Bittercon: the Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk

[attackfish]

Steampunk is frequently realized as an idealized, shiny version of the Victorian era, with quite a few of the nasty bits missing or obscured. The real Victorian age was a mix of great wealth and progress with poverty, workhouses, and more. What does it say about us when the latter are left out?

For a previous round of bittercon, I wrote about history and fantasy in which I touched briefly on the moral ramifications of using real world histories as a basis for fantasy worlds, which generated the most discussion.  When I saw this topic, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to write a follow up.  Recently, there have been several writers posting about how it can hurt when their own histories are played with.  Steampunk I think shows the other side, how it can hurt when someone plays with a history they insist is not yours.

The Victorian era we read about and feel the sort of longing for that it prompts genres like Steampunk is the product primarily of the writings of the wealthy.  This, combined with the natural filter of nostalgia means that it was almost inevitable that most Steampunk fans want the good parts version of history.  People like shiny things.  That’s why they’re expensive.  We also like to play, and this is a fun genre.

However, just underneath the surface of the gilded age was a foundation of poverty, starvation, oppression, inequality, conquest, and colonialism.  In America, the beginnings of the Victorian era were propped up with slavery and destitute urban labor, and the end was propped up with sharecropping and destitute urban labor.  The tide of immigrants that flooded int the country outstripped even the speed at which the Federal government wrested land away from American Indians.  In England and much of Western Europe, they sucked resources from the colonies, including Ireland, itself part of Western Europe, to prop up the homefront, and the poor choked the cities, desperate for work while the wealthy sprawled out in the country.  In Russia, they didn’t need colonies, because the majority of people at home were still surfs.  This was the era that so horrified Dickens and Marx and prompted attempted revolutions all over the continent and the colonies.  Women held almost no power, and people with disabilities were treated with scorn and pity.  Protestants called the Pope the Antichrist, missionaries tried to get natives to stop worshiping idols, and anti-Semitism was natural and acceptable.

When we ignore this to play in the Victorian Era, we say that those stories, the stories of the oppressed, don’t exist.  The world is cooler without them.

None of this means that Steampunk is rotten at the core, any more than other fantasy and science fiction, which has an interesting history of erasure to say the least.  Aside from the fact that it’s the right thing to do, there are some seriously amazing stories to be found in the underbelly of a Steampunk society.  Steampunk in Victorian India, in the colonial cities of China, in colonized Africa, in places the Europeans were never quite able to subdue, Indian tribes using Steampunk, the women’s suffrage movement with pneumatic robots.  Steampunk that maybe just acknowledges that someone’s servants aren’t happy and adoring.  There is some of this out there.

Steampunk is in some ways a complete paradox.  It is a product of a certain unconscious nostalgia, a sense that things were better then (or more interesting) and yet the Victorian era itself was full of great thinkers who touted the wonders of progress.  The Victorians, especially the late Victorians, where most of the Steampunk I have come across focuses, had a very linear view of history with the industrialized west at the pinacle of human development, in which constant progress and universal betterment was the assumed outcome of the passage of time.  This fit in well with their colonial aspirations, and is responsible in part for their belief in the “white man’s burden”.  They had made it, they could teach others to make it, and then everything was going to just get better and better for everyone.  This wasn’t of course to say there wasn’t a lot of nostalgia in Victorian times, especially for the middle ages, as evinced by Gothic revival architecture, books like Ivanhoe, the popularity of the King Arthur legend, an emerging Pan-German Nationalism (oh dear) and the entire romantic movement, but in general, like 1950’s America, progress was the word of the day.

Steampunk may itself be reflective of a larger darker movement of nostalgia in which subsets of the Religious Right talk about returning the country to its core values and deliberately invoke the Victorian era (and the 1950’s) for their supposed good behavior.  Thankfully, most people who enjoy the genre probably know better than to fall for that, but does this adoration of the past help their cause?  Nostalgia is natural and normal, but it can be dangerous.

Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic stolen from a panel at the 2011 Worldcon.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

The thing is, the failed rebels were around in written SF long before Firefly, and sometimes buying into the same Hollywood version of the Civil War. There were several Westerns involving groups of Confederate soldiers who were isolated from the slavery, and former Confederate soldiers in the US Army on the frontier.

It's a pretty pervasive thing in the US landscape. I wouldn't like to overemphasise Hollywood in Whedon's sources.

