003 Steampunk
It’s the early 1800s and before Rudolf Diesel and Henry Ford. Electricity is still a lab experiment. But it doesn’t matter. We don’t need any of what those guys were selling. The true motors of Innovation are started with firing up a boiler, copper or brass tubing, and driving pistons of power.
Your clockwork butler is powered with a small coal boiler. Your self driving carriage is steam powered. You need to leave London and go visit the colonies? The first class traveler travels on airship powered with steam generators and handled with pneumatic control systems.
Steampunk– It’s a big and visual movement at the conventions: ladies in corsets trimmed with copper tubing, men in shin high-boots and victorian jackets but a steam powered blunderbuss at his side. Steampunk is about fashion, high adventure, and genteel conduct.
(Tone change)
It probably shouldn’t contain the term punk. Unlike it’s cousin, Cyberpunk, steampunk isn’t focused on high-tech lowlifes but instead the characters are well educated and savvy inventors, scientist, and explorers who employ thoughtful problem solving skills using steam craft tools.
(Harpsichord)
This is due to it’s Victorian ladies and gentleman styling and stories about expanding the frontiers through the unknown. Jules Verne was a early forerunner, a steampunk author before there was steampunk with his (sub ping) “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” published in 1872. During this period of time, Jules was simply doing what any contemporary science fiction author would do, take the technology of his time and apply it to solving the engineering problems that got in the way of touring the seas of Earth in a submersible ship.
Unlike Jules, contemporary authors make effort to use pneumatic call tubes instead of intercoms and frequently create alternate histories with Victorian period characters sporting bitching steam driven gear platted in copper or brass and Victorian gentle-persons faced with high adventure.
Other than Jules Vern, seminal work was published in 1958 by Mervyn Peak called Titus Alone.
The most famous steampunk work that broke outside the scifi genre readership would be Wild Wild West (cue electric cowboy). A tv series that ran from 1965 to 1969 and again, a 1999 movie
starring Will Smith and Kevin Kline, who are American West secret agents set in the victorian era, outfitted with a number of clockwork gizmos and battling steam driven monstrosities. Not into movies or books? How about playing a handsome hero in BioShock Infinity, featuring airship technology, floating cities, and skyhook battles. To this date, it’s been the rare movie like Wild Wild West or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that has gone beyond the orbit of their genre. I have yet to discover a Steampunk book that has hit the New York Times best seller list. Only Jules Vern is widely read outside of science fiction reading circles. Despite this, the fan base is well organized in creative vintage clothing with pseudo-boilers and other Victorian era high tech.
And who could blame them?
(cue) Imagine reading or interacting in a world where a gent is wearing a velour long coat with brass buttons, a heroine in a corset with a blunderbuss in her lap, having a clandestine meeting with a balding scientist. All three hunkered over a table to study an analogue computer of cogs while a Swiss precision automotive tray sidles up to their table with their drinks. Who wouldn’t want to dip into this world of romance, adventure, and technology?
There are several steampunk themed conventions in the US and around the world. Subscribe to the mailing list at LancerKind.com and I’ll send you a list so you can plan your steampunk world tour.
Next episode we’ll look at the timeline of science fiction as a literary genre and figure out who to blame for starting it.
Attributions:
This podcast contains sound effects from FreeSound.org and specifically used samples available via the Creative Commons license from the following members:
jay_rope.
