Lifestyle, Mad Science, Theory, & Fiction]

SteamPunk Magazine [Lifestyle, Mad Science, Theory, & Fiction] #8 “After all, what our world is and can be are more about human imagination than, well… anything else. And isn’t that a lot of what steampunk has to say? Imagine! Play! Create! Push past the artificial boundary of time to ask the real questions: what does it mean to be human? What are we going to do with all this technology? How can we create the future we want and need?” —James H. Carrott, Cultural Historian, 2011 The cover was illustrated by Doctor Geof From the Editor It is with enormous pleasure and unbridled joy that And fiction. Oh so much fiction. Our fiction will take I welcome you, dear reader, to the eighth installment of you from the American Civil War to the immigrant tun- SteamPunk Magazine. It’s been two years since we’ve re- nelers who built New York City’s subway system; it will leased an issue, and a few things have changed. For starters, take you into madness and into Eastern Europe. It will we exist again and will be publishing regularly! Also, I’ve take you beneath a fantastical city run by a machine and resumed editorship. I founded this magazine, but after five far into the post-apocalypse. issues I passed it over into the capable hands of C. Allegra It’s here in the letter from the editor that I get to say Hawksmoor. Last summer, she passed it back. And we’ve whatever I want, so what I want to say is this: steampunk got a new publisher. Combustion Books is a worker-run has re-inspired me. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to let (no bosses!) genre fiction publisher based out of New York people know that I ever doubted steampunk. I’m probably City. But while we’ve got a glossy cover and better dis- supposed to lie and claim I’ve always thought it’s perfect in tribution, we’re still a committed DIY project. There will every way. But the reason I put down the magazine three never be paid advertising in our pages. All the same people years ago is that I was burned out. I still loved steam en- are involved. We’d like to think we’ve just gotten better at gines and mad science, I still read more 19th-century polit- what we do. ical theory than 20th. I still wrote about crazy contraptions If this issue is themed, it seems to be themed along and I still wore entirely too many earth tones to fit in with the lines of mischief and criminality. We’ve got a rogue’s the punks that I ran with in my day-to-day life. But I’d lexicon of 19th-century New York City slang and the true grown tired of the culture. I got into steampunk with naive tales of the girl gangs who ran in those streets. There’s an assumptions. I thought it would be all tea and regicide, all exploration of the sky pirate archetype. There’s a how-to on the time, but it wasn’t. Sometimes—and haven’t we all felt urban exploration (sometimes referred to as “trespassing”) this way?—steampunk was just some gears hot-glued onto and DIY instructions for growing poppies to make one’s the boring mainstream culture I’d long ago rejected. I took own laudanum. These latter and potentially illegal topics, my leave and retired to my books and the aforementioned of course, are intended only to inspire our fiction and our tea and the company of those who shared my passion for imaginations. a life less common. Social unrest and protest are on everyone’s tongues as But then, last summer, I found myself attending the much now at the start of 2012 as they were in the 1870s, Steampunk World’s Fair in Trenton, New Jersey. Circus and we would be remiss if we did not include such top- punks marched through the hallways with drums and sax- ics in our pages. We’ve an interview with activist cosplay- ophones while workshops covered doing steampunk cheap ers Steampunk Emma Goldman and Voltairine DeCleyre, and doing it anti-colonial. A labor rally in the courtyard who introduce us to the ideas of anachro-anarcho-femi- brought our 19th-century flair to 21st-century problems. nism. We’ve a brilliant essay on Occupy and steampunk. Academics presented literary criticism—and if I recall, We’ve also taken a look at the Haitian anti-colonial revolu- there was a drag show. People from every generation at- tion, since anti-colonialism is dear to our little brass hearts! tended, and everyone I met was amazing. I was humbled. Not everything is drugs and revolution, of course. I love this culture even if it’s different from what I ex- There’re some mathematical proofs to get you started pected it to be. And coming back to the crew of SteamPunk dreaming of lighter-than-air craft. There’s an introduction Magazine felt a lot like coming home. For a full-time no- to those internally-combusting dieselpunk kin of ours. mad, that’s saying something. Steampunk, you have never There’s a simple and beautiful sewing project, expertly failed me. You are awesome because the people make you explained. We’ve got interviews with a maker, a cellist, a awesome. I’m glad to be back. comic writer and a smut writer. We’ve spoken with those —Margaret Killjoy who run Ruggine, an Italian steampunk fiction journal. contents FICTION: The Mechanic . 