Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [0]
Infernal Devices
INTRODUCTION
On Steampunk and "Steampunk"
I wish I could say that the whole steampunk thing took me by surprise. Opportunities to display a becoming modesty arrive so much less often than those calling for a well-deserved modesty, as in this case.
Of course, the creation and promotion of literary genres and subgenres, even for one the label for which has embedded itself so deeply into the hip world's current operating dictionary, is nearly always a matter of selfpromotion. Writers are essentially telling readers, "Hey, look at me; I'm doing something New & Different, not like those schlubs over there at the other end of the bookstore shelf, who are just doing the Same Old Thing." For academics, of course, it's more of a tenure pitch, a ritual dance in front of their department committee, demonstrating that they are indeed keyed in to what is being texted about by the youth of today, whose parents pay the tuition bills.
Observing these endeavours, one is inevitably reminded (if one is old and recherché enough) of Seventies comedian Flip Wilson, whose television personae included the Reverend Leroy, excitedly exhorting the congregation at the Church of What's Happening Now. That's an ecclesiastical establishment where the pews are perhaps even more tightly packed these days than they were back then, since hardly anybody now wants to be called a Luddite and risk not being invited to the better party that's always down the street somewhere. (Though of course, Luddism proper is something that neither anti-Luddites or neo-Luddites, bravely contrary in their hempen shirts, get quite right as they push their own agendaheavy carts down that same street. But that's another discussion, for another day.) If the mid-Eighties' starry-eyed, gobsmacked fascination with the siliconized future now seems more of a piece with the Kennedy-era Disneyland's Carousel of Progress exhibit than with the life we're living now, then who says mankind doesn't progress? As soon as your kids can download a smartphone app for hacking the Pentagon, we'll know the revolution is over.
So it's a tribute to tortuous human ingenuity and the blithely cheerful doublethink of pop culture (indexed under "Orwell, George; gameshow host"), that there developed a taste for brass and copper and the ticking, hissing mesh-&-grind of Victorian technology. God knows that I didn't send that particular juggernaut careening down the highway; the most I can be credited with is the vaguely modernistic nameplate under the hood ornament, as though the chrome moniker of a Chrysler Airflow had been bolted to Amédée-Ernest Bollée's 1875 L'Obeissante and sent cruising for dates at Mel's Drive-In. But as Orwell did in fact point out in his "The Principles of Newspeak" appendix to 1984, it can be pretty difficult to think about stuff for which we don't have names. My coining back in 1987 of the word steampunk originally might have been more of a humorous jab at a tendency going around those days, of labeling any two genre writers with more in common than bipedal locomotion as the "[insert word here]punk" movement, but if it assumed some sort of life after that, or at least clawed itself up from whatever grave in which old jokes are laid to rest… well, it could've been worse, lexicographically.
And as much as the nametag is the tail to the much larger shaggy dog of the various novels and stories that have since been labeled steampunk (many of which are excellent and substantial, and would be just as enjoyable with or without the category to be stuffed into), the steampunk literature is a relatively small part of a larger enthusiasm. The concept has metastasized to the point where its cultural penetration is driven less by authors than by film studio art directors, costumers and special effects departments. (In that sense, not much different from any of the shrinking number of other concepts we have nowadays.) If saying that one is into steampunk allows young women to attend science fiction conventions while laced into visibly complicated