Industrial Evolution: Steampunk’S Predecessors and Present

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Industrial Evolution: Steampunk’s Predecessors and Present

If you have spent any time on Boing Boing, Gizmodo, or Engadget in the last twelve months, it might have seemed that “steampunk” as a concept, design aesthetic, and all-around

Internet meme might have come from nowhere. Looking at data from Google Trends, it turns out that this assessment of this reiteration of technological and material culture of the late 19th century isn’t all that far off. For all intents and purposes, steampunk was not even a blip on the collective consciousness until 2007. From that point, however, it suddenly began to appear—or to be noticed—everywhere: in the DIY/Maker movement, cosplay, video game and movie design, and art installations. In May of this year, The New York Times ran a feature story on the subject, and two weeks ago, from 31 October to 2 November, the inaugural California

Steampunk Convention took place in the San Francisco metro area. Even MTV has recently gotten into the act, running several short segments on MTV News about the trend and pondering whether Beyoncé Knowles’s latest video—for “Single Ladies”—involves a steampunk glove.

With this emphasis on the visual appeal of steampunk, however, one might not immediately realize that steampunk began as a literary movement, another subgenre on the ever- branching tree of science fiction. While bloggers and the media have paid progressively more attention to steampunk in the last 12 months, those interested in literary and cultural studies are only now beginning to consider the movement. This panel represents one of the first such investigations (aside: a second will be the forthcoming special issue of NVS), and in our paper we would like to offer a few preliminary thoughts about steampunk in relation to the science fiction modes that precede it. In apposing steampunk to cyberpunk, steampunk’s generic cousin and etymologic parent, we will argue that steampunk not only borrows aesthetically from the

Victorian period but also reconfigures temporality within science fiction in a manner that may be best illuminated by 19th-century temporal paradigms.

Perhaps William Gibson is only stating the obvious when he tells T. Vigil Parker in a recent interview that “science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written.” Most frequently, however, science fiction has commented on the present through representations of a possible future. Since we have yet to create sentient robots, accomplish interplanetary travel, or produce virtual spaces as immersive as a holodeck, readers immediately understand these staples and accoutrements of science fiction to function as part of a projected future—even if, as in the case of Star Wars, we are told that the events depicted happen “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” (emphasis added). What makes something science fiction is the incorporation into narrative of technologies (science) that do not yet exist (fiction).

Investigating how such technologies would affect the world and its subjects becomes one of the larger themes of science fiction.

Throughout the “golden age” of science fiction—the late 1930s through the early

1950s—as well as through the “new wave” of science fiction that defined the 1960s and 1970s, the settings of novels or stories were frequently far into the future. For example, Isaac Asimov’s

Foundation novels (1951-1953), which explore the predictive powers of large-scale statistics, are set 10,000 years from the present when large-scale interstellar colonization has become the norm. Since Asimov’s three novels were awarded the Hugo Award (science fiction’s equivalent of the Oscar) for “Best All-Time Series,” the reader might reasonably assume that the texts’ future setting is definitive of the science fiction mode.

In the 1980s, however, a new genre of science fiction emerged: cyberpunk. Cyberpunk radically shrank the temporal distance between the present and the imagined future. Masamune

Shirow’s 1989 manga Ghost in the Shell, for example, is not set thousands of years from now but rather in 2035, at a time when computers have become more ubiquitous and cyborgs and bionically enhanced humans are increasingly common. Although it does not provide dates,

William Gibson’s Neuromancer—the ur-text of cyberpunk—also introduced its readers to a world that was still recognizable as a version their own. When the book was published in 1984 it was not possible to grow new organs in culture, but organ transplants were already commonplace. Moreover, computation wasn’t yet the “consensual hallucination” that Gibson predicted, but the cyberspace decks Case and other console jockeys use are similar to the first laptops, like the Epson HX-20 that was just beginning to sell widely in 1983. Although research into artificial intelligence had been ongoing prior to the rise of cyberpunk, the increasing importance of robotics and information technology to commerce and to warfare in the final throes of the Cold War revived fears (and hopes) about how human beings would be replaced from their jobs (and from dying in combat) by sentient machines. This double logic concerning artificial intelligence influenced Neuromancer as well as Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), in which the novel concludes not with the union of two AIs but with the conjoining of an AI (Art Fish) and the human Visual Mark, whose body dies.

But the technologies of cyberpunk were not the only thing recognizable to its readers in the 1980s and 1990s. With the deregulation that begun in the 1970s, the terrain of business was rapidly changing. Telecoms, transportation agencies, entertainment entities were suddenly freed to acquire their competition, take more control of the local market, and make forays into alternate revenue streams. The result was mega-mergers and the creation of mega-corporations like those within Synners, where Diversifications, Inc. manages the creation of music, music video, movies, and advanced surgical practices. Neuromancer features similar zaibatsus, who are

Copyright © 2008 Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall Bowser and Croxall 4 SLSA 2008 presentation in league with the Yakuza and the government. And Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) takes the mega-corporation to its logical conclusion with its proliferation of franchulates that have essentially become their own nation states. The noir elements and paranoia that infuses these and other cyberpunk novels reflect the worry many people felt about the increasing role of a handful of large, bureaucratic, and profit-driven on a national and global stage. At the same time that control of the media was consolidating, the number of channels and outlets were expanding exponentially. Cyberpunk regularly amplifies this into worlds that are completely saturated by media, all designed to entertain rather than inform.

