On Steampunk and Cyberpunk
‘-punk’, the rapscallion, has been leading a double life as a suffix applied to stuff. There’s the ‘-punk’ that is all about themes, and societies, and a, well, punk attitude; if we can’t beat the system then we’ll at least insult it. Then there’s the ‘-punk’ that’s about aesthetics, atmosphere, and feel, who doesn’t care much for attitude or insulting any sort of system if it comes at the expense of immersion or enjoyment. ‘Steampunk’, the bringer of cogs, goggles, and airships, and ‘Cyberpunk’, bringer of cybernetics, immersive virtual realities, and neon absolutely everywhere, are two dovetailing examples which perfectly illustrate how this is double life creating parallel movements that begin to talk past one another.
Cyberpunk was first created as a term in 1980, by Bruce Bethke in his eponymous story Cyberpunk. The inclusion of ‘punk’ in the title was very deliberate. Steampunk was named in imitation of cyberpunk, by Kevin Wayne Jeter in 1987. He used ‘steam-punks’ to describe those authors writing what he called ‘Victorian fantasy’, which he expected to become the next big thing. I’m not sure he quite expected to name the entire genre practically overnight, but he did. In terms of fiction cyberpunk describes a sub-genre of science fiction which focuses on the virtual, the artificial, and alienation. Steampunk first created the idea of -punk referring to an aesthetic. These days steampunk tends to refer to a subgenre of fantasy that heavily relies upon 19th century visuals, ideas, and technology, especially steam powered technology. It’s generally included in fantasy because it usually involves creative applications of these technologies, incorporates explicitly magical elements, or places these 19th century things in unusual settings. In terms of stereotypical visuals cyberpunk’s jam is virtual reality, ASCII interfaces, and maudlin rain-soaked skyscrapers. Steampunk’s is cogs, the British Empire what the sun never sets on, and wearing corsets outside your clothes.
These are both simplifications of the two oldest -punks, which are now accompanied by numerous descendants such as ‘dieselpunk’ and ‘biopunk’ to name but a couple. Cyberpunk has mutated considerably, as all science fiction does, with changes to culture and technology. Originally you would expect cyberpunk to go something like this; first, take the plot of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, published in 1984 ,with its main character described as a ‘console cowboy’. Now combine this plot with the visual look of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner from 1982, which pictures a 2019 Los Angeles of near constant rain, mass-consumption of Japanese culture, corroded older buildings amid the towering skyscrapers of the future, and a tortured sky reflecting pollution gone rampant. Hey presto! These days the genre is filled with arguments about what is cyberpunk, what works count as cyberpunk, and what is its place in a world with our current technology. There’s also quite a lot more cyborgs, not to mention religious themes going around these days thanks to 1999’s The Matrix, along with a general notion that we might just have actually stepped into a cyberpunk society.
Steampunk is a little different. Rather than a vision of the near-future it is rooted in a real era that has already come and gone. Cyberpunk did use real things for visual inspiration, Blade Runner’s look was heavily influenced by the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong for example, but not to the same degree, nor was it a restoration of a prior era’s sensibilities. However, steampunk is not solely Victorian fashion and technology with different colours, nobody wandered around Carnaby Street in 1870 with about 5 lbs of gears and cogs trailing out of their pockets. To get the stereotypical steampunk setting you take a Victorian era society, preferably the British Empire. Then, depending on what flavour of steampunk you like, you inject it with the shadowy style of a Mike Mignola comic, or you design hugely complicated and oversized steam contraptions which replicate something not possible with Victorian era technology, or you put in fully fantastical elements from absolutely any era you choose. However, it’s also become recursive- now many adaptations of Victorian era stories include nods to steampunk, like Guy Ritchie’s pair of Sherlock Holmes movies. As with cyberpunk this causes many arguments over what exactly counts as a steampunk piece of work.
In both genres, however, the double life of -punk also continues apace. There are many works that are called cyberpunk which have all the visual tropes but it’s just there to be visually interesting, and ditto with steampunk. For what it’s worth I don’t get bothered by the fact that -punk after a word now primarily means an aesthetic. There’s a clear reason why this has happened, there’s nothing automatically wrong with having an aesthetic just because you enjoy its look, and neither do I take umbrage at pulp. The problem comes with the kind of bitter fights that ensue over whether something ‘counts’ as cyberpunk/steampunk or not, and with some of the specific consequences from choosing a particular aesthetic outside of its context.
