This post was originally just going to be about this beautiful book cover, which appears to be a nautical chart overlaid with hinged brass doodads, posted by its maker, special effects and model maker Tim Baker on LiveJournal’s handmadebooks community. I never knew they had one of those, and since I am partial to That Sort of Thing, I considered joining it, for a moment or two. Then I remembered that I can’t stay on top of what’s already on my plate [glances nervously at the overflowing in-tray, and that's just the paper].

Anyway, it spread, and now it’s a bunch of observations about the emerging subculture known to its friends as Steampunk.

The most elegant of the many provisional definitions I’ve read is probably the first paragraph to the first editorial in the first issue of Steampunk magazine:

Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.
Even if we had to make it all up.

This is what is happening now; they’re making it all up: a curious and highly performative version of a past that never was, with contemporary technology wrapped in some approximation of hypothetical Victoriana.

The antecedents and references for steampunk are mostly literary and cinematic. It was the scifi novelist K.W. Jeter who actually coined the term, adapted from ‘cyberpunk’, to provide a term for the kind of work he, Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing from the end of the 1970s through to the early 1990s. Of the original self-styled steampunk authors’ works — Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates (1983), James Blaylock’s Homunculus, (1986) and Jeter’s own Morlock Night, 1979 and Infernal Devices (1987), I must confess I have read nothing (I suspect I should put that right soon) but I golloped down Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s collaboration The Difference Engine (1990) when that came out, and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995), which doesn’t strictly count as steampunk, because it isn’t set in the C19th, but in a nanotech-rich, post-scarcity future which happens to resemble the mature, Victorian phase of the British Empire. In parts. Nevertheless, there are many steampunk tropes at work in there, and most highly recommended it is, too.

The primary cinematic reference is the Walt Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954). Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) is less often cited, but provides an important and original interpretation of what some people understand by the term, ‘retro-futurism‘ (for which see also William Gibson’s short story The Gernsback Continuum (1981), in the collection Burning Chrome (1985)).

The steampunk project extends these tendencies into fashion, music, and most unusually, the creation of artefacts. Long-time readers may recall Andrew Leman’s Electriclerk, blogged here, nearly five years ago, probably the first fully realised steampunk artefact that came to my attention. Presently, Jake Von Slatt is responsible for the most widely exposed steampunk mods and fabrications (ranging from the undoubtedly attractive but superficially modified Fender Stratocaster to the more thorough and IMO satisfying monitor and keyboard). He is Technical Consultant to Steampunk magazine and he is “Mr Steampunk” to his admirers at Wired News, who report that Von Slatt believes:

both the do-it-yourself and steampunk movements are driven by the same obsession: the idea that a single mad engineer working in his lab can help change the world by having mastery over his machines.

Now here’s where I come over all Marxist for a minute: the isolated mad scientist creator — a creature of myth from the days before universal education, it is probably worth remembering — was never really isolated, except by the removal from visibility of the infrastructure which allows the Romantic “solitary genius” to do, well, whatever it is they do. Victor Frankenstein had his Igor (at least in the movies he did, I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember whether any assistant is even mentioned in the book. It’s been a very, very long time since I read it) — and he was an impoverished and marginalised mad genius. Something for the contemporary steampunks to remember: the figures they strive to honour and emulate had a supporting staff of henchpersons, who don’t get a speaking part and if they did, wouldn’t be using the flowery words like “prestidigitation”. We’ll return to this later. My point is just to offer an explanation of why living this particular dream is likely to fall way short of expectations.

Von Slatt makes an telling observation, in the course of acknowledging his influences:

“Disney is a big influence,” von Slatt admits. “I loved Tomorrowland back when it was accidentally retro-futuristic. Now they’ve renovated it to be purposely retro-futuristic. It just doesn’t have the same charm.”

I have only the very vaguest idea what Tomorrowland is, but this remark touches on something I get from many of these new Steampunk creations, mods, and so forth: the purposeful retro-futurism doesn’t always work.

Three Rings office, by Because We Can LLC

Take for example the office makeover for Three Rings Design in San Francisco, photo-essayed recently in Wired. It looks kind of okay at a quick glance, in a long shot, as in the first picture, but really none of the detail stands up to closer examination: metallic-painted MDF flats just don’t convince, and the colours are all wrong; the colours are Scooby Doo. Mind you, this ‘steampunk-lite’ probably fits Three Rings’ corporate identity better than a full-blown, visually persuasive Jules Verne submarine rig out would have done, but that’s a little off the point…

