Steampunk

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's Steampunk (Tachyon, 2008) is a collection that wants to be many things at one time: a critical introduction to the genre; a historical overview; an anthology of relatively recent tales.  There are three critical essays, of which the first, Jess Nevins' "Introduction: The 19th-Century Roots of Steampunk," does the most to link steampunk to its literary antecedents--most importantly, the Edisonade, in which "a young American male invents a form of transportation" and proceeds to have wild, martial adventures in parts hitherto unknown (4).  As Nevins goes on to note, steampunk is constantly reworking earlier SF conventions (8), including the Edisonade's very American assumptions (9).  More polemically still, he claims that current steampunk has suffered from its "abandonment of ideology" (11), ossifying into a recognizable grab-bag of genre conventions without any self-reflexive, radical element.  (Oddly or interestingly enough, many of the editors' selections seem to have been chosen to refute this claim.)   The two essays at the end, Rick Klaw's "The Steam-Driven Time Machine: A Pop Culture Survey" and Bill Baker's "The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium," are both more personal in nature and more oriented towards offering reading/viewing suggestions. 

The VanderMeers admit up front that they've omitted several Big Names from the anthology because they write novels rather than short fiction; readers may understandably be a bit puzzled, then, to find that the anthology's first selection is...a brief excerpt from Michael Moorcock's The Warlords of the Air (1971).  If Moorcock, why not something from Gibson's and Sterling's The Difference Engine? In any event, the anthology offers one entry from the 1970s, two from the 1980s, five from the 1990s, and five from the 2000s, without explaining the rationale behind this particular chronological distribution.  Was steampunk all novel-length in the 70s and 80s? No interesting examples? A fad suddenly took off? I also note that only one of the 2000-era stories was originally published electronically, and that in the dual print/online SteamPunk Magazine, which is an interesting contrast to the more extensive online presence in the annual Dozois anthologies. 

In some ways, The Warlords of the Air and James P. Blaylock's "Lord Kelvin's Machine" (1985; basis for the novel of the same name) were the least effective selections in the anthology, although for different reasons.  The Moorcock entry was just too short and out of context to work effectively as an excerpt.  Beyond that, though, and despite the actual subject matter, its use of dialogue shares a certain...tweeness...with "Lord Kelvin's Machine": both stories want to parody Victorian earnestness, but the resulting archness cloys quickly.  There's only so much of "Certainly, sir.  Steady-on, sir" (19) that a story can bear. (Molly Brown's "The Selene Gardening Society" is similarly arch, but ultimately does better as faux-Wildean social satire.)   "Lord Kelvin's Machine" becomes more interesting when considered in relation to the Edisonade (as described in Nevin's essay) or, for that matter, the Victorian boy's adventure tales of G. A. Henty; we've got an intrepid scientific explorer, his loyal right-hand man, his trusty band of assistants, and the like, all out to rescue the world! from imminent doom!  Unfortunately, the VanderMeers don't provide particularly informative headnotes, which may leave readers unfamiliar with nineteenth- or early twentieth-century pop genres out in the cold. 

In fact---and this is speaking with my academic's hat on--the editors could have done a far more extensive job of situating these stories in genre context.  Mary Gentle's "A Sun in the Attic" (1985), for example, is indeed "feminist" (79), but it's also clearly in dialogue with the feminist utopian/dystopian tradition that includes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and Joanna Russ' The Female Man.   Similarly, Neal Stephenson's "Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast" (1995) is an amusing send-up of the Victorian missionary-cum-ethnographic-cum imperial explorer narrative, but the editors don't mention that, either.  Understandably, nobody felt the need to point out that Joe R. Lansdale's "The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A DIME NOVEL" (1999) is a Western (besides being a terrifically wacky combination of H. G. Wells meets Bram Stoker meets Vlad the Impaler meets Zane Grey),  but its SF reworkings of pulp Western tropes are the best things about the story.   Without much in the way of an explicit literary-historical context, it's difficult to see why these particular stories deserve inclusion in this anthology: if we follow Nevins and read steampunk as an ongoing critique of SF (and, quite clearly, non-SF), then what makes these stories notable examples of such a critique?

