So. Steampunk. That silly little kludge of a word, target of a hundred angry Playpen posts and much general grumbling. That thing everyone kinda likes, but which no one can really define, and which people who should know better will argue about until intellectual coherence is a wistful memory.

It's not that I hate steampunk. Quite the contrary; I been nosing about at the edges of the subgenre/whatever the hell it is for years now, after having been introduced to it though my interest in alternate history. I've got plenty of books that most reasonable people would describe as "steampunk," I've got a copy of Arcanum sitting in my DVD cabinet (which I'm going to play one of these days, honest!), and I've spent the past nine months on a SF criticism binge partly motivated by a desire to figure out what steampunk is. I've even been contributing for over a year now under a fairly obvious pseudonym to another ezine that specializes in steampunk matters.

And yet...sometimes I wonder what the point is. I'm a guy who's primarily interested in the literature, and some days I feel like I'm the only one out there. Everyone else seems to have more fun doing flossy DIY stuff or trying to import a boilerplate left wing/punk political message into the genre or just arguing for the sake of arguing.

Then again, much of the literature isn't much to write home about. A lot of it is just bog-standard pulp adventure with gratuitous pseudo-period window dressing (which is in all honesty the sum total of my reaction to Cherie Priest's Boneshaker). To makes matters worse, some authors (and I'm pointing squarely at YOU, Stephen Hunt and George Mann!) seem to use their retro settings as springboards to launch into some good old-fashioned wog-bashing, with fictional foreigners (or mobsters) being written as totally evil untermen who deserve nothing less than a thorough curbstomping at the hands of the forces of justice. Or the hands of the notBritish.

So, in other words, when I listened to Ferretbrain's third podcast, I was in broad agreement with everyone's complaints with steampunk. Still, I am a sentimental fool at heart, and I was still convinced that there was something in the subgenre worth salvaging. To that end, I've been picking through my ziggurat of books to see if there are some titles out there that actually do something interesting with the steampunk concept.

Wait, Could You Back Up For A Second?

Of course, all this awkward book recommending-disguised-as-proselytism will be somewhat pointless if there's no workable definition of steampunk against which titles can be judged. It's certainly been a bear for me to find one, and it's required a lot of digging back into modern history, the history of SF, the cultural manifestations of nostalgia and the nature of kitsch. For what it's worth, though, a decent prehistory of the genre can be found over here here, though it focuses more on film than books.

One of my major discoveries in the course of this informal research is that, despite appearances, steampunk does have a history. Something like like steampunk first reared its head back in the 1960s, in the shadow of New Wave SF. In a sense, it was a natural fit; one of New Wave's many interests was the history of science fiction. With the sense that contemporary (i.e. Campbellian American) SF was becoming a self-referential closed shop, no longer interested in trying to figure out what the future would be like, and with SF having grown to the point where historical progressions could be mapped, several New Wave writers decided to do some research of their own. Writers began poking around in the strata, taking a look at those earliest technological adventure tales from the Edwardian period and creating stories that mimed and celebrated the spirit of those early works, though always with a constant reminder of all that had transpired between then and the 1960s. Despite this, New Wave's engagement with the old tales was more a dalliance than anything. There was a brief flurry of results from such luminaries as Michael Moorcock (in his Oswald Bastable books), Christopher Priest (with The Space Machine, and Harry Harrison, who bounced about between genres while giving us A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!), then all went quiet again.

The next stage of steampunk's evolution came in the 1980s, with the team of James Blaycock, K. W. Jeter, and Tim Powers, all three of whom wrote multiple stories set in glamorized versions of Victorian London reimagined as a sort of Dickensian fantasy. The word "steampunk" comes from those three guys; it was facetiously proposed by them in a 1987 letter to Locus magazine to describe their work. Around that time, people were starting to get interested in this neo-Victorian SF thing (possibly due to greater cultural forces), the name took off, despite not having anything at all whatsoever to do with cyberpunk, so there, and the 1990s saw a steady stream of titles that eventually led to the subcultural growth we see today.

So, in other words, there is a vague twofold point to steampunk. If you ever want to criticize pre-WWI SF, or even post-WWI pulp SF for that matter, then you're doing steampunk. If you want to exploit the early industrial world (an heuristic term I use to describe any society with a technology level falling somewhere between 1820s and 1910s Western Europe) as a fantasy setting, then you're doing steampunk. It's noting that you could hang a manifesto on (if not from...), but it opens up several avenues for writers to engage with the history of SF and create provocative new worlds.

And Now, Story Time!

It is these avenues, these old ideas ready to be decanted and mixed into new solutions, that fuels my interest in steampunk. Below are seven books that represent the high points of fantastic industrial fiction, all of which are united in a desire to create something new with the past.

The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

This is the one book that everyone thinks of when the word "steampunk" is mentioned, though it does happen to be one of those books that lots of people have read that most people (myself included) didn't really understand. As near as I've been able to figure, the book is the story of a great mechanical AI trying to puzzle out its origins by observing the course of three people who were integral to its emergence. As a result, the book is formatted as a MacGuffin chase for a set of punchcards in a mid-19th century London dominated by the "Industrial Radical Party" of Lord Byron and Charles Babbage, which have used surprisingly hyper-effective analytical engines to kick off a Victorian Information Revolution. It's a bit of a chore to work through, but the descriptions of a London spasming into hypertrophic modernity are breathtaking, and even manage to riff on older sci-fi stories in subtle ways. (To this day I still can't believe it took me so long to realize that the glass cathedral pyramid that houses the biggest analytical engine in London was just a glamorous Victorian version of the concrete Ministries from 1984.)

