I apologise for having upset you. From what I have seen of your posts and actions I think you are someone with whom I generally have a great deal in common. That may not include steampunk; certainly, as I see steampunk at present this does not include steampunk.
I do not necessarily think that a complete divide on the topic of steampunk (if this is what results after my explanation given below) should prevent us talking about other areas while avoiding that one. Like RPF (and I have good online friends with whom I have to agree to disagree about RPF, at least with regard to living people) I do have enormous problems with the whole steampunk project. My problems with it are as follows (please feel free to counter them from a position of knowledge of steampunk itself; I agree that my profound upset with the way steampunk gets raised from time to time may make me less than well-informed about how it works in practice);
1. Blatant classism. Raising steam depends on being at the top of a pyramid which starts with coal. If you've not read Orwell's essay Down the Mine about the physical toil taken on coal miners and the way their lives were threatened by both the coal dust on their lungs and the unrelenting physical toil of mining, please could you do so? It should be available on-line. After the coal has been mined, hauled, washed, it is then sent to the steam-boiler to be shoveled by the fireman. I do not get any sense that the "black gangs" (the stokers who worked in intolerable conditions in the bowels of ships like Titanic) are recognised as human or as even existing in steampunk.
My problem with steampunk is that the versions I've seen have had the Professor and his team say, "make it so" to get where they want ot go and no-one gives a damn for the people who are spewing up their guts to do so.
2. Colonialism. Coaling stations. If you look at the British Empire and how it retreated after WWII, you'll note the odd few little dots across the Atlantic ocean which were the last places we hung onto. Those are coaling stations. Wars were fought over little dots on that map, that would be suitable coaling stations, because steam ships have only a limited cruising range. Indigenous peoples were exterminated to place coaling stations. If you subscribe to a steam-punk, air-ship aesthetic, where are the coaling stations and how do you handle that in your new myhtology.
3. Ecology. Steam creates acid rain and particulate emissions. The glorious buildings of Europe only became glorious after the imposition of smoke-free zones and scrubbing (at great expense). The return of steam signals the destruction of both forests and the Parthenon. Again, fine if the genre handles it, but does it.
4. Wilful anachronism, erasing the true nature of the struggle for women's rights. This is a specific and narrow-based annoyance, rather than the large scope of the comments above, but in the same series of tor.com posts which produced the one I quoted, someone talked about a strip called "the adventures of Babbage and Lovelace" in which they put Ada, Countess of Lovelace into jodhpurs because they didn't like the idea of someone like her being constrained by the dress conventions of the day. That idea made me want to vomit. The whole point, to anyone who has studied the life of Ada, Countess of Lovelace was that she went mad (for some definitions of the word mad) and was rendered incredibly unhappy because of the constraints placed on her by precisely the societal standards (symbolised by her dress) which little miss sparklypants decided to remove for the cartoon.
To sum up, I don't despise or wish to insult anyone for taking a different view of steampunk to mine, and I am open to attempts to convince me I am wrong about the genre, or (more probably) that there are examples of the genre which redeem it. But from what I have seen of it, I really, really have problems with it. Sorry.
no subject
I do not necessarily think that a complete divide on the topic of steampunk (if this is what results after my explanation given below) should prevent us talking about other areas while avoiding that one. Like RPF (and I have good online friends with whom I have to agree to disagree about RPF, at least with regard to living people) I do have enormous problems with the whole steampunk project. My problems with it are as follows (please feel free to counter them from a position of knowledge of steampunk itself; I agree that my profound upset with the way steampunk gets raised from time to time may make me less than well-informed about how it works in practice);
1. Blatant classism. Raising steam depends on being at the top of a pyramid which starts with coal. If you've not read Orwell's essay Down the Mine about the physical toil taken on coal miners and the way their lives were threatened by both the coal dust on their lungs and the unrelenting physical toil of mining, please could you do so? It should be available on-line. After the coal has been mined, hauled, washed, it is then sent to the steam-boiler to be shoveled by the fireman. I do not get any sense that the "black gangs" (the stokers who worked in intolerable conditions in the bowels of ships like Titanic) are recognised as human or as even existing in steampunk.
My problem with steampunk is that the versions I've seen have had the Professor and his team say, "make it so" to get where they want ot go and no-one gives a damn for the people who are spewing up their guts to do so.
2. Colonialism. Coaling stations. If you look at the British Empire and how it retreated after WWII, you'll note the odd few little dots across the Atlantic ocean which were the last places we hung onto. Those are coaling stations. Wars were fought over little dots on that map, that would be suitable coaling stations, because steam ships have only a limited cruising range. Indigenous peoples were exterminated to place coaling stations. If you subscribe to a steam-punk, air-ship aesthetic, where are the coaling stations and how do you handle that in your new myhtology.
3. Ecology. Steam creates acid rain and particulate emissions. The glorious buildings of Europe only became glorious after the imposition of smoke-free zones and scrubbing (at great expense). The return of steam signals the destruction of both forests and the Parthenon. Again, fine if the genre handles it, but does it.
4. Wilful anachronism, erasing the true nature of the struggle for women's rights. This is a specific and narrow-based annoyance, rather than the large scope of the comments above, but in the same series of tor.com posts which produced the one I quoted, someone talked about a strip called "the adventures of Babbage and Lovelace" in which they put Ada, Countess of Lovelace into jodhpurs because they didn't like the idea of someone like her being constrained by the dress conventions of the day. That idea made me want to vomit. The whole point, to anyone who has studied the life of Ada, Countess of Lovelace was that she went mad (for some definitions of the word mad) and was rendered incredibly unhappy because of the constraints placed on her by precisely the societal standards (symbolised by her dress) which little miss sparklypants decided to remove for the cartoon.
To sum up, I don't despise or wish to insult anyone for taking a different view of steampunk to mine, and I am open to attempts to convince me I am wrong about the genre, or (more probably) that there are examples of the genre which redeem it. But from what I have seen of it, I really, really have problems with it. Sorry.