Rather than fetishizing new technologies and hypothesizing new social and corporate structures that will come in the near future, steampunk goes surprisingly against the ingrained temporality of SF by turning its attention to technologies and society of the past in the service of examining our present. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1991), about which Patrick has just spoken, transplants our concerns about privacy in an increasingly networked world into 1855. Imagining the invention of a mechanical computer a century before its time, the novel explores the dangers of nation-wide databases, where having someone else’s number is tantamount to control over that person’s past and future. Although steam-powered difference engines that anachronistically resemble our day’s computers make this surveillance possible, the theme gains additional nuance by being set in the Victorian period, where class and social standing were always already broadcast through one’s clothing, bearing, and even accent.

The characters of the novel are principally worried about controlling or gaining access to their files stored within the national database, but the emphasis that Victorians placed on material surfaces reflects and amplifies our present-day concerns about how we can control and safeguard our identities. Ted Chiang’s short story “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000) presents a London where

Kabbalistic research allows industrialists to animate golems or automatons to “man” their factories or even to fight in their wars. In this manner, Chiang comments on present labor relations between the first and third world, which, of course, are outgrowths of those established in the Victorian period. What’s more, the climax of the story relates to a new set of Kabbalistic names are being developed that allow for both artificial insemination and that teaches automatons to create other automatons. By presenting quandaries about genetic engineering and the reproductive rights of both humans and AIs, the story helps the reader reconceptualize current debates in bioethics.

What these examples have in common of course, is the unifying element of steampunk: the invocation of things Victorian. There are many avenues by which we could investigate the relationship of steampunk to the Victorian period: aesthetics, plot machinations, technological gimmickry, ideologies of nationalism, gender, and so on. What we want to focus on right now, however, is time and the ways we can connect the Victorian moment and the steampunk moment via temporal paradigms.

One of the things we find most intriguing about steampunk is how it blends historical moments. Like most science fiction, it takes us out of our present moment, but instead of giving us a recognizably futuristic setting, steampunk gives us a future that is borrowing from the past or a past borrowing from the future. There are many different iterations of this: the reversion in

Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age to Victorian-era social organization and the inception of a tribe actually calling themselves the Neo-Victorians; the grungy, gritty East-End London feel of the

New Crobuzon setting in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and its accompanying technologies that resemble those of the Industrial Age; or the actual 19th-century aesthetics that inform steampunk modifications of machinery and gadgets. If science fiction most often

Copyright © 2008 Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall Bowser and Croxall 6 SLSA 2008 presentation understands its present by looking to a future, what does it mean for a subgenre and a cultural phenomenon looks to the past to understand it’s more contemporaneous anxieties?

As a literary move, this is certainly not without precedent. It may be, in fact, that the

Victorians themselves perfected backward-looking artistic aesthetics: from Carlyle’s Past and

Present, to Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, to Ruskin’s engagement with ruins and medieval architecture. In each of these examples, the authors, to some degree, look to the past to make sense of the present. Whether by comparison to highlight the relative advancements and progress of the nineteenth-century, or, as was more common, to wax nostalgic for the order and hierarchies of the past, Victorian writers frequently understood themselves with respect to distantly past cultures, a paradigm not radically different from steampunk.

And yet, it is not that steampunk consistently sets itself or its stories in the past—or even consistently in a past-looking future—so much as it mixes up and blends time periods. Moreover, the method of blending is apparently unimportant. The setting could be a nineteenth-century

England where technologies are more advanced, like in The Difference Engine, The Steampunk

Trilogy, Larklight (2006), or Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992), or it could be a faintly futuristic but radically alien world where some technologies or social structures have not advanced beyond the nineteenth-century, like Perdido Street Station, The Diamond Age, or The Golden Compass

(1995). In other words, it is not that steampunk is marked by an invocation of a distant past so much as it is remarkable for the creation of a new paradigm for how technologies, aesthetics and ideas mark different times.

