Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [117]
Gradually, too, Steampunk has circled back to the literature, even though many of those who participate in the subculture may not know the original fiction, beyond those pre-Steampunk influences of Verne and Wells. But even when Jake von Slatt of the Steampunk Workshop creates some elegant machine with cogs and wheels and tubes, he is in a sense not just emulating the craftspeople of the Victorian era – he's also pulling from the zeitgeist of images and approaches found in the fiction. Mike Libby's clockwork beetles have at least as much in common with the automata in Infernal Devices as with anything actually produced during the Victorian era. Reality and fiction, imagination and making feed off of each other.
Within that context, it's not surprising that Jeter says that a good deal of his initial inspiration for Infernal Devices "came from a visit to London and discovering a shop [near Covent Garden] that specialised in old scientific gear…. You knew that real people living in a real time had created them, and that they weren't just stamped out of plastic in some hellhole factory in China."
Inspiration also came from closer to home: "The advantage of growing up in Southern California in the fifties and early sixties was that there was still some evidence of that sort of machine-age handcraftsmanship, such as the now-vanished Angels Flight tram in Los Angeles, the old steamship modern Pan Pacific Auditorium (now gone as well), the Craftsman bungalows in the old neighborhoods of Pasadena and Glendale, etc. So to some degree the whole Victorian craftsperson period seemed like a glorious tide that had once washed over the world, and left a few shining bits behind in odd places."
However, Infernal Devices is not so much a love song to London by an American as it is an ironical tribute, permeated by elements of dark humor and social critique. A Ladies Union for Suppression of Carnal Vice is both hilarious and all too true to the spirit of the age. A Royal Anti-Society almost enters Monty Python territory. From the first pages, too, Jeter deploys the drunkard Creff not just for comedy but to pointed effect, juxtaposing him with the "Ethiope" who comes to George Dower's shop. While Creff claims the Ethiope is "maddened with some heathen liquor, and prepared for murder," Dower knows that "Intoxication was indeed a possibility" – on Creff's part.
The Victorian era overlapped the rise and fall of the Decadents, who had a fascination with pushing limits, including views on drugs, sex, and disease. So it's perhaps no surprise that the humor and absurdity veer into the, well, decadent, with much verbiage devoted to depraved habits and even more depraved acts. Readers easily turned off by such things may find solace in placing certain passages in the context of the stylised outrages of Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud, and the like.
But wherever it originates, this healthy sense of humor – Scape: "You turkey!" – is perhaps best exemplified by the absurdism of a "Saint Monkfish" and the seamless way in which Jeter combines fish-men and brilliant descriptions of clockwork devices. Indeed, there's an entire subset of Steampunk fictions that indulge in a mecha-organic aesthetic, presaged by the gooey/clockwork back-and-forth of Infernal Devices. (The most notable example may be Paul Di Filippo in his 1990s Steampunk Trilogy.) Jeter seems as invested in weird biology as in clockwork contraptions, and this tends to humanise and soften what might otherwise be simply a gleaming recitation of the contents of the chest cavities of various automata.
In terms of authenticity, the clever insertion of what appears to be contemporary American vernacular through the speech of Scape and his assistant contributes, by way of contrast, to the believability of the English settings and characters, and helps to make the narrative more fluid, with very little period piece stiffness. Scape as rogue has both those elements of likeability