Let’s take cyberpunk first. Depending on who you ask, it’s anything set in the near future that heavily involves virtual reality, and/or the internet, and/or cybernetics. Others would call it science fiction meets film noir. Others insist that to be cyberpunk, not only must there be a take on technologies that introduce the artificial into basic elements of human life, but there also must be a punk sensibility, or at least a pessimism about the impact of these near future technologies. Anything which can’t fit into another subgenre but isn’t sufficiently pessimistic is ‘postcyberpunk’. This has as much to do with the people who use cyberpunk as a visual aesthetic as the Magna Carta has to do with medieval re-enactors. Those who create works inspired by the most distinctive visuals associated with cyberpunk, or who write cyberpunk that isn’t particularly frightened of the future, or who create subcultures generated from the genre, are not wrong. It is fair to value a brace of themes associated with a form of speculative fiction, but you have to be prepared for a genre to thematically alter over time, particularly one so heavily based around the near future and technology. It isn’t enough to recognise that 12 gigabytes of data is not as impressive in the real 2016 as it was in the 1980s imagining the 2010s, you also have to recognise that different perspectives will be brought to near-future imaginings of human society’s continuing relationship with technology, and that cyberpunk should be big enough to fit those in. This is especially inevitable given that cyberpunk is not the sole province of North American and Japanese creators anymore, to our great fortune.
It feels like this is a common problem to any work or genre that was intended to be cutting edge but has existed for long enough to gain a history. Steampunk has ended up embracing this; the early steampunk influences are primarily works of Victorian science fiction, or its close equivalents, intending to genuinely speculate about the future with known science at the time, especially those works by Jules Verne. Instead they are now easily incorporated as somewhat pulpy, fantastical elements in a piece of fiction because science, technology, and science fiction have all changed so radically since then. Cyberpunk has been around a while, culturally speaking; if we purely went by its coinage as a term then the genre has been around for at least 36 years. If we included works prior to the genre getting solidified and named then we might be talking a full 50 years, going back to the earliest of Phillip K Dick’s work that resembles what became cyberpunk and his similar contemporaries in the 1960s. Even if we went with 36 as the minimum age then that is long enough that Usenet was only just established the very same year, 1980. Usenet is old enough that its decline is traditionally dated from 1993, and that AOL discontinued access to it in 2005 (many other ISPs having blocked access to it after a run of investigations into child pornography hosted on Usenet in the 90s). We are now in a world in which, as of 2015, you can expect an average internet speed of 2.8 mb/s in the Philippines, which is still below the global average of 5.1 mb/s, and in 2016 it’s estimated that there will be 2 billion users of internet-capable smartphones. The face of technology, the shape of history, and our interactions with simulations and the virtual have all gone along a very different path to that foreseen in the 1980s, to the point where all of the earliest cyberpunk seems like serious literature attached to an unbelievably pulpy setting, not to mention cliched. It is a complement to cyberpunk that, despite how dated much of the genre classics have ended up with extremely dated predictions, its aesthetics and some of its notions have ended up absorbed by populations at large, and celebrated. This is also why, to retain the serious credentials its authors seek, cyberpunk authors and critics need to stop trying to prevent substantial changes that preserve the genre’s spirit from counting as ‘cyberpunk’.
Steampunk, on the other hand, does have a problem with aesthetics trumping other concerns. There is a very good reason that I don’t believe that this is hypocrisy, given my earlier stance on aesthetic genres, and that is because of its incorporation of historical elements, and replication of something close to historical societies. Steampunk’s very underpinnings are taking Victorian era idealistic visions of the future and running with them, that’s where it comes from, and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. The problem comes when work labelled steampunk forgets what the Victorian era actually was, not to mention the British Empire that is so heavily mined for inspiration. These are not neutral subjects, these are not societies that are safely past and which have no resonance in very modern issues. It’s fine that -punk does not primarily mean a punk sensibility anymore, but I would hope that it was an accidental reminder to be careful with the real elements that your aesthetic incorporates.
The Victorian era did see the industrial revolution begin to come into its own, with grand architecture, magnificent machines, eccentric fashions, and a great amount of literature that we continue to enjoy. The thing is that the British Empire, the actual Victorian society used as the basis for Victorian fantasy, was in such a position in large part because of its, well, Empire. It runs off a fundamental concept that other peoples need to be dominated and controlled by their betters, and people seem to miss that founding and maintaining the Empire required a willingness to kill and manipulate for the sake of expansion. This isn’t me throwing out ‘give peace a chance’, it’s me complaining that what’s seen as quirky British upper class culture -silly accents, bowler hats, cricket, afternoon tea- masks the reality. It’s also the society that started the process of codifying eugenics, social darwinism, and racism, and this is not from the mouths of kooks; all of these either became mainstream in Victorian era British society, were codifying existing widely held views, or would become mainstream within a decade or so of Queen Victoria’s death. Neither are these the only dangers of the period. The Victorian world was one in which epidemics were frequent, even in the world’s most powerful and richest nations. In the UK it was normal for whooping cough alone to cause 10,000 deaths a year, across this entire period of history. Abject poverty was rife in Victorian Britain. Homelessness among children and destitution among adults was a simple fact of life, as was child labour. Not only did children work for a living, by necessity, many of them worked in factories and helped to maintain extremely dangerous machinery.