18 Marie Morgan Pearls Before a Sandhog . 26 The Catastrophone Orchestra Lichens . 50 Pinche The Scouts of the Pyre . 66 David Z. Morris What is Steampunk? The Paraclete of Pierre-Simon Laplace . 78 Jamie Murray What is SteamPunk In the Shadow of Giants . 96 Magazine? David Redford Air For Fire . 100 The term “steampunk” was coined to David Major refer to a branch of “cyberpunk” fiction that concerned itself with Victorian-era FEATURES: technology. However, steampunk is more Riot Grrls, 19th-Century Style . 4 than that. Steampunk is a burgeoning Screaming Mathilda subculture that pays respect to the visceral Rogue’s Lexicon . 8 nature of antiquated technology. Professor Calamity It’s about “steam,” as in steam engines, Damn My Blood . 40 and it’s about “punk,” as in counter- Mikael Ivan Eriksson culture. For an excellent manifesto, refer Frances Willard . 48 Katherine Casey to the first article in our first issue, “What A Dieselpunk Primer . 64 Then, is Steampunk?” Larry Amyett, Jr. SteamPunk Magazine is a print Toussaint Louverture . 88 publication that comes out erratically. Miriam Rosenberg Roček Full quality print PDFs of it are available Reviews . 106 for free download from our website, and we keep the cost of the print magazine EDITORIAL: as low as possible. Back issues can be Why Steampunk Still Matters . 10 downloaded and the first 7 issues have James Schafer & Kate Franklin been anthologized in a reader available Nevermind the Morlocks: Here’s Occupy Wall Street . 92 from our publisher, Combustion Books. David Z. Morris Let the Banal Fall by the Wayside . 108 All work on the magazine, including Dimitri Markotin articles, editing, illustration, and layout, is done by volunteers and contributors. DO-IT-YOURSELF: To see how you can get involved, see How to Make Laudanum . 38 page 109. Canis Latrans Sew Yourself a Cuff . 60 www.steampunkmagazine.com E.M. Johnson [email protected] How to Sneak Around . 84 Wes Modes On Lighter-Than-Air Craft . 98 P. Fobbington INTERVIEWS: Unwoman . 16 Shanna Germain . 36 Greg Rucka . 46 Collane di Ruggine . 58 Steampunk Emma Goldman and Voltairine DeCleyre . 74 Thomas Willeford . 82 SteamPunk Magazine #8 3 Riot grrls 19th-Century Style By Screaming Mathilda Illustration by Juan Navarro The Victorian Era’s suffragettes and bluestockings are abundantly recognized for their struggles to secure women’s rights and for spawning the political and philosophical basis of modern feminism. While these upper- and middle-class women were seeking to reform the relations between the sexes primari- ly within their class, the myth that lower class women in Victo- rian times did not seek or fight for freedom—and mostly relied on the charitable efforts of their upper class benefactors—was born. It is curious that most of us have heard about the suffragettes and the settlement houses, but we know virtually noth- ing of the struggles of lower-class women. These women were already demonstrating that indeed sisterhood is powerful while their upper-class sisters were politely petitioning for reform. The fighting lower-class women, and sometimes girls, of New York City were not giving speeches in convention halls, they were not rubbing shoulders with city officials in the corridors of power, they were not holding soirées in Gramercy parlors; they were living radical feminism on the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen, the Five Points, and the Lower East Side. Despite its awesome fashions, the Victorian Era was a time when it sucked to be a woman even in the upper and middle classes, and it sucked even harder to be a poor woman. In the teeming impoverished neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, survival, for independent-minded women, often meant living outside the law. Gangs were a road to status in those neighborhoods, as they are in many poor urban areas today. When we think of gangs in New York during this period we think of toughs in dented derbies. The photos of Jakob Riis and the film Gangs of New York by Scorsese come to mind.

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