Two weeks ago I attended the Arisia convention in Boston and had a wonderful time. One thing which was impossible to miss was the prevalence of steampunk costumes among some of the attendees, especially the younger ones. Maybe this was just because the guests of honor were Phil and Kaja Foglio, creators of the steampunk graphic novel series Girl Genius, but I'm not so sure. Steampunk is huge right now, and not just in the self-referential world of science fiction fandom.
Once upon a time, science fiction was the literature of the future. When Hugo Gernsback started publishing his "scientifiction" magazine, the stories were intended as straight prediction: here's what will be invented in the next few years. Since the set of writers who were also inventors was small, the tone quickly changed from prediction to speculation: what if we could fly to the Moon? What if there was a pill to prevent pregnancy?
In time, writers and readers gained a bit more sophistication, and science fiction stories combined their technological predictions with actual drama: what if we could fly to Mars and how would these characters react? What if you built a machine that could think and how would it interact with these other characters?
All these what-ifs were set in the future, either near or far. They were roadmaps to a territory that the writers and readers confidently expected to occupy. The future belonged to America, at least as far as American science fiction writers and readers were concerned. Oh, there were plenty of dystopias and apocalypses, but most of those were intended as warnings: "here be dragons" signs on the way to our future.
But now? The last Space Shuttle landed a year ago. A Presidential candidate who advocates a return to lunar exploration is mocked like Robert Goddard. For two election cycles the rhetoric has all been about America in decline. We hear that China will soon be the world's biggest economy, while we seem mired in debt and stagnation.
And what does this have to do with steampunk? Steampunk is science fiction without the future. Instead of asking what if about the future, about things that might happen, it asks what if about things that didn't happen. What if the Victorians had computers? What if they had visited other worlds? (And how would the characters be affected by these changes.) It also looks back to the spirit of the Industrial Revolution era -- which of course looked to the future.
It's hard not to see a connection. If the future isn't ours anymore, then our science fiction looks to the past, romanticizing the days when the future was ours. If we can't own the future, we can at least relive the days when we did.
Does this mean that an uptick in the Dow would spell doom for steampunk as a sub-genre? Or, like science fiction itself, which provided hopeful escapism from the Great Depression and a world war, will steampunk break loose from its origins to become a full-fledged genre in its own right?
We'll have to wait and see . . . in the future.
Steampunk isn't the only historical off-ramp that science fiction has taken. Although it doesn't have a convenient name yet (that I know of) there's also a growing body of retro scifi with a nostalgic esthetic that is some sort of mashup of Art-Deco and the 1950's. Like this: http://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/toaster-with-two-brains-part-one/00_01
Posted by: Nick Howe | 02/14/2012 at 11:35 AM