Matrix Online: the news and media magazine of the British Science Fiction Association

George Mann, one of the driving forces behind Solaris Books, has recently signed a two book deal with Tor in the US, which represent his first sales as a novelist. The deal is for a Steampunk duology, and here George shares with the readers of Matrix his thoughts on the resurgence of Steampunk.

Something strange is happening. Out there, outside of genre publishing, outside of science fiction and fantasy, there appears to be a resurgence of interest in steampunk and ‘fantastic Victoriana’. Steampunk has become a fashion accessory, a lifestyle; people attend themed parties and conventions, take over theatres for performance art, build sculptural installations themed around Victorian time machines or customise their personal computers to look like steam-powered typewriters.

Steampunk has pervaded the public consciousness, and what’s more, this appears to have generated a feedback loop that goes all the way back to literature and the work of genre writers, both old and new. More and more novels appearing on the shelves make use of the themes, ideas and imagery of steampunk, whether they constitute stories of consulting detectives lurking in the foggy streets of an alternate London, science fiction tales exploring questions of ‘what if?’ or ‘flintlock fantasies’ set in imaginary worlds but nevertheless drawing on this rich tapestry of our reinvented history. Steampunk is no longer just a small sub-genre of science fiction. It is a movement in its own right.

So what is it that makes steampunk so enduring, and what has caused this sudden spike in popularity? Why is it that people have once again started to go weak at the knees at the very thought of an airship, an automaton or a brass raygun?

For me, it’s all to do with reclaiming that classic sense of wonder, the conscious shrugging off of the trappings of the modern world in an effort to get back to pure, unadulterated adventure. There’s certainly a large dollop of nostalgia involved, too – a harking back to the Boy’s Own Adventure tales of childhood – but predominantly I believe it’s about recalling an era when the universe hadn’t yet yielded its secrets and many of the major scientific breakthroughs were still to be made. No one had been into space, so it was easier to imagine that there were all manner of wondrous secrets to be discovered out there. Einstein had yet to postulate his Theory of Relativity, so the stars were still only as far away as the fastest rocket could carry us to them. Darwin was only just working on his evolutionary theory, and there was nothing to say that dinosaurs could not still be found in the ‘lost world’, or that prehistoric civilisations weren’t living in isolation deep inside the ‘hollow earth’. Importantly, the possibilities seemed limitless, and not tempered but the harsh realities of modern science and politics. (Of course, this is just a matter of perception – the possibilities today are just as limitless, but perhaps, in some ways, less immediately glamorous).

Steampunk Girl Perhaps, in many ways, steampunk is also the perfect antidote to Mundane SF, that movement obsessed with the reality of the modern world and the limits of science. In a world ravaged by war in the Middle East, Global Warming, rising fuel prices and the constant threat of terrorism, people are looking to escape to that safe place, that land where heroes are larger than life, where true adventure can still be found. Steampunk and Mundane SF are bedfellows, the opposite sides of the same coin, and compliment each other perfectly. Steampunk is also, perhaps, slowly replacing those grandiose space operas of old, those stories of atomic rockets and wars in space and galactic empires full of teeming alien races. Modern science has discounted Flash Gordon and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith. These are futures that will never exist. Steampunk, however, is rooted in the past, and has always been based on the ‘what if?’ Steampunk is never going to become an untenable future, a scientifically inaccurate look at what could be. And that’s simply because it is already based on what wasn’t. Steampunk allows us to continue to explore those impossible ideas, because it’s asking a different question, adopting the mindset of a time when those things we dismiss today as impossible could still have been possible, if only.

So is steampunk, as a distinct movement, here to stay? I suppose it’s too early to say. But I, for one, will be watching with interest.

^ TOP