The Goggles Do Nothing — Crooked Timber

On Steampunk:

Hence, the initial impetus of ‘steampunk’ was in large part an effort to recapture this sense of social inquiry, bridging the gap between nineteenth century inquiries and our own. Here, I am not referring to K.W. Jeter and others who were using Victorian tropes, but to the two books which really brought steampunk to a wider audience – William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Both of these are unabashed exercises in sociological speculation, which use nineteenth century forms to explore modern anxieties. Gibson and Sterling’s book is indeed arguably a Singularity novel as well as steampunk – but the singularity is the emergence of an unusually baroque form of the ‘vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters,”’ that Cosma is talking about.

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The difference between what say, Sterling and Gibson wanted to do (and what Stross wants), and what Priest is doing, is perfectly clear. Sterling and Gibson wanted to use Victorian technologies as a set of metaphorical tools to explore social change. Priest wants to use class struggle, exploitation, war and all that blah-blah-blah as a means of justifying cool-sounding Victorian technologies. A long war allows her to justify the inclusion of fun-sounding “tanks and crawling machines and elaborate guns” in her novel. A Dickensian factory allows her to have a heroine who wears goggles (she needs them to do her work). But the point of interest for Priest isn’t the war, or the class struggle, or the Dickensian factory conditions. It’s the zeppelins and digging machines, and the funky-looking goggles. The former provide a patina of sociological plausibility for the latter.

Steam-Punked

Regarding the Steampunk Backlash over at io9: I am both a fan and a critic of steam punk. It's fun and it's clever, but it's also sort of endlessly repetitive and pointless. It's a style that can only do one thing, and as a creative anachronism it can't really stretch. As soon as you try to push the envelope a little, they call it something else: diesel punk, sandal punk, elf punk. Is The Willows weird fiction, nostalgia, or tentacle punk? After a while it starts to get a little stupid.

From 60s era Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and T.V.'s Wild Wild West and Doctor Who, to the interactive mysteries and world-building of Myst and Riven, to Alan Moore's all-encompassing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and even Pynchon's epic Western Sci-Fi Historical extravaganza Against the Day, steam punk has been a huge part of everything I like about sci-fi. It's a kitschy blend of the technical and the domestic; gears and steam engines with comfy overstuffed chairs, brandy, and fireside philosophizing. It celebrates both the extraordinary and the quotidian with its eccentric scientists laboring in garage laboratories and boy geniuses inventing things in their rooms. In this regard, it's firmly in the tradition of all boy's fiction from Jules Verne to Sherlock Holmes to Back to the Future to Encyclopedia Brown to Spider-Man. You can run away, have an adventure, and still go to sleep with a full tummy, a soft bed, and a warm dog.

The problem with it right now is that it is a fad, and as a fad it doesn't really mean anything. It's just a style, once choice among many. It's very flat, and all the rough edges are worn away by the repetition of the same costumes and the same modded out computers. Worse yet, it isn't really fashion. It's dress-up. It's play. And too often this sort of play fails to make the leap from the personal and the fanciful, to the level of pure imagination (in the Coleridgian sense). In other words the meaning of steam punk fails to make the imaginative leap beyond its internet micro-culture to have a larger meaning in society. It's just another weird, creepy, sad hobby like gun collecting, or civil war re-enacting, or fantasy football.

For me, the deeper theme has something to do with the problematic rise and expansion of Capitalism and Imperialism during the Victorian era. Just as British military might was conquering the world, its people, its wealth, and its resources, industrialization was conquering the countryside, restructuring labor, worklife, homelife, and the family. Great advances, built on the backs of human suffering. Great adventures of exploration at the cost of colonial slaughter and subjugation. It's that sense of dislocation, contradiction, revolution, and change that steam punk has the potential to capture. You can see signs of it in the 60s version of steam punk in the way the stories reacted to the cold war, the space race, our friend the atom, and the rapid suburbanization of the cities. What else is Mad Men but a googie-punk version of the same idea and fascination? And today it serves as an outlet for all of our 21st century anxieties over American decline: globalization, the information age, ex-urbanization, systems of surveillance, economic uncertainity, global warming, the energy crisis and world wide terrorism.

It's not all brass goggles and zeppelins, after all. Steam punk is about systems of power and exploitation (steam driven turbines), and the ability of individuals to subvert and undo those systems in the name of the dispossesed (politically subversive punks). In steam punk, the individual is the champion of his preterite community standing against the plutocrats and the elect. Moreover it is where the logic and control of science and commerce meets the non-rational and chaotic forces of life and art. Or, as Henry Adams observed in the "Dynamo and the Virgin,"

This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction -- the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many schools of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin: --

"Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."

The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools: --

"Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."

All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

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At Chartres -- perhaps at Lourdes -- possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles -- but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power -- only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

What's wanted is not just sci-fi gadgetry, but a deeper understanding of our own natures. The dyanamo is a sexless scientific artifact that hides within it the power and fecundity of chthonic nature. For thousands of years, in religion, in art, in symbol, the virgin as goddess had been the organizing principle for humanity; the driving force behind all human action. What then in the age of the steam engine and all the scientific discoveries to follow. What then is the nature of human existence? How does he organize himself? What of his relationships, society, love, marriage and the rest? How does he interact with his creations, as master or servant? What mysteries does life hold if one has access to infinite power without infinite wisdom?

