Steampunk

[gfish]

I'll admit it: I feel somewhat self-conscious and embarrassed by being into steampunk. A lot of it is done very poorly, by the standards that I care about. But I like it. I like having a fantasy genre that focuses on my favorite technological aspects of my favorite period of history. I don't care that it is goth turned brown -- I like the goth look too, it just isn't for me. And with all due respect to Charles Stross, I really don't care that it glosses over 19th century class struggles.

Beyond it simply being an aesthetic that happens to speak to me, though, I find it all very... refreshing. The last 15 years have been very good for fandom. (Maybe too good, but that's another post.) I've enjoyed seeing the energy and excitement that has come in with every new fan-friendly media property. I've gotten into more than a few myself. But they're all properties, owned by someone. Or, worse, something. Most turn a blind-eye towards fan remix culture, but the threat is always there. They're someone else's sandbox. More creepily, being a fan for a commercial enterprise makes your enthusiasm into free advertizing. I'm rather uncomfortable with my excitement being... harvested. Particularly if we're talking about a large corporate IP owner. I'm glad that there is a business model which means big awesome media properties get made, but that doesn't make me entirely comfortable with all of the details.

Steampunk, obviously, isn't like that. It's a genre that people are getting excited about. No one owns it. No one is cynically making money from your honest devotion. There are conventions but no cannon. No lingering background threats of DMCA takedowns or copyright lawsuits if you do too much free publicity for it.

Plus, how often do you get to see an entire genre being invented? I used to think steampunk was going to be a brief fad, but now I'm not so sure. It's starting to have the feeling of a core mythos now. I wonder if this is how the explosion of Tolkien-style fantasy felt.

Comments

[keystricken.livejournal.com]

Reading this made me curious as to how steampunk was begun, so I asked Wikipedia. Looks like the phrase was coined as a variant of cyberpunk, which also got its start as a science fiction genre (with a 1983 book of the same name). In other words, it's very much a Tolkien-style explosion, only moreso because there's no 'canon' work to dictate conventions and hold everything else in its shadow.

In fact, the literary scene has been the backbone of every craze I can think of (e.g. zombies, vampires) that has significant cross-pollination with movies, video games, jewelry on Etsy, etcetera. Does this mean that literature is still the prime mover of popular culture? That's a little encouraging.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the closest to core canon it gets is Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine, and even that is almost entirely an honorary position. I can't think of any direct influence it has had, beyond the most general visual elements. It was never even all that popular.

I'm not too worried about literature. With the trend over the last 10 years of more complex mass media, I think it's getting more accessible again to general audiences. It's certainly a mover of pop culture. Not sure if there will ever