The Cow in the Apartment and the Ghost of Steampunk Future

[ursulav]

So in the last week or two, there were a fair number of posts ’round the blogosphere that could be pretty much boiled down to “I am bloody well sick of steampunk” and “Steampunk is awesome, don’t be a hater.” (I am not linking to these because some of the parties have since recanted, extended olive branches, etc, and while I am happy to beat a dead

Comments

[raeraesama]

Heh. I'm not sick of steampunk, although I can see how some people are. I'm actually working on a steampunk comic idea that came to me while surfing Wikipedia on Ancient Greece and saw that the Greeks had steampower back then(not especially surprising when you know how advanced their water technology was).

The past is viewed with rose-colored glasses, and adventure is always more appealing without the everyday toil and worrying about dying of hunger, I suppose. Romanticism is always heavy in fiction, perhaps especially so for steampunk.

[windbourne]

Ancient Greek steampunk is something I'd read. Far more to my interests than most of the Victorian-style stuff out there. :D

Aristotelian Steampunk

[rocketmensch]

There's a not-very-well-known novel, Celestial Matters, by Richard Garfinkle (Tor 1996) which is the only Greek steampunk novel I know of. It's set in a universe where Aristotelian physics is *real* -- there are crystal spheres and four Earthly elements; Earthly matter tends to travel in straight lines until it comes to rest, and then fall straight down (just like Coyote and Roadrunner!), and heavenly matter tends to rise and move in perfect circles. The Greek empire is pitted against the Chinese empire, which has a different (and, to the Greeks, poorly understood) science based on Xi. It's a beautifully worked-out world, and quite a good novel, but it's *hard* to wrap your mind around how the world works.

[fatkraken]

I thought that Philip reeve did a pretty good job of making a (post apocalyptic) steampunk(ish) setting where the nasty underbelly is very much an important presence in the world. the series is "the hungry city chronicles", book 1 is called "Mortal Engines" for anyone interested

The basic setting is a post blow-up world of carnivorous mobile cities which eat each other in the wonderfully ironically named practice of "municipal Darwinism". We the reader start at the top, but very quickly descend into the grim underbelly of sewage and slaves, crime and corruption that powers any apparent utopia. Later in the series there's also a rather nasty and protracted war where young lives are squandered and the parallels with WWI and other horrendous conflicts are never far from the surface.

It's a fantastic series and I can't recommend it enough, age range is probably 10+ for the first book and maybe 12+ for the tougher parts of the later ones (it really doesn't pull many punches)

[woodburner]

As Scott Westerfeld pointed out, Boneshaker was pretty Dickensian, and I found it loads of fun! It was more directly focused on battling blight and zombies than any class inequalities, but class inequality played an important part in the very premise of the book, and the main character was a poor single mother. I think you can still have a rollicking fun adventure story in a bleak setting, it just depends on how it's told - and I'm someone who has a lot of trouble reading anything that's particularly bleak and depressing. (I couldn't read Perdido Street Station, actually.) Stories don't have to be super-heavy, preachy, or really anything in particular to acknowledge the negative effects of inequality and -isms and so forth on society. I think there's plenty of sff out there that does. (I could make a short rec list, if anyone's interested

[rev_ursa]

I started ready Boneshaker the day before Ursula posted this, and am amused by the timing. So far, I'm enjoying it.

[funwithrage]

More or less. I'm...not particularly interested in historical realism in anything I read. Yes, everyone had horrible breath in the Middle Ages and pirates were nasty nasty people with syphilis and coal pollution in Victorian England and no indoor plumbing and the Black Death and YES I GET IT LIFE WAS UNPLEASANT

[awfulhorrid]

Thank you! I love my local renaissance faire and I don't particularly care about 'historical accuracy' for exactly these reasons. Actually I'd go so far as to say I relish in the historical inaccuracies! (I'm diabetic. In the renaissance era I'd be ... well, dead for about 10 years now, actually.)

I have actually heard people complain about lack of historical accuracy in Steampunk. You know, when you show me the history of people with mechanical arms and goggles carrying brass rayguns to fight off zombies ...

[funwithrage]

...lord, yeah.

It's one of the reasons I like actual fantasy: yes, yes, the actual historical world was a squalid and horrible place. This one isn't. Because...magic and stuff.

And yeah. I've had three root canals. Not something I want to deal with before...well, this decade, actually.

[rachelmanija]

The other thing is... life is extremely unpleasant right now if you're a member of the underclass, as a large percentage of the world's population is.

It's not like the issue of writing escapist fiction set in a time when many people are starving to death, homeless, are being oppressed by their bosses and beaten by their husbands, etc, is limited to steampunk, or even to historical fiction. Those times, like fiction set in them, have existed from the dawn of time, and they continue in the present day and include present-day-set fiction.

[renatus]

Man, the discussions of steampunk lately have been driving me up the wall. Lots of 'my genre is better than yours' and 'writing is SRS BZNS' and 'stop having fun guys!' and carefully ignoring anything that doesn't fit their thesis of how much steampunk sucks, like how it is indeed a young genre.

I read this argument for more squalor on the airships and went “Oh, hmm, good point, there really isn’t any Dickensian steampunk dealing with the horrors of early industrialization and squalid class warfare, somebody should write that!”

It's funny, a lot of people keep saying that and completely ignoring that someone did write that -- Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. (See also Scott Westerfeld's rant on the subject.) (There's also some interesting discussion on steampunk here and here and here and here.

All of which goes hand-in-hand with your conclusion.

[woodburner]

Precisely! And despite being bleak and full of squalor it was a very fun read.

[renatus]

Indeed. :D Cherie writes a hell of an adventure.

[irishelflinwe]

I think I'll pick that up, actually. I'm okay with a bit of bleak, as long as it's still FUN. :D