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attackfishSteampunk 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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 forbittercon 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.
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. 
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 03:11 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 03:35 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 04:05 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 05:07 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 05:11 pm (UTC)Thats true, I'm not giving up my opinion but you have a point.