attackfish | Bittercon: the Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk

Entry tags:

Bittercon: the Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Most Steampunk seems to take pace in the late Victorian era, thereby in some people's eyes, probably sidestepping slavery, despite the fact that race relations actually worsened from a small high point in the years directly following the Civil War (though race relations weren't exactly good then either) to the deep lows that categorize the late Victorian age, sometimes called the nadir of American race relations. Also, a number of Steampunk stories take place in the American west, for the most part ignoring or glossing over A)the numbers of former slaves and B) the number of former Confederate soldiers who went West. Also, part of the reason that I want to smack any Southerner who talks about states rights (other than that it's really disgusting) is the simple fact that they were actually railing against state's rights. In the South Carolina succession declaration that the other Confederate states adopted, they complained about the Northern states' noncompliance with Federal fugitive slave laws, and this was he only mention of states' rights. And even if they had given a flying you know what about states' rights, it would have been a story of them putting the rights of the government above human rights. this is part of why I was never able to stomach Firefly. The browncoats were meant to be a parallel to the numbers of former Confederate soldiers walking around, but they were treated by the show as the righteous but failed revolutionaries. The writers bought into the Confederate lie.

I think the reason Steampunk doesn't trouble me so much is that that venerable fantasy subgenre I grew up on, medieval fantasy grossly distorts medieval realities to clean it up and erase the histories of the oppressed already. I don't see how Steampunk is any worse in that regard. However, it means that like medieval fantasy, I eagerly hope for better. And there are multiple examples of the genre that I just can't stomach. In other words, it's not tat Steampunk doesn't have a lot of fail, but I'm so used to fail in SpecFic that it doesn't make me lose any more faith in humanity.

"This is just fun," is a close cousin to "This is just fiction," both of which prompt me to want to give a long lecture about societal myth-buiding, culture, and identity.

Edited 2011-09-01 18:41 (UTC)

Hollywood has always bought into the southern revisionist view of the Civil War and history, particularly in the locii and periods post the American Civil War. I'm actually writing a book about why and how. Eeek!

Whedon bought into it naturally, as can not be missed in Firefly -- like all those neo-cons who insist that hundreds of thousands of slave fought on the confederate side.

Love, C.

It's a good story. Too bad it's wrong. And so very racist.

And then there are the neo-cons (probably the same ones) who talk about how blacks were better off as slaves. Nonononononononono...

Why, yes! They were better off as slaves and the enslaved knew that. That a hundred thousand of the enslaved fought in the Confederate army proves it!

Love, C.

Of course.

Sometimes the winners don't write history. The idea that they always do is a useful propaganda tool for the neo-Confederates, of course, much like their beloved myth of the "liberal media."

To be fair to Whedon, I think he was deliberately modeling the world of Firefly not on post-Civil War America, but on Hollywood's version thereof; the gray and butternut just came along for the ride.

True, it was meant to be a space western, with tropes like the hooker with a heart of gold, and former Confederates, but it could have still been a space western without ever going anywhere near that trope.

Yeah, it probably could have.

Not unfair. The Hollywood model is wrong, just as Whedon's models of graphic novels, comix, etc. for how women are displayed and depicted is not feminist and is wrong.

Hollywood is a propaganda machine that sometimes actually consciously is working for the established power. They even take funding from the government, i.e. you and me, to produce shows such as Army Wives, funded muchly by the Pentagon. The film, Thunder Road, is a notorious example of the FBI doing the same back when, and more lately, White Collar is another.

Alas, White Collar is the best light-touch, witty, sexy, sophisticated caper romp entertainment going!

Love, C.

This is what gets me. If it's "just fiction", why does so much money go into ads? Why does the government funding shows that promote it's agenda? Why do we eat it up?

I WILL FORGIVE WHITE CALLER ALMOST ANYTHING (and there is a lot to forgive)

That what Neal Caffrey does to the audience, I fear. But I also love Peter. And his wife! And the dog! And the FBI secondaries. I don't care much for the female love - frenemies of Neal's though, because I can't tell the difference among them. I can't even remember their names!

Love, C.

Kate was barely there, and I have no idea what to do with Alex after the S2 finale, but I like Sara. But mostly, I'm there for the fandom, which is full of smart, smart people who write really well and have a thing for threesome fics.

Yeah, I was going to say, steampunk does to the Victorian era pretty much what high fantasy does to the Middle Ages; and I'm not sure one is any worse than the other. Either way, I suppose, if the story is enjoyable enough I can suspend my disbelief long enough to ignore the huddled masses in the background. And yes, that is perilously close to an "it's just fiction" argument -- I guess I'd modify it to "but it's good fiction." Good storytelling offers absolution for a multitude of sins. (E.g., I'm as much of a Union partisan as you'll find anywhere, but I'm still willing to forgive Firefly's crypto-Confederacy.)

Steampunk's unique flavor of nostalgia does bother me, though. Verne and Wells weren't writing knowing, ironic, retro-futurism; they were writing science fiction, plain and simple, with their knowledge of the science of the day. Steampunk's worldview condescends to everyone who lived in the era being depicted, of whatever social status, by treating them as quaint objects rather than as people doing the best they can with the world they have. Good fantasy and SF don't do this.

The quality of writing also often lends a sense of realism and compassion to the narrative, so that those huddled masses become real. That's the fantasy I want to read.

I want to see more punk in the Steampunk, less ideological contentedness. It can be done well (just as medieval fantasy can) but I'm not sure I like the collection of tropes the subgenre is collecting. As for condescention, much of that is the way a lot of Steampunk present snaphots of the Victorian world, and a view of a static society.

"The browncoats were meant to be a parallel to the numbers of former Confederate soldiers walking around, but they were treated by the show as the righteous but failed revolutionaries."

Really?

I see it now, since hello, Amy! Wild West meets Space? What did I think it was supposed to parallel? But because they didn't say much about the motivations of the colonists IIRC, I didn't make the connection. And the movie Serenity said "Big Brother goverment made slaves of people because of drugs and mind experiments so obviously Mal and co were right!" so that blinded me further.

I still like cowboy mercenaries in space. :(

I think I also miss the days when I didn't see deeper messages in shows. Innocence lost makes for sad Amy. It's good that I do see it now so that I can encourage competing narratives of the underrepresented, but I think there will always be a part of me that wishes a show was just a show and a book was just a book. I know that's crap, but still.

Oh man, I miss those days too. But, What Is Seen Cannot Be Unseen.

Or, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife

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.

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?

Maybe they are.

Time for a Firefly/Matrix Mash-up?

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.

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?

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.

"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.

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.

Thanks.

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Bittercon: the Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject