Bruce Sterling - The User's Guide to Steampunk

Jake von Slatt — Tue, 09/16/2008 - 07:21

(Photo from Stephanie Booth's Flickr stream)

This is either brand new or somehow snuck completely under my RADAR. It's a little essay by Bruce Sterling written, I think, for GOGBOT that describes what Steampunk is and he F&@%ing nails it! NAILS it! I say.

He gets the community part right:

If you like to play dress-up, good for you. You're probably young, and, being young, you have some identity issues. So while pretending to be a fireman, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or whatever your parents want you to be, you should be sure to try on a few identities that are totally impossible.Steampunk will help you, because you cannot, ever, be an authentic denizen of the 19th century. You will meet interesting people your own age who share your vague discontent with today's status quo. Clutch them to your velvet-frilled bosom, because you will learn more from them than you ever will from your teachers.

He gets the crafts part right:

Steampunks are modern crafts people who are very into spreading the means and methods of working in archaic technologies. If you meet a steampunk craftsman and he or she doesn't want to tell you how he or she creates her stuff, that's a poseur who should be avoided. Find the creative ones who want to help you, and who don't leave you feeling hollow, drained and betrayed. They exist. You might be one.

And he wraps it up exactly right:

We are a technological society. When we trifle, in our sly, Gothic, grave-robbing fashion, with archaic and eclipsed technologies, we are secretly preparing ourselves for the death of our own tech. Steampunk is popular now because people are unconsciously realizing that the way that we live has already died. We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses. Steampunk is a pretty way of coping with this truth.

And then he puts a cherry on top! Go read the whole thing now! As they say on the LiveJournal: "I am full of Squee!"

Ephemera

Word.

HappyJack1888 — Sat, 09/20/2008 - 20:13

Thank you so very much for posting that, Jake. Couldn't have said it better myself.

HmmMMmm... Me like. :)

K. Smithington — Wed, 09/17/2008 - 10:59

HmmMMmm... Me like. :)

Well, I think his part on the

Cory Gross — Tue, 09/16/2008 - 10:53

Well, I think his part on the 90% of Steams is more or less right. I'd question his theories about the 10% of Punks though.

He doesn't really seem to explain how case modding a computer or welding together a kinetic sculpture for Burning Man is a serious statement on modern society becoming obsolete. Not that plenty of Steampunks haven't tried to make that connection, to which hundreds of Boing Boing and Gizmodo commenters have replied "get a life". Nor does Sterling seem to make the conceptual leap between Steampunk being made possible by modern technology - the post-industrial Information Age - and then it somehow surviving the collapse of that, or being a prophetic commentary on it. At least, as anything deeper than a kind of nascent, unconscious irony. Y'know, talking on the Internet about how much modern technology is dead and alienating. That's above and beyond how suspicious I've become, as a Goth no less, of a disenchanted minority trying to tell everybody else that they're just walking corpses. It's an almost fundamentalist-like zeal in thinking that other people are an emotional extension of oneself.

All in all, with the exception of calling it on socializing in funny costumes, Sterling just seems to be glossing the standard rhetoric with the silken prose of a professional writer.

(x-posted from Anachrotech)

The part I really liked

Jake von Slatt — Tue, 09/16/2008 - 11:50

The part I really liked was:

Steampunk is funereal theater. It's a pageant. A pageant selectively pumps some life into the parts of the past that can excite us, such as the dandified gear of aristocrats, peculiar brass gadgets, rather stilted personal relationships and elaborate and slightly kinky underwear. Pageants repress the aspects of the past that are dark, gloomy, ugly, foul, shameful and catastrophic.But when you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.

The modding and contrapting is the music, it's the pretty thing that brings people to bigger more important ideas. That's what all art does.

As for the "walking corpses" that's clearly metaphorical and refers to the sustainability of our lifestyle in developed countries. If you look purely at energy consumption without making any statements with respect to politics and society, it's clear he's correct. Our lifestyles WILL be radically different in the future because they HAVE to be.

I don't know... "We are

Cory Gross — Tue, 09/16/2008 - 12:04

I don't know... "We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses." sounds much more like the sort of hand-wringing, navel-gazing existential angst of people who are more bored with their own society than deeply conscious of earth-destroying and people-oppressing systems that keep it running.

I'm sure he is concerned about those, given his work on Veridan Design and such, but it hearkens back to the critique of Steampunk I've held since DIY raised its head. A wise man once advised Steampunks to "get ye off the computer" and into the workshop. I advise Steampunks to get ye out of the workshop and into a soup kitchen. If you're actually concerned about the world going to Hell in a handbasket, actually do something about it. Dressing up in costumes and enjoying the luxury of case modding is an expression of our society's monetary and technological excess, not a critique of it. The only thing it's criticizing are the aesthetic preferences of the majority.

That, I guess, is the big point I would say Sterling missed. He jumped from Steampunk being made possible by modern society to it being a critique, a "funeral theatre", without explanation because it's not true.

(Also x-posted from Anachrotech... Maybe we should just continue this here? ^_^)

Actually I think the audience

Jake von Slatt — Tue, 09/16/2008 - 12:53

Actually I think the audience is bigger at http://community.livejournal.com/anachrotech/414255.html and there won't be the delay of me approving comments.