Which is not to say that the stories themselves are of poor quality.  The best-known is Paul di Filippo's surreal "Victoria," previously collected in the Steampunk Trilogy, in which a newt (!) has to stand in for the young Queen, who has absconded under feelings of great stress. Along with the di Filippo, Lansdale's pulped SF Western is the best comic piece in the anthology, even if it does feature graphic representations of execution by impalement (I wasn't kidding about the Vlad the Impaler bit).  Of the two golem stories, Jay Lake's "The God-Clown is Near" struck me as more effectively executed than Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters."  While the latter, which crosses kabbalah with the Industrial Revolution, has quite a neat concept, its narrative recapitulates Victorian and twentieth-century political history (nascent unionization, the effects of industrialization, the rise of eugenics, etc.) in a way that seems both too mechanical and too predictable; the protagonist's desire to reinstate domestic textile production as an alternative to "the conditions of the factory" (174), for example, borrows from John Ruskin and William Morris without really rethinking what Ruskin's and Morris' arguments about production might mean in a kabbalistic world.  (That being said, the story works better as a political tale than Rachel E. Pollok's "Reflected Light," which is also structured around a decent conceit--voice recordings on wax cylinders--but stops almost as soon as it gets going.)  "The God-Clown  is Near," while certainly not political in the way that "Seventy-Two Letters" is,  both offers a convincingly alien world in which people tend to be constructed, not just born, and plays around with the gender possibilities of such a world.  There doesn't seem to be any way to assimilate our protagonist's friend Jack to our own notions of gender identity.  Ian R. MacLeod's "The Giving Mouth," which morphs from dystopia to utopia, is a steampunked quest romance that muses, among other things, on the persistence of loss in even a world of dreams; it ends on a note reminiscent of "Sleeping Beauty," but with the proviso that "you will let her sleep, for no one would dare to wake her" (77).  Both it and Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance" are also boy's coming-of-age stories, in which the son must contest with the larger-than-life figure of an awe-inspiring but problematic (or downright abusive) father who is both the source of and an obstacle to his son's dreams.  Finally, Stepan Chapman's "Minutes of the Last Meeting" rewrites the fate of the Romanovs in terms of nuclear apocalyptofic, all set in a fierce satire on the usefulness, or lack thereof, of universal surveillance.  In Chapman's tale, the meek don't inherit the earth, but nanotech just might. 

Comments

[Jeff VanderMeer]

Thanks for this, but you've gotten a few things wrong.

(1) There aren't three critical essays. There's *one* critical essay that works as an introduction to the history of steampunk. And then there are two surveys of steampunk in pop culture, etc. Neither of those are critical essays and shouldn't be judged as such.

(2) The Moorcock is clearly described as a kind of "benediction" or "prologue" to the anthology, and it's clearly pointed out why we start with it: Moorcock was the godfather of "steampunk," a term that did not exist when he was writing those novels.

(3) Moorcock had nothing to do with The Difference Engine. That was written by Sterling and Gibson. This is a fundamental error and I hope you will correct it.

(4) We omitted *three* names who didn't do steampunk in the short form, two of whom only wrote one steampunk piece, a collaboration (The Difference Engine) not "many".

(5) We don't like story notes and rarely include them as we don't like leading the reader by the nose. And we weren't trying to provide an academic text, regardless of your opinion on that subject. I like your take on the Gentle very much, but your average reader doesn't care. This is a pop culture phenomenon at this point.

(6) As you may note from reading the introductory materials, the term "steampunk" wasn't coined until the mid-1980s and a concerted "steampunk" movement didn't occur until around that time, historical ancestors aside. Therefore, the distribution you mention is perfectly natural.

I would also argue that "Lord Kelvin's Machine" is the quintessential steampunk story and no steampunk anthology would be complete without it. It doesn't matter how twee or non-twee it is.

Further, to mis-direct on the Lansdale by calling it a Western is somewhat ridiculous as far as I'm concerned. It is a clear send-up and radical commentary on Wells and on the Edisonade. That's its strength.

Thanks for the other analysis, which is very interesting.

If you want an antho for general readers that also is meant to perform an academic or critical studies function, New Weird is for you.

RE/Search has a Steampunk book coming out that, as a companion volume to Steampunk, will serve the function you desire.

Thanks again.

Best,

Jeff VanderMeer

[JBJ]

No use to you today, of course, but PopMatters will run Any. Day. Now. an interview I did with the VanderMeers in which they speak to some of these questions.

[Miriam]

As I said, I've got my academic's hat on--and, as an academic, I can't help thinking that the connections are important. I'm perfectly happy to agree that a non-academic audience might not agree (although, given Nevins' argument, it seems fair to ask why not point out the genre conventions at play).

By "If Moorcock, then..." I didn't mean if Moorcock, then why not Moorcock's The Difference Engine, but if excerpt from this author, why not this excerpt from excluded authors? Still, badly phrased on my part, so fixed.

In retrospect, you're right that "Western" is overly restrictive, but the Western played a significant role in the dime novel pulp market. (And there's definitely some dourly comic Lone Ranger and Tonto commentary going on.)

Similarly, I have no objection to "Lord Kelvin's Machine" being in the anthology on the grounds that it's seminal; I understood that that's why it was there, and I agree fully with the decision to include it. I do have some questions about how well it holds up as a literary work (execution-wise, I found it much less impressive than some of the fiction elsewhere in the collection), and that's the sort of issue that requires...well, longer headnotes. Then again, MMV.