Steam, electricity, magic, and complexity

[branchandroot]

A comment in the recent batch of Tor blog posts on steampunk made me reflect on the insistence of one significant faction that steampunk must focus on the mechanical, not the electrical.

As though they were separate. As though the 19th C European technological types weren't all over electricity, and, in fact, magic.

The rallying point of this faction seems to be "macro-mechanical processes", with a hefty dose of "a simpler time" underlying it. Even if you just stick to Britain, that's absurd. The Victorian era was over-complicated, over-mannered, over-wound, and eager to experience the "unseen" while the consumers insisted that the guts of any mechanical process be hidden. Especially the human guts. It was the home and font of Spiritualism, and of truly astonishing credulity. The eagle-eyed scientist and inquiring-minded tinkerer were in the mix, too, but they left steam-power in the dust early on and started looking at (you guessed it) electricity. Well, them and the Spiritualists, and half the time that was the same person. And there we have what I think is the core of the matter.

If I were to point to a hallmark concept out of this, I would not say "mechanical", I would say "juxtaposition". Thomas Edison and Madame Blavatsky, biologists attending seances, the pretty brass and wood first class compartment and the black gang, the flaming suffragette who's a howling racist.

Those examples are all from Europe, but the pattern seems to apply to any major period of discovery anywhere, so I'm inclined to say it holds true for world-wide steampunk also. Concentrated discovery or change happens because some people are tossing over rules that someone else is clinging to with a death grip, and no one knows what will be true in the morning, and everyone is terrified of what it might be, and everyone is dead wrong half the time but right often enough that no one is sure of who's right this time and is desperately trying to make sure it's them, and the whole thing rolls on in a welter of mistakes and newness and brilliance and cruelty. And there's your renaissance for you, or your revolution. That's what makes this period an interesting place to write or tinker or cosplay or whathaveyou.

The reason I think the "dress up for high tea" crowd is so flat and uninteresting is that they're imitating one tiny fraction of that ferment without, usually, acknowledging the vast web of tensions and contradictions that fashion and manner were born out of. Similarly the "visible mechanical processes" crowd seems willfully ignorant of the Victorian passion for the hidden.

How boring. And how very un-steampunk.

Comments

[opusculus]

Seriously. I mean, I adore stuff that you can see how it works because it's awesome, but trying to limit steampunk to just that and giant machines pumping steam is, well, boring. The whole fun of steampunk is the complexity and the contradictions and the deliberate anachronisms! Requiring that all machinery be of a certain type is just boring.

Also for some reason your post made me want a steampunk ghost story.

[branchandroot]

There should totally be steampunk ghost stories!

[legionseagle]

Er, sort of along these lines, perhaps? (Which is another of my annoyancies; the Victorians were actually writing much more complicated and nuanced things than they are given credit for.

[branchandroot]

*patiently* Victorian ghost stories are plentiful, to be sure, and some of them fascinating, but that won't be the same thing as a story written today by someone who grew up in a different culture reflecting back on that period through the lens of reified anachronisms. Just because good stuff is already available doesn't mean there shouldn't be more and different good stuff.

[legionseagle]

The Victorian era was over-complicated, over-mannered, over-wound, and eager to experience the "unseen" while the consumers insisted that the guts of any mechanical process be hidden.

To say nothing of "over-engineered" (simpler age MY BOTTOM: we had a very large bomb go off in my city and it moved the entire Victorian Royal Exchange sideways two inches. Without other visible damage to the structure. And by that time it had already come through the Blitz.).

And I wonder if they've ever read Kipling's story Wireless

[branchandroot]

I have to wonder, too! I think a lot of people aren't actually reading their own roots, here.

*grins* The Age of Redundancy, seriously. I do think the poster linked here had a good point about people now projecting exactly the same nostalgia and romanticism onto the 19th C that the 19th C did onto the middle ages. It's not a reflection of the older time in either case, it's totally a reflection of the age doing the romanticizing and what we fondly imagine is our reverse, simpler image.

[legionseagle]

One of my great Victorian heroes is Balzagette (someone create a genre called "sewerpunk" and I'll be first in line) and he made the sewers with double the maximum projected capacity needed. And fifty or so years later, along came mansion-blocks and later tower blocks and they are only just reaching capacity.

[7veils]

It isn't that different, really, than the Merlin crowd who romanticize the living conditions and superstitious batshittery of the Dark Ages. Or the strange Teuto-Germanic romanticization that sprang up around Nietzsche and Rudolph Steiner, and was twisted up into something truly perverse by Wagner and the Nazis. Or the representation of Samurai-era Japan as being some sort of wonderful illustrious period of enlightenment. It is interesting how people are drawn to places and times out of a sense of nostalgia for what never existed, conveniently overlooking the 'nasty, brutish and short' business.

(Besides which, any form of movement, even mechanical movement, must factor electricity since friction begets it.)

Even so, I see this fantasy as a representation of people's inner 'heaven world', something which is intrinsic and nonphysical, except in the sense of play. As with any romanticization, there's always the possibility that you get that Nazi effect of pure delusion and mass psychosis, but for most people, it's just a way of experiencing adventure and derring-do in the safe and harmless fashion of fantasy.

[7veils]

(Also, I wrote a steampunk Blavatsky/Saiyuki mashup as part of a giftfic exchange.)

[branchandroot]

*grins* Indeed, that's something the post pointed out.

Well, safe and harmless for /them/ anyway. Hence the arguments over re-inscription of privilege, and all the more so when the suffering and protest that went on in the actual time period are either magically absent or else replaced with that bizarrely cheerful complicity you see in Disney's Pocahontas.

[7veils]

Re-inscription of privilege would come hand-in-hand with the person that intends to re-inscribe it anyway, no matter what the context. A person who works to expand their consciousness will find a gateway through steampunk or whatever period-fetish they might have to recognize the constriction of that society's mores and beliefs. Yeah, you will get weird stuff like Pocahontas, or you might get The Glass Books of the Dreameaters instead.

[7veils]

I should mention that some of my thinking around this is informed by Monbiot's article on how the nature of how desire trumps reason in discourse so that people are persuaded to act (in his example, vote) against their own interests.

[branchandroot]

*goes to read* Rationalizing, not rational; indeed. Interesting argument, and it's certainly a pattern I recognize. So do you feel that the nostalgic romanticism trend has no valence of its own, but is inflected either emphathetically or hierarchically by the value-system of the person nostalg-ing?

[7veils]

Yeah, that's what I think. (You've put it across much more succinctly though.)

It is an extension of Theodor Adorno's philosophical stance that the purest, most ideal beliefs will be twisted to suit the agenda of a selfish person, so beliefs aren't really core. Orwell's Animal Farm satire probably fits in the same modality.

Conversely, the person who is enlightened and self-sacrificing will continue to express that dynamic no matter what media they use — to the extent of their enlightenment and selflessness. There may be an evolutionary aspect to that.

[branchandroot]

*nods* I could agree with that. At the same time, I think that makes it all the more important to speak in favor of the empathetic enactment; these aren't static inclinations, after all, and the people just being introduced to a particular expression, steampunk or whatever, are surely at their most open to influence, as they try something new.

[7veils]

*nods* The worry about whether a story I write shoehorns properly into a specific genre is more likely to shut down the inspiration for writing it than anything else, so I would go for empathetic enactments. But the only readers I would persuade are those who also favour that sort of connection.

Ultimately, a good yarn is a good yarn is a good yarn. The rest can lace up their boots and corsets as tightly as they like and still fall flat.