The Edison Club, by Andrew Meieran

Consider, on the other hand, The Edison Club in LA, as photographed by Dave Bullock (eecue). Granted, it looks as though the Edison started out with a fabulous space with a suitable history (apparently it was the first building in Los Angeles with electricity, produced on the premises by hulking great oil furnaces and machinery that would give forth a most satisfying clang, no doubt, when struck — and spent more (I suspect by orders of magnitude) on the fixtures and fittings than the Three Rings project. The result is incomparably classier, at least visually. There are a few notes of caution to be raised, though, where the Edison is concerned; one being the distinctly caucasian dress code, and another being the name. I’ve been reading comments here and there, so I know I’m not the first to ask: why name the place after one of the most wretched, parasitic scumbags ever to be mistaken for an inventor? Is the Tesla Club spoken for already? (I had to go and look that up. 201 results just now, including:

The Tesla Club, otherwise known as the Friends of Tesla is a fraternal order of scientists, chartered to provide a forum for social interaction and sharing of information among peers. Many people describe the Club as “a cross between MENSA and the Elks’ Lodge”.
The Club has meeting halls in many large cities in the United States, Canada, and Europe where members can meet and socialize. In addition, they host regular banquets toasting (and in some cases, roasting) noted personages in the field of science. Membership in the Tesla Club is by invitation only, only after a scientist has achieved some form of unique discovery in their field.
While named in honor of Nikola Tesla, the Tesla Club was not formed until ten years past the inventor’s death, and he was named its first posthumous member. As a tribute to their namesake, the Tesla Club has officially barred membership, posthumous or otherwise, to Thomas Edison or anyone carrying on his work.

— not really. This is from a wiki dedicated to the X-Men movies. Sounds like a good idea, though, and being fictitious isn’t quite the disadvantage to steampunk that it might be to other subcultures.

Let us deal, as we must, with the matter of steampunk fashion. It is a dandified subculture, in the way that the teds (originally, Edwardians) and the mods were, in their day. Steampunks affect late C19th European fashions, with a big side order of aeronaut. Elements of this style have been knocking about in youth culture all along: Julian Cope sported a flight jacket, boots and goggles at one point, IIRC. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had a steampunk sensibility before that sensibility had a name, though it manifested principally in the music — it was not much entered into by Peter Saville on their sleeve artwork, and I couldn’t tell you if it’s there in the videos, because I only remember the Louise Brooks one blogged previously). And I could have sworn I spotted a Sgt. Pepper type uniform back there somewhere… hold on a sec… yeah, that’s the blighter. Need I say more? Why, it was forty years ago, just the other day. I expect you can think of a few others yourself.

I don’t think I’d really taken any notice, until I started into this, of claims that there is now a Steampunk Tendency in music. Eating My Words tells us that steampunk music derives from “New Wave, Industrial and Goth”, and counts only two bands who plough this furrow: Abney Park (from Seattle, but named after a cemetery in Stoke Newington, well known to me) and, ahem, Vernian Process. Hey, I didn’t make them up, I’m just saying. I’ve only been able to find a few tracks on mySpace pages. Eating My Words makes them sound more different in his overview than they sound to these old ears. They aren’t terrible, and they might get better, and I don’t want to be too snarky about the music, because these are people with thousands of “friends”, and I wouldn’t like to make thousands of “enemies” for no good reason. Personally, if I was to theorize a steampunk music, the first thing I’d do is forget all about rock music, and about nearly everything that came after it. Maybe consider early jazz, music hall and folk ballads — and maybe also consider inventing new instruments in the steampunk idiom. Now that, I would like to see.

Finally, a word or two about the language of steampunk. Adherents often aspire to a flowery, archaic mode of expression, in supposed imitation of Victorian literature. While I would love to see more archaisms around the place, I’ve read too many instances, over the last couple of days, of sloppy usage of archaic language that made me cringe. I’m not going to point to examples, but a word to the wise: if you’re going to make an issue out of transforming the language, you better know what you’re about, and that is going to entail reading a lot more 19th century literature than busy contemporary folks have the leisure for. Otherwise, wait until the buzzwords percolate through the noise and stabilise, and use those. You’ll look less of a twat, that way. Another possible remedy is to avail yourself of a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day, and study it carefully. It isn’t steampunk, but it takes place in the same historical period, and the relevance to the subject in hand will be obvious from the first page and throughout.

Yeah, so, what with ol’ George Clooney making a six-hour miniseries of The Diamond Age for the SciFi Channel (Neal Stephenson scripting it himself, according to this page) and the movie of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (AKA The Northern Lights) — again, not strictly steampunk, but lots of steampunk flavour about it — due out this December, I wouldn’t bet against steampunk breaking into mainstream culture. If that should happen, I would expect that it will be a narrower and more sharply defined thing than it is just now, though it’s unlikely to become as doctrinaire, as was the fate of (vanilla) punk. Likely it will be reduced to a few signifiers: suit, boots and goggles. Hinged brass doodads optional.

(Nautical chart book link via Neatorama, who had it from Brass Goggles)