Anti-Ice, by Stephen Baxter
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter

Back in the early 1990s, Stephen Baxter was flirting with steampunk (and some of his recent stories in Asimov's suggest that he's rekindled that romance), and the products of that liaison were these two books. Anti-Ice, the first book, is a sort of creepy reworking of Jules Verne, imagining a world where the British found an exotic form of antimatter in Antarctica that is rendered inert at zero degrees Celsius at the end of the eighteenth century, and subsequently used it to supercharge their national infrastructure. The story itself, set in 1870, is a brief exploration of the world that has resulted from this discovery. While the book maintains the outward forms of a harmless steampunk romp (the great majority of the story is a clever thought experiment of how a Victorian scientist could recreate the Apollo moon landings with period technology), there is a rather vicious undercurrent to the story, with the description of how Britain has been warped by the discovery of anti-ice and how its military applications have started a nuclear arms race during the Franco-Prussian war.

The Time Ships, by contrast, is a far more ambitious work. Set up as a direct sequel to The Time Machine, the book is essentially a modern scientific romance (i.e. a story where the protagonist drifts around and observes some great fantastic world or event in grand sweeping detail) that sees the Time Traveler introduced to the concept of parallel universes, Big Dumb Objects, nanotechnology, and all the goodies of modern hard sci-fi. Baxter's crowning achievement, though, comes in the middle sections of the book, a great riff on The Shape of Things to Come that's set in a parallel 1938 where WWI has been raging for decades, all the cities of Europe are enclosed in kilometer-wide concrete domes, and where Wellsian technologies are being exploited for the development of superweapons.

Jack Faust, by Michael Swanwick

I mentioned this before in my discussion of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and it's still one of my favorite Swanwick books to date. It's a retelling of the legend of Docktor Faustus, though this time around Mephistopheles, now a construct crewed by a race of alien creatures from another universe that only Faust can perceive, offers him access to the complete body of human understanding. Faust being the glory hound that he is, he soon puts this knowledge towards practical invention, essentially putting Late Renaissance Europe through an amphetamine-powered industrial revolution. It's a pretty fun romp through a creepily accelerated Europe that manages to compress about three hundred years of technological development into a few decades, and it's also a nice deconstruction of the "Edisonade" type genius inventor that shows the rather nasty impulses that lurk beneath that Promethean exterior.

The Light Ages, by Ian R. MacLeod
The House of Storms, by Ian R. MacLeod

These two are actually two of my absolute favorite books of all time. The premise itself is a killer; round about the end of the seventeenth century, this odd substance dubbed "aether" is discovered in England. While we never get to understand what aether is, it becomes fairly clear that it has the capacity to make matter respond to human will when alloyed with certain materials. The books themselves are set centuries later, when aether has completely changed the fabric of English life. The end result is a world that lies somewhere between alternate history and fantasy; the books read as very English, but they lack all the trappings we'd expect from an alternate history England, with no King, no Parliament, not even any Monday or Thursday. The whole world is suffused with a faerie glamor that, beautiful as it may be, cannot hide the baleful effects aether has had on society and technology. After all, when you can just use magic to make a better steam locomotive, who needs engineering?

The first book, The Light Ages is a Dickensian tale of a young man who moves from the industrial North to London while searching for a mysterious girl he loves, almost missing out on the revolution that tries to overthrow but ultimately submits to the current order. The promises of overthrow are eventually made good in The House of Storms, set a century later, which initially appears to be a gothic romance. At least, it does until halfway through the book, when London and Bristol decide to reenact the Somme in the Midlands.

Fitzpatrick's War, by Theodore Judson

While he hasn't written much, I consider Theodore Judson the most honest man writing steampunk. Alone of almost everyone who plays in the genre, he tries to work out the implications of following too closely in the models of the past. The end result is Fitzpatrick's War, a neo-imperialist tract designed to make readers ashamed of neo-imperialism. Judson's warmongers of choice are the Yukons, a society of cranky agrarian Protestants who in the twenty-fifth century dominate the Anglosphere, a feat made possible by their decision to exterminate the Americans as a people at the end of the twenty-first. The book itself chronicles the life and times of Issac Prophet Fitzpatrick, greatest leader of the Yukons, as he decides to emulate Alexander the Great and start a world war that basically rapes the rest of the planet. The horror is deftly communicated to us through the viewpoint of Robert Mayfair Bruce, confidant to "Fitz" and quite possibly the last Yukon with a conscience. There are some weaknesses, particularly with Judson's explanation for why the world has abandoned electricity, but it's a good scary read that will leave the reader wary of ever reading military sci-fi uncritically again.

Polystom, by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is another fellow who occasionally likes to dabble in steampunk. Swiftly, his Gulliverian pastische, is probably his most elaborate foray into the subgenre to date, though I refrained from including it on this list simply because I couldn't understand what the heck he was trying to do. I did, however,figure out what was going on with Polystom, and enjoyed it immensely. The story itself follows the adventures of the young lord Polystom, a high-ranking noble in his vaguely Greco-British society that reads like Wodehouse without the laughs in a pocket solar system where interplanetary travel is can be done with a four-hour biplane jaunt. As Polystom tries to understand why the death of his new wife has left him feeling a curious blankness, his investigations start to suggest that something is seriously wrong with Polystom and his world. Polystom is one of the few books I have read in which the steady undermining of a constructed world is both deliberate and surprisingly effective.