Industrial Evolution: Steampunk’S Predecessors and Present
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Bowser and Croxall 1 SLSA 2008 presentation 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 Copyright © 2008 Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall Bowser and Croxall 2 SLSA 2008 presentation 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 Copyright © 2008 Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall Bowser and Croxall 3 SLSA 2008 presentation 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 Copyright © 2008 Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall Bowser and Croxall 5 SLSA 2008 presentation 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.