The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Actual Thoughts on Steampunk (2025-11-24)

Quote of a lovely image of an orchestrion from Jake Von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop website. The original-original source is a Collector's Weekly 2012 article Von Slatt cites, which is also well worth a look. Both pages visited and working 24 december 2024.

Nearly seven years ago I wrote a piece called The Nineteenth Century Blahs, but never did get around writing much about one the stranger responses to the nineteenth century of the late twentieth and early twenty-first, steampunk. The great steampunk vogue came and went in the 2010's, running alongside the temporary mainstreaming of so-called "geek culture." For awhile there, every comic con or similar event had at least a solid steampunk-costumed contingent, if not a full track of sessions to complement a substantial number of vendors and products. Among speculative fiction writers, a very few tried their hand at writing counterfactual histories and alternate timelines that were really interesting. At the moment such writing is tragically blighted by the market hijacking and perversion of the concept of "woke" combined with protestant extremist demands for faith displays commonly designated "virtue signalling." But if you can find at least the Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution anthology edited by Ann Vandermeer, you can have the marvellous experience of reading an excellent selection of stories including other than "white" main characters from before the blight took off. Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer is also good, if you can track it down. But the first Steampunk anthology they edited, which features the first short stories reveals profoundly violent and disturbed evidence of how most of the first steampunk writers were specifically nostalgic for an era when supposedly patriarchy was absolute and the lesser races were treated like subhumans without apology by "whites." It's a deeply disturbing read, but for anyone who is concerned to see a full spectrum of written treatments including the worst, then that first anthology represents an important historical record.

For good or ill though, in the end steampunk became almost wholly about an aesthetic, and so by nature this meant it could only become a fashion and then quickly miss or even actively close potential avenues for imagination and artwork. So if a person was drawn to steampunk by what could be construed as a critique of modern technology with its constant drive for centralized control and rendering everything possible into pictures under glass, the contradictions began to poke out in a hurry. While there is an admittedly fun thumb-nosing in steampunk redecoration of computers and computer peripherals, rendering them other than butt-ugly for most "PCs" and rejecting the weird anorexia-adjacent and colour palette-minimized aesthetics of recent apple products, the fact remains this is only about looks, not fundamentals. It's less glamorous to get into the discussion and considerations about freelibre software and hardware, although the joys of joining the rogue repair community are evident in such businesses as ifixit and the craft fora like instructables.com. Yet it seems to me there was an important element of an attempt to revalourize practical skills and ways of practising art still often sneered at as mere "craft" because they don't depend on expensive art supplies. Still, I get why the aesthetic element took off long before the commercialization kicked in. Thanks to commercialization and mass production of products designed to land in the trash as quickly as possible, which if all else fails turns out to mean they are poorly designed and/or ugly and difficult to impossible to refurbish, the result is both boring and disgusting to the eye. Maybe various cynical parties saw this as a means to drive people back to the pictures under glass, where the colour and movement are. Then faced with the evidence from more than just steampunk aesthetic that people value pleasant textures and hefts, techbros decided handheld computers needed "haptic feedback." (Including the jackanapes who decided they would literally hide all options to switch from "haptic feedback" to quiet, distinct click sounds instead.)

Perhaps what steampunk as an aesthetic and performance mode reflected more than anything else was a particular cohort of young but mature adults, who for awhile found a wonderful niche to meet up together and have fun in. It started out from rather humble beginnings, associated primarily with thrifting and reuse. In fact, it could even overlap with the larping scene, while not depending so much on waving around swords and pretending the world is full of elves and orcs or rolling dice. The few people who tried to "dress victorian" on an ongoing basis seem to have been after something else demanding rather more money, and in at least one case I am aware of, ended up with them being formally ordered out of a local botanical garden and tourist attraction. (I don't have the details about the botanical garden incident, it all sounded very odd, and seems to have come down to some sort of ban on "costumes" in the gardens unless it is hallowe'en.) This also suggests that this particular aspect of steampunk aesthetic was made ephemeral by default, because the people involved would tend to be pulled away from their original cosplay groupings by such life necessities as moving for work, dealing with lack of work, perhaps building a life with a partner and even having children. But hopefully the incidental reminders about how people can still create art in their daily lives, resist pressure to generate constantly growing mountains of plastic waste, and have fun with similar aged and/or like-minded friends.

I am not convinced by the people who sneer at handheld computers masquerading as phones as skinner boxes, nor when they sneer at people they think are run wholly by their "smartphones." I am not too convinced by the people who have decided to reframe questions about "social media" and handheld computers in terms of demands for "digital veganism." Yes, I too have seen toddlers handed a phone or tablet to keep them busy instead of more familiar toys whose role in building muscle and gross motor skills are now being rediscovered the hard way. While I agree wholeheartedly that we have a serious and growing problem with technologies designed and redesigned to encourage physical and mental helplessness with a strong side of surveillance and attempts to impose centralized control, the associated technologies are symptoms not the disease. The disease is the all-pervasive clash of social classes, whether we like it or not, and the best and most thoughtprovoking uses of steampunk as a loose category within speculative fiction and a cosplay aesthetic practice actually dealt with this element directly. After all, who had well-fitted, elaborate clothes in the real life nineteenth century and often the fictional steampunk reimaginings of it? Who could act as if there was no such thing as money and expect to be accompanied by servants who mysteriously never needed paying? Fashion is not so unimportant or unrevealing as we are encouraged to believe.

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