On the other hand, when you put it in Space, with the sort of authoritarian government which was the Big Bad of the Cold War, it's hard to avoid the sympathetic rebels, and maybe we shouldn't forget the Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. But the guys aren't being picked on for being rebels, not in a blatant gulag sort of way.

It's not quite so simple.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

You could do without the and, for example, going off on a tangent to write about the Rape of Nanking in a story that takes place in the American south might be a little unnecessary, but you better have the racism, rape of black women, and lynch mobs. And, you know, the Great Depression.

This is true. The Nazis and other fascists were so unspeakably evil that it make anybody fighting them (Except maybe Stalin) look like saints by comparison.

I hadn't heard of any new movies about the Tuskegee airmen, and google tells me nothing.

You should probably know that the current American news is warped, but the actual storytelling apparatus isn't all that much warped than anywhere else. Of course, they're all pretty warped. I mean, look at Europe's outright racial panic, and the German prime minister saying that multiculturalism is an experiment which has failed. That would never fly in the US. We say things that would never fly in Europe, but it goes both ways. And it's only a certain age/socioeconomic status/set of regions that go into panic over the word socialist, but since they're pretty high up on the scale and the Republicans have been catering to them for so long, their impact on the political discourse is disproportionately loud.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

We tend to use Hollywood to refer to the entire mythmaking apparatus, because it was so good at synthesizing and codifying tropes used elsewhere. While the glorious lost cause was common in literature and penny dreadfuls, and a sort of Southern consciousness, when westerns became big business in Hollywood, they picked up the trope and gave it the kind of staying power that it needed to just be considered an accepted part of the western genre. The US is still heavily divided by the memory of the civil war. If not for Hollywood, the trope never would have made it in the old Union.

That was the other reason I couldn't deal with the browncoats. If the government was as awful as they said, why weren't they all in a secret prison somewhere?

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of any new movies about the Tuskegee airmen, and google tells me nothing.

"Red Tails": due out January 2012, trailers on YouTube.

The specific time and place I'm working on isn't the American Deep South, and the whole mess in China is rather more immediate as a threat. At the same time there's also the Spanish Civil War, and there are quite a few African-Americans visible in photographs of the Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigade.

Heck, I'm calling it a mess. It was worse than that. There was Civil War in China, paralleling the chaos of the Russian Civil War, with people such as the Mad Baron taking part in both. and the series of "Incidents" in the 1930s were just another name for a Japanese invasion. That changed when the Chinese government decided to formally fight, and proceeded to lose, big-time.

One of the weird details was that China was getting help from Germany.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Should I be worried that George Lucas is producing it, I wonder.

*whistles* That is a mess. Part of the tendency to strip out the darker aspects of history is to just simplify, I think, especially in works that leave a lot of dark bits in. They just can't deal with it all.

Bad Germany, you're not supposed to help the Victims of your allies

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Maybe they are.

Time for a Firefly/Matrix Mash-up?

[danielmedic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it probably could have.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Oh, the German presence in China started long before Hitler. And Japan wasn't a formal ally until 1940, though there were earlier treaties. such as the Anti-Comintern Pact.

The German Military Mission was withdrawn in 1938

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

That would be pretty epic. Or if we wanted to keep it in the Whedon family, Firefly/Dollhouse. Good luck getting to sleep afterwards, though.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh, inherited foreign policy. All makes sense now.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

I think the problem the browncoats had/has with the government is the same the problem many people in USA has with there government just more so because to my understanding the Alliance in Firefly is more akin to the North European governments with laws fore and against most things, (guns, taxes, how you are suppose to do your job etc.). Also to my understanding the Firefly was suppose to be a show with a grey-and-grey moral, it is just that we se the universe from the eyes of some weary bias people (who also happens to be criminals).

The Alliance is probably not worse than USA's government in the last century with all its double-dealing, CIA operations and wars.

I think that the problem is that if you are doing a semi-realistic space western then you need an excuse to why so many people are carrying guns and know how to use them. The easiest, and probably best, explanation for that is a war in the backstory, and any war in a western like environment is going to be associated with the American Civil-war with makes the losers of that war the Confederation.

Not to say that any glorification of the Confederation is right but the same can be said about the North.

On a different but similar topic have you seen the movie CSA - The Confederate States of America?

