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

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

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?

I'm not so sure of this. I think steampunk is like the Tolkien-esq fantasy world in stereotypical fantasy, it's become repeatedly xeroxed to the point that the historical root doesn't matter any more. It might as well be copying the aesthetics of Star Trek. Things as disparate as colonialism and the Pullman Strike don't enter into the equation. If there's any grounding in history, it's of the Hollywood or 'ironic' type.

There's a quote by Elizabeth Kostova that's really stuck with me since I first read it, and it sums up why I personally find it hard to separate steampunk from the era that spun it off: "The thing that most haunted me that day, however...was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred...For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth - really seen it - you can't look away."


(BTW, Your essay reminded me of a lot of the points Charles Stross made in this post (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/10/the-hard-edge-of-empire.html) about steampunk.)

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Excellent, well-written essay.

Among other major events of the Victorian era was the American Civil War. Secession and the founding of the Confederate States of America were undisguised white supremacy, the perfection of a race-based slave society into eternity. The CSA purified and perfected the Philadelphia constitution which verbally obscured that slavery, the slave trade, and federal representation was based on individual wealth, of which the 3/5ths clause made clear that slaves were money -- not people.

Also secession and the CSA were reactions to the progressive movements in Europe, and even up north in the U.S. They were part of the regressive political thinking of the ruling elites of South America and other parts of the world that managed to defuse or otherwise circumvent the revolutionary - progressive movements and revolts of the 1840's.

Steampunk to me is deeply troubling, particularly when any troubling thoughts expressed provoke the response, "This is just fun, and anyway Name Writer of Your Choice is writing African steampunk."

Love, C.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see one of the favorite tropes of alternate history fantasy, steampunk, mashup whatever you call it these days -- if you really want to re-imagine a world in which the indigenous populations weren't destroyed, Africans weren't brought to be slaves, etc. -- how about the 'New' World invade the 'Old' World? You'd have to do some serious thinking about history and the hinges. You'd have to really KNOW something.

Pretending that this usual re-imagining can do it without Indians, African slaves and all the rest, does NOT work. We still have Indians, but this time they're, oh, well -- trolls, with brightly colored feathers -- still not human Like Us.

Love, C.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

My stuff isn't steampunk, but it has the same problem of good-parts history. You can't write in an recognisable alternate history 1930s without the Nazis, and the Rape of Nanking, and the colonialism, and lynch-mobs in the USA. You have a period of change and uncertainty, and looming war, and there's a lot you can do with that, as well as the new technologies.

And you can put characters into those settings who can really be heroic, trying to do the right thing, because we know that so many of the bad things were defeated, if not quite destroyed.

It's sometimes difficult trying to depict the 1930s USA, because so much of what was there is so wrong. We were lucky that the other side won that battle, even if they weren't always clearly the good guys. There's a movie coming about the Tuskogee Airmen, and the way it seems to mess with the reality is worrying, but they were a sign that the USA was moving away from the lurking evils.

But I am biased. I'm not an American. I'm not one to panic over the word "socialist". I'm not viewing that history through a lens warped by current American media.

Colonialism? Just which colonial country's Indians are the ones with nuclear weapons and a space programme? History is complicated.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

Do you know any steampunk in a German setting?

[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?