Monday 17 January 2011

Steampunk: my Philosophy

Today I happened upon a post to The Steampunk Workshop, written in August, talking about Steampunk Philosophy. Copied (and lightly edited) below is the (long winded) comment that I posted there.

My post

I've found that different people have very different specific reasons for appreciating Steampunk, but there are certain things that I find quite widespread. I'm going to focus on the relationship between Steampunk and industrialism.

As we can all agree. the genre takes a great deal of inspiration from the nineteenth century in the forms of literature, technology, fashion and other elements. We often talk about taking the technology of the time to its extremes, but in some ways that is exactly what we don't do. It is real history that did that, if one considers that modern electrical power stations run on steam and that today's factories are directly descended from the steam-driven mills of those supposedly halcyon days.

The truth is that the Victorian world (perhaps particularly England and her empire) was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, which I consider to have reached its height in the nineteenth century (feel free to correct me). The revolution came with billowing smokestacks and pulsating steam cylinders, fine clockwork and precise machining, great dreams and hopes for the future of mankind! Oh yes, these are the things we choose to remember in our genre, the best of the industrial revolution.

But ours is an era of contradiction, as this genre reflects. In the modern world we are subject to, benefactors and victims of, an industrial commercial complex that straddles the globe. People today know luxury and opportunity beyond the dreams of our ancestors, carried onward by matching technology. Still, there is much discontent. We are disenfranchised, the individual a small piece of a larger machine. Few of us are able to fully explore the opportunities that the world claims to offer, we live in the shadow of commercial industry, fed by it even as we are imprisoned.

This too links to the Industrial Revolution. Before those advances in technology, production was achieved largely by means of cottage industry. In that era, individual craftsmanship was the norm. Resources and products were scarce and expensive, without the mass production of later times, and life was hard; yet, in that dog-eat-dog world, every person had the chance for individual accomplishment. Well, more or less.

Steampunk, it seems to me, reaches back into the heart of the Industrial Revolution and tries to undo the damage that was done; we embrace the power of technology and its potential to fulfill our dreams, but we recoil at mass production and the ruination of the craftsman. It is more than an aesthetic, more than literature, it is a deep-seated urge to restore the finest of craftsmanship. This is no easy task, but is served well by the Maker culture and is, it seems to me, becoming more widespread beyond either of these subcultures.

I am well acquainted with the presence of those whose interest is purely out of fashion; there is no wrong in that, such people provide an outlet for the creatives. Similarly, there are those whose interest lies solely in Steampunk literature and art, which may speak to them of who knows what. Still, for those of us who find hope in philosophies like (or unlike) that which I have outlined or those which others have, there is the whole.

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