excuse to take that "History of Western Science" course next semester.
Unrelated news: I have a hand cream recommendation: Cetaphil moisturizing cream (the jar, not the bottled lotion, which I haven't tried yet). It's excellent. I've only been using it for two days, but I can tell already that it's going to become a standby for me. I get chapped hands easily in the winter, plus I wash my hands with soap and water a lot (cooking, doing dishes, gardening, being fastidious) so they get dried out even faster than they would ordinarily. This stuff is heavy-duty but soaks in quickly, and a small amount goes a long way. It's scent-free. Mostly when a package says "unscented", they mean "except for the sickly-sweet base fragrance", but this stuff actually has no smell that I can detect, and I have a pretty sharp nose.
It’s not just the Rosenbaums cobbling together computer workstations from vintage cameras and manual typewriters. Local enthusiasts are mounting steampunk exhibits, writing books, creating objets d’art, and dressing up in steampunk garb for live-action role playing games.
To be sure, steampunk has been part of the cultural conversation for the past several years, as DIY-ers embraced the hand-wrought, Steam Age aesthetic over high-tech gloss. But recently, it seems to be gaining a wider appeal, especially here.
“Boston lends itself to steampunk,’’ said Kimberly Burk, who researched steampunk as a graduate student at Brandeis. “You have the MIT tinkerers, the co-ops in JP, the eco-minded folks.’’
That's a far cry from the usual "Pimply, Unloved Nerds Beam Down From Klingon" boilerplate lines that the press usually loves to hand the non-fannish public about any set of fans, from Worldcon-goers to Discworld enthusiasts to Anne Rice's readers. Dave Langford keeps a running tally of such depressing cinderblocks of thought in the "As Others See Us" column in his newsletter Ansible. I believe I'll start a counterpart, the (probably much tinier number of) positive press mentions for SF and genre fans. (The author here seems to be a SF fan himself, which may explain the positive tone and good nature.)
I also read a post by Scott Westerfeld, "Genre Cooties", an articulate rant in favor of steampunk. He's defending the genre against the accusation that it's a mere escapist playground where dewy-eyed idealists can rejoice in a bogus 19th century idyll. Wow. It takes a special kind of willful blindness for other genre writers to level those accusations. It's a situation where I want to shout, "Dudes! Outside the genre's city walls there are hordes of non-fans who would dismiss both you and me, and every single genre writer, as escapist nerds. And you sit in here throwing pebbles at your peers." I'm not linking to the earlier debate, but you can find it through Westerfeld's post.
Mostly, I'm happy to see steampunk's glory acknowledged. It can be both a home for lighthearted escapism and heavy-duty deconstructionism. I like steampunk because it allows you to do lots of stuff I love, which is otherwise mostly ghetto-ized in different genres. Zeppelins and zombies and mad scientists and werewolves and seances and robots and undersea exploration and imaginary foreign countries and Elder Gods and... the list goes on and on. About the only common steampunk motif that I don't like is time travel--stories about time travelers always feel bogus and wrong to me in a way I can't quite define. I read even time-travel stories when they're well-written, though, as witness Narbonic. Anyhow, steampunk felt like home to me, even years ago when I'd never heard the word, because it's pretty much made of the stuff I love already. (This is a big part of why I fell in love with The Amazing Screw-On Head.)
Some of my favorite lines of Westerfeld's:
Now, agreed, many steampunk cosplayers aren’t engaging with the greater questions inherent in the subgenre. Some even dare to dress up as aristocracy, and inherited titles are a bad thing.
But, dude, in mainline SF the single most popular costume is an imperial stormtrooper. And imperial storm trooping is RATHER MORE BAD than inheriting titles.
There's a stack of excellent discussions of the broader implications of steampunk historical revision, linked from Westerfeld's post. They're all worth reading, but this is my favorite: "Stupid Things We Say", in which Nisi Shawl lays out her reasons for using steampunk to deconstruct colonialism and the slaveholding world. Doselle Young coined the expression "cotton gin punk" in a discussion which led to the post. In Shawl's words: I love this term-it’s so evocative of one of the important differences in how people of color relate to Victorian-era technology. Many times, our ancestors were quite literally chained to it. Is the discussion of slavery and racism a task suited to steampunk? I say yes, absolutely so.
I want to become more involved in steampunk as a fandom, for both reasons: frivolous escapism, which is a legit reason all by itself, and discussion of Age of Steam-era cultural mores. Even short of the thorniest issues of being a nineteenth-century human being, there are plenty of heavy-duty topics I'd like to approach. Mill girls in the advent of large-scale female employment, for one thing, and early feminism and women's suffrage, for another. Not to go from the sublime to the fluffy, but I wonder where to start. RPG-ing? Steampunk dances? Just plain reading and con-going, definitely, but I need to do something a little different from my usual fannishness. Through steampunk, I could potentially do the things I wanted to do with historical re-enacting: storytelling and interpreting popular history. I never really got into re-enacting because most of the people I know who are into it are stuffy and set in their ways and never really do much of anything but sit around in costume.
This might be a good excuse to take that "History of Western Science" course next semester.
Unrelated news: I have a hand cream recommendation: Cetaphil moisturizing cream (the jar, not the bottled lotion, which I haven't tried yet). It's excellent. I've only been using it for two days, but I can tell already that it's going to become a standby for me. I get chapped hands easily in the winter, plus I wash my hands with soap and water a lot (cooking, doing dishes, gardening, being fastidious) so they get dried out even faster than they would ordinarily. This stuff is heavy-duty but soaks in quickly, and a small amount goes a long way. It's scent-free. Mostly when a package says "unscented", they mean "except for the sickly-sweet base fragrance", but this stuff actually has no smell that I can detect, and I have a pretty sharp nose.