If steam punk can ever rise to this level of understanding, then it will become something better than a fad.

Pynchonesque in Our Emptiness

The normally smart Techsploitation blog comes up with this baffling bit of non-conformity:

On The Simpsons, however, the characters are nothing but stereotype. They’re practically Pyncheonesque in their emptiness — not people, but objects who get driven through various pastiches in order to become the butt of the audience’s arch, ironic jokes. I didn’t give a shit about any of them. The only way I could enjoy these characters was to say, “Haha look at the funny dumb poor people who are so incredibly stupid that they actually work at nuclear power plants.”

I don't know what's worse: the failure to understand The Simpsons, the failure to understand Pynchon, or the over-the-top knee-jerk reaction against strawman hipsters (with their "arch, ironic" jokes).

There seems to be an assumption that there is an intellectual elite sitting somewhere in their towers mocking dumb poor people for sport and profit. When in fact, that is exactly the sort of situation that would be ably lampooned on The Simpsons (with a guest appearance from Wes Anderson and a Royal Tenenbaums spoof). Because it is the situations in The Simpsons that we are meant to laugh at and the way they expose unspoken desires and power relations in the real world (just like a Pynchon novel).

If Homer seems like a stereotype its because he is archetypal in the same way Bugs Bunny is: able to be dropped into any storyline, role, or pastiche while maintaining his core identity. More importantly we don't laugh at Homer so much as recognize that his dumbness is a reflection of the world he lives in. We sympathize with Homer for his laziness, inflated sense of importance, weakness for donuts, and talent for disappointment (d'oh!). He is us. He is our everyman. At the same time he is also all of our own worst habits, all those things that annoy us in everybody else

Perhaps good comedies exploit that same tension that we find in the fear and entertainment experienced by audiences in a horror movie: "the frisson of ambivalent feelings". In The Simpsons we have characters who remind us that life is both wonderful and stupid. We laugh with as we laugh at and that ambivalence is what makes the show so brilliant.

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As for Pynchon, his latest book, Against the Day, is a steam-punk epic and a meditation on the unnecessary violence that gave birth to the modern world. His characters begin as types, but their true humanity is revealed for those patient enough to read to the end. No joke.

n+1 Article on China Mieville

Not sure when this article was published, but it is an excellent overview of Mieville's New Crobuzon novels by Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber.

Mieville's works are powerfully imaginative, embracing both steampunk and horror as a way of expressing his social, literary, and political views. What Farrell highlights is the way the novels attack and rework the genre's root conservatism, in the mode of Tolkien's anti-modernism, and escapism, in the mode of the fantasies and aspirations encoded in our consumer culture.

In [The Scar], we see the city from the outside, through its colonial relations and its willingness to use military force to secure commercial interests. Much of The Scar is set in the pirate city of Armada, and Miéville riffs on the glamour of swashbucklers without ever forgetting the relationship between high-seas adventure and the desire for economic gain. In The Scar, the yearning for fantasy always betrays, either by cloaking relationships of imperial exploitation in the spurious glamour of adventure, or by becoming an endless, ineffectual form of escapism. Either way, it’s a trap.

In this view, the romance of fantasy fiction blinds us to the political and social realities of both the time-periods we're idealizing (Feudal Europe, Victorian London, etc.) as well as the present day. We opt-out of reality rather than participate in it, and ignore the economic exploitation and political will to power around us.

In the Bas-Lag novels, the power of fantasy fiction is realized in its ability to remake the world and undermine these power structures:

For Miéville, fantasy shouldn’t merely justify what is, in the service of a self-defeating escapism or consolation; to the extent that it does, it’s merely remaking our political world, not Remaking it. Instead, fantasy should become a way of arguing about our social condition, of re-presenting our dilemmas, and creating a space for the imagination in which we can identify new possibilities of action. Fantasy can have a kind of political force that the ‘realistic’ novel can’t, precisely because it doesn’t take the real for granted.

The goal for all horror, fantasy, or science fiction should be to take us out of the comforts and escapist urges of familiar genre conventions. It should do more than rehearse and repeat the stories of the past (no matter how much we like them). Instead, we should always be mindful of what is real and use literature to strike a dagger into the hearts of the powerful. Writing should always be a political act of radical imagination.

Steampunk Socialites

The New York Observer coins a new term, "New Vicotorians", in a lifestyle article on the return of Gen-Y Millenials to more traditional views on marriage. The New Vic world centers around child-bearing, cooking, gardening, knitting, nesting and other modes of bourgeois domesticity that the boomers thought they'd successfully done away with.

...recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twentysomething nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn’t make sense to them.

Unfortunately, the article eventual devolves into yet another touchstone for female marriage panic. Girls musn't be spinsters in the New Vic world. And after all, isn't this just a new take on 80s era yuppie-ism?

Still, until everyone gets bored of playing house, I look forward to steampunk being the next major fashion trend for these Neo-Victorians and their trendy homes. With mid century modern on its way out, what would be better than Jules Verne inspired espresso makers, mp3 players, hd televisions, and cell phones?