Steampunk fashion, these days, relies upon artisans as much as it does any kind of mass-manufacturing, perhaps more. But the goods and periods that are being replicated are those where mass production factories were dominant in working life for the first time. Take an airship that a begoggled character is flying in. Where did the materials come from make it? Are they the result of mass industry in the home nation or are they extracted from colonial subjects? What are the conditions of those workers like? Do they have any ability to organise to get better conditions? Do their children have any likelihood of becoming something other than their parents? And what about the people who made the airship, who put together its complex components and final form? What are conditions like in the factory? Are there children working there, and are there dangerous machines they are likely tasked to maintain? How much are these factory workers paid? Do they have any choice about working in a factory? Are there hazardous materials that they are being exposed to? In other words, the price of these cool steampunk toys is usually being paid by ignored multitudes. Works labelled as Steampunk that care, or at least think about this in some way are works that I respect, the ones that don’t are the reason that I am writing this article.
All of the steampunk fiction that I regard highly does not suffer the problem of perpetuating a white, upper class, western perspective on an industrial society. These works either draw attention to the inequities of the period, make an active attempt to demonstrate that things are different in particular ways, or introduce complexity in other ways. China Mieville, Neal Stephenson, Beth Cato and their kind are not the kind of authors I have a problem with. This is not an inevitable problem with steampunk, neither with fictional steampunk settings nor with purely aesthetic steampunkers. In both cases awareness, and accompanying forethought, goes a long way. However, as of right now, do pay close attention to who currently gets involved in steampunk fashion and subcultures- there’s a reason you might not find many dark skinned faces, because the history of race relations and the treatment of those considered nonwhite in this period does not lend itself to enthusiasm for the era, or a -punk derived from the Victorian era. Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, and not all slaves in the British Empire were actually free yet- it was only in 1838 that their period as forced apprentices ended. The most deadly conflict in US history was fought in the 1860s predominantly over the issue of slavery’s continuing existence in the USA. Though the 19th century saw the destruction of the Transatlantic slave trade via an increasingly potent alliance of abolitionist countries the actual treatment and attitudes towards the freed slaves, their descendants, and the free black people already living in the relevant countries did not improve. In fact it became even worse in some places. The Jim Crow laws in the United States was instituted from 1877 onwards, and in many cases reduced the legal rights and abilities of black Americans even compared to those they possessed before the abolition of slavery. In 1885 King Leopold II of Belgium acquired control over what was called the Congo Free State, and instituted a regime so brutal in the privately owned colony that it was scandalous even in the world of the early 20th century once knowledge became widespread of what was going on. It is recent enough in history that photos survive of Congolese men and women who had their hands cut off for incredibly minor offenses, and it’s estimated that up to 20% of the population of the Free State died from 1885 to 1908. Those of colour who do partake in steampunk fashion, in my experience, try to celebrate what might have been, and what could have been. Treating the British Empire, and the elite of the 19th century imperial powers, purely as a wardrobe for quirky dressup is a good way to show off disregard for quite a lot of people, past and present, and earns anything labelled steampunk nasty looks at times. And as for anyone who actively wishes to celebrate the British Empire as it really existed, well it’s pretty clear me and thee won’t see eye to eye.
Cyberpunk’s problem can be the inability to acknowledge the diversity that already exists in the literary genre, and to acknowledge that it’s become as much of a look and design choice as a deep and meaningful examination of the effects of technology on mankind. Conversely I think that many steampunk authors and aficionados lack an awareness of what they are playing with and its historical significance, and also an awareness that the movement lacks in diversity. Jadepunk and The Sea is Ours are welcome changes of pace, of an ilk with Avatar the Last Airbender in being entirely non-European inspired steampunk, and there needs to be far more steampunk of a similar mindset to both that still remains respectful towards people of colour. I really don’t want steampunk to gain the same reputation as high fantasy, which is (not always fairly) reputed to have become nothing but clones of the genre’s ur-texts. This doesn’t just require inspired writers to put their fingers to keyboard, it also requires support from those who love the genre and, when necessary, getting out of those writers’ way.
All pictures used in this article are in the public domain.