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

Have you read GURPS Alternative History II?
It has one parallel, Ming-3, where China under the Ming Dynasty decided not to stop with ocean travel and exploration and is now (1857) controlling or influencing large part of the world.

Another one is Caliph where a scientific revolution in the 9th century has made created space travel and interstellar colonies in the 17th century.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Whedon has actually said they were a reference to the Confederates. Having a group of failed revolutionaries in a fictional world would not be a bad thing, and would in fact be cool, but not when it's explicitly an allusion to a revolution that was over the failed group's rights to own other human beings (and yes, that was what it was about, the states' rights argument was a later invention and a smokescreen). Though the South continues to glorify the Confederates, and Hollywood follows suit, it was a very black on gray war, not a gray on gray war, and Firefly contributes to a narrative that obscures that.

Tropes like the failed revolution in a western aren't awful on their own, or if there's one or two (because then it wouldn't occur to us to think Confederates) but in aggregate it's bad. And it might not look so bad to someone who isn't American (because you're not getting steeped in this history and mythos) but it is. It really is.

As for the guns, you could just make it so that the outlying planets have a problem with dangerous creatures and general lawlessness, so that gun running has become big business. If you already have a corrupt government, then all you have to do is mention the gunrunning, and mention someone who was paid off. remember, Whedon himself is an American, and gun laws are much looser over here.

I did, but I has so many quibbles with the historical viability of it that I couldn't enjoy it.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I burned out on gaming when I was in high school. Never read either. Though I did read a set of essays about what would have happened if Zheng He were the one to colonize the Americas.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

It is more of a setting book than a real game book and as such it had not hurt it if it was a couple of pages longer, or twice as thick.
It is interesting and I can recommend it if you are interested in Alternative history but I have to say that the illustrations are terrible if you have any kind of idea how fashion develop.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I'll have to check it out.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

"Whedon has actually said they were a reference to the Confederates."

I did not know that, do you know where I can find it?

"As for the guns, you could just make it so that the outlying planets have a problem with dangerous creatures and general lawlessness, so that gun running has become big business. If you already have a corrupt government, then all you have to do is mention the gunrunning, and mention someone who was paid off. remember, Whedon himself is an American, and gun laws are much looser over here."

You have a point, but I have problems seeing the Alliance corrupt in that way, but that is just me, and if you are trying to impose order on people one of the thing you don't what them to have are weapons they can hide under there jacket. Also the Alliance is partly Chinese and they don’t have as loos gun laws as USA.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

It's from Serenity: The Official Visual Companion by Whedon himself. He states that after reading the historical novel Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, he wanted to develop a show about the losing side of an American Civil War type conflict. He also has Mal say "We will rise again" in one episode, which is a standard Southern slogan about the Confederacy.

I thought the show made it pretty clear that the Alliance didn't have the greatest control over the outer planets, and there's always someone in the government who can be paid off when control is lax and plausible deniability is high. Besides, a war wouldn't be a good explanation, because what's the first thing you do to a surrendering enemy? Make them disarm.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

Thats true, I'm not giving up my opinion but you have a point.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

Do you know any steampunk in a German setting?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld spends time in Austria and Switzerland, and one of the two main characters is a Hapsburg prince. The main setting is a British airship, though.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

thanks

[corrinalaw.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I've been working on a steampunk series and when I started out with my worldbuilding, I thought of my friend who writes Regencies and how we noted that most (but not all) of those stories center on the ruling class especially in a romance.

So when I went to the Victorian Age, I was thinking far more along the lines of Sherlock Holmes, where you do get a sense of London as a dangerous place with glass differences and serious social problems. (Not perfect, of course, but at least Doyle was writing about his contemporary world, not a romanticized view of it.) The annotated versions of Doyle's stories point out these things. The existence of the Baker Street Irregulars and several lower-class clients in Holmes' stories seem deliberate.

Hopefully, my world touches on a lot of the class and racial differences not only because that's my inclination but because why take out stuff that can create such lovely story conflict. Who's got all the cool gadgets? Only the rich kids? Who is benefitting from all these great science inventions? Are more people being fed or are they just being used to create dirigibles? And what if you happen to be a talented scientist at heart but your father is in a debtor's prison?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Seriously. Those problems to me say lovely lovely conflict. Why wouldn't we dig into them?

I eagerly await your series.

[corrinalaw.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Right now, it's in the submission format. Soon, though!