Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [116]
By Jeff VanderMeer
It's rare indeed for any writer to coin a term that results in hundreds of thousands of people over a quarter century participating in a multi-media entertainment experiment centered around outdated technology. Yet that's exactly what K. W. Jeter accomplished when he, half-jokingly, offered up the term "Steampunk" in a letter to the editor in Locus Magazine, the Variety of the genre fiction world: "Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term… Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like 'steampunks', perhaps." Jeter was attempting to identify, with no little amount of satire, the kind of alt-history, Industrial Age Victoriana being written not just by him but his fellow writers Tim Powers and James Blaylock. Powers' major contribution to the subgenre would be The Anubis Gates, while Blaylock would write a short story, "Lord Kelvin's Machine" that he later turned into a Steampunk novel. All three were to some extent influenced by Henry Mayhew's book London Labour and the London Poor.
What is Steampunk? Modern steampunk fiction derives at least in part from the influence of novels by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the 1800s and early 1900s that featured wildly imaginative steam-powered inventions, or even just inventions based on technology from the time that no one uses anymore. Even when wildly romantic, the work of Verne and Wells tended to also be somewhat cautionary in nature, with a healthy unwillingness to accept "progress" as always inevitable and good. The American Edisonades of the 1800s, meanwhile, used steam inventions as a way of visualizing Manifest Destiny through simplistic wild west adventures. These adventures, as might be expected, have not dated well and have not.
The general gist of proto-Steampunk fictions and even later full-on Steampunk like Infernal Devices or William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine (1990) can be boiled down to a general equation: Mad inventor + invention (steam x airship or metal person/robot) x [pseudo] Victorian setting) + progressive, reactionary, or neutral politics x adventure plot. (The supernatural also plays a part in many such adventures.)
Since then, Steampunk has by fits and starts entered the mainstream. Kit Stolen created the first Steampunk looks in the 1990s which led to a thriving fashion/cultural scene. In parallel, Steampunk-related pseudo-Victorian settings infiltrated movies and comics, including anime and manga, along with a parallel rise in the art and tinker/maker involvement.
The result? A slow burn leading to an explosion of interest. Since about 2008, Steampunk has been hot. Steampunk's popularity – its incredible, almost viral rate of growth – has been widely documented in, and fed by, national and international media, from newspapers like the The New York Times to such high-profile publications as Newsweek, Wired, Popular Science, and the journal Nature. Each of these media outlets has chosen to highlight different aspects of the Steampunk community, typically those that relate most closely to the publication's or journalist's specialty. The New York Times Style Section, for instance, focused primarily on the fashion aspects of Steampunk. Technology oriented publications have focused on the efforts to remake and modify technology in the Victorian mode, while the journal Nature related Steampunk to science and education.
All of this attention has sparked new energy and diversity in a sprawling community that ranges from the involvement of neo-Victorians to sites like Beyond Victoriana and a burgeoning scene in places like Brazil, from the anarchist/DIY SteamPunk Magazine to those who casually dress up and have tea parties at conventions. Many Steampunks seek to reject the conformity of the modern, soulless, featureless design of technology – and all that implies. They also seek DIY solutions to the damage caused by industrialisation. This isn't simply an impulse to whitewash the bad