We want to return to this feature of steampunk in a few minutes, but first we want to get at why the Victorians may be just the right source of inspiration for these revised temporal paradigms, and especially for the inspiration to revise what one think about how time periods are

Copyright © 2008 Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall Bowser and Croxall 7 SLSA 2008 presentation marked as distinct. 19th-century England was the site of major upheavals in how people understood time due in part to technological innovation. In the most quotidian ways, the

Industrial Revolution accelerated the shift from agrarian time to factory time and rewrote all the equivalences of time to productivity. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has written persuasively about the inception of “railway time,” which severed the connections between time and space by ushering in an era where larger swaths of land could be traversed in shorter spans of time. Such perceptual shrinking of space or lengthening of time produced a different way of feeling one’s self in time while traveling. These techno-temporal innovations radically shifted how time worked and felt for Victorian subjects, unsettling inherited assumptions about the experience of time. That is, mechanization and railway travel did not so much change the way time was measured as they changed the way time was felt. We see in steampunk a version of this upheaval, where an impressionistic experience of Victorian fiction and culture is blended with the apparently incompatible impressions and experience of science fiction, and more exactly, cyberpunk. The aesthetics of both Victorianism and science fiction, which may be formally systemize-able, but which we more readily understand as experience-able, are mashed together, presenting a new and somewhat disjunctive aesthetic experience.

While these techno-temporal innovations have some of the most apparent roles in the steampunk phenomenon (it is surely not a coincidence that so much of steampunk’s material culture involves modding technological gadgets like laptops and ipods), it may be that the 19th- century’s scientific discourse has an even more substantive role in steampunk culture. Here we want to talk a bit about the work of Charles Lyell. Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology

(1830-1833) created a kind of catastrophe for 19th-century understandings of the earth’s history by suggesting that there had been, in fact, no catastrophe. Prior to Lyell’s work, most geologists

Jerome Buckley, in The Triumph of Time, writes, “the orthodox theory of the earth, through the eighteen thirties and even into the forties, remained catastrophism, the notion that sudden cataclysms of nature, violent upheavals, and inundations, had given the world its shape and structure” (27). Catastrophism seemed to support the Biblical narrative of the earth’s formation and development. The theory endorsed a planetary age that mapped onto the Genesis account, and it allowed major events such as the Great Flood to determine the planet’s physical history.

In contrast, Lyell built on the earlier work of geologist and chemist James Hutton, to developed a theory of uniformitarianism. Lyell’s supposition was that lacking any indisputable physical evidence of catastrophe, one must proceed instead under the assumption that the earth’s history could be extrapolated from the available evidence: fossil records, sedimentary deposits, and landscape features. From that evidence, he concluded that the earth was in fact much older than had been thought and that slow, gradual changes—not catastrophic events—could account for the planet’s present condition. Lyell writes that the “assemblage of general causes” apparent to the geologists surveying their planet “may have been sufficient to produce, by their various combinations, the endless diversity of effects, of which the shell of the earth has preserved memorials, and, consistently with these principles, the recurrence of analogous changes is expected by them in time to come” (26). James Secord summarizes the theory as “the doctrine

[…] of slow change wrought by such quiet agents as erosion and sedimentary deposit, forces everywhere still evident” (xvi). By focusing on changes that are “still evident,” Lyell’s theory suggested that the forces that shaped the Earth in the past continue to work today. This emphasis on continued, observable forces at work in the present is signaled by Lyell’s subtitle to the text:

“An attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by reference to causes now in

Copyright © 2008 Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall Bowser and Croxall 9 SLSA 2008 presentation action” (emphasis added). Lyell’s entire paradigm is in fact often summed up as: “the present is the key to the past.”

Lyell’s invocation of causes “still in action” resonates with what we have said about science fiction in general throughout this essay: those anxieties which inform a science fiction novel’s present are those that inform its representation of the future; the causes of the present are

“still in action” in the future. Or, in other words, the present is the key to this particular future.

But Lyell’s uniformitarianism says, “the present is the key to the past.” And, indeed, steampunk looks to the past to illuminate the present, the future to illuminate the past, the past to illuminate the future. In other words, while catastrophism—a paradigm that would encompass the more contemporary concept of technological singularity, which itself informs so much cyberpunk—essentially discounts the relate-ability of the past to the present, insisting on such radical changes that geological periods are entirely distinct, uniformitarianism suggests that the past, present, and, implicitly, the future, no matter how incompatible they look, can be understood in the same terms. Those things that seem to mark distinctions between geologic ages can all be understood as progressing from each other. Steampunk is premised on this relate- ability, taking the paradigm one step further and asking what happens when the markers of various time periods—past and future—are estranged from context and made simultaneous.

Steampunk enacts key principles of uniformitarianism by forcing the apparently disjunctive markers of time periods – iPods and brass gears – to reveal their compatibilities. The point of modding your laptop to look like a turn-of-the-century machine is, after all, not to create an object so radically mashed-up that one can’t discern functionality. It is instead to find the commonalities in aesthetics, to blend them in a way that verges on canceling the difference.

Is the work of steampunk fiction and culture to cancel the difference between the 19th century and the future? A question that requires an entire set of answers, most for a different day.

What we can conclude here is that steampunk represents something new because of its use of something old, but more exactly because of its insistence of the compatibility of the future and the past. Whether that compatibility is best understood as a comfort in opposition to the dystopic mode of cyberpunk, where catastrophe seems to be lurking in the backstory, or a decadent nihilism that undermines any teleology of progress, is perhaps better answered by someone in costume.