Steampunk : An introduction to a lost reality | Part 1
It was about ten feet in height, measuring to the top of the ‘stove-pipe hat,’ which was fashioned after the common order of felt coverings, with a broad brim, all painted a shiny black. The face was made of iron, with a pair of fearful eyes and a tremendous grinning mouth. A whistle-like contrivance was trade to answer for the nose. The steam chest proper and boiler were where the chest in a human being is generally supposed to be, extending also into a large knapsack arrangement over the shoulders and back … The steam man was a frightful looking object, being painted of a glossy black, with a pair of white stripes down its legs, and with a face which was intended to be of a flesh color, but, which was really a fearful red.
This is how we are introduced to the titular machine in Edward S Ellis’ The Steam Man of the Prairies, a five-cent novel published in 1868. It could arguably be one of the earliest examples of Steampunk, written in the very era that the genre is captivated by.
Steampunk as we know it today began as a sub genre of science fiction. The ‘steam’ refers to the generally Victorian setting, where the industrial revolution was in full swing, with the railways interweaving the world and technological marvels abounding. The ‘punk’ aspect is the subversion of that setting that occurs when everything we think we know about that period is turned on its head. Steampunk has been described as ‘what the past would look like if the future had happened sooner,’ with fantastical creations come to life, social and gender norms subverted and great leaps in science reimagined in steam and brass.
The term itself was coined by writer K.W. Jeter in April 1987 in a letter to the editor of Locus Magazine, as he tried to define what it was that he was beginning to write. He was one of the vanguard of modern authors who were experimenting with this Victorian-esque aesthetic to tell tales of wonder and progress while critiquing the world around them.
They weren’t the first though. As Ellis’ example above demonstrates, writers and thinkers had been imagining this kind of world for some time. Possibly the true fathers of the Steampunk movement were H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Their works, written in Victorian Europe, imagine the boundaries of science and technology cast aside in the name of adventure and discovery. Verne’s 1880 work The Steam House Pt 1: The Demon of Cawnpore saw four Englishmen crossing the Indian continent in a steam-powered mechanical elephant. Wells later imagined great devices capable of transcending time (The Time Machine, 1895) and space (War of the Worlds, 1898). What these men began, modern Steampunks continue.
Steampunk came of age in the 1990’s as the subculture began to emerge based on the fiction being written. It started seeping into pop culture and can be seen in aspects of films like The Adventures of Baron Van Munchausen in 1988 through to The Man with the Iron Fists in 2013 and many others. When the New York Times’ Style section featured a Steampunk fashion spread in 2008, the genre burst into the mainstream consciousness and has since made appearances in popular magazines like Wired, Popular Science and Newsweek. Films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were unashamedly Steampunk, making the once underground movement yet another thread in the mainstream.
Today Steampunk has a strong following, with its own websites, conventions and events. It has spawned a number of spinoff genres with their own peculiarities, like the working-class oriented Boilerpunk, the slightly more advanced Dieselpunk and the science fiction focused Raygun Gothic. Steampunk however continues to grow in its expression and popularity, now extending well beyond literature to embrace fashion, engineering, music and most forms of media. What is is that exactly defines Steampunk will be the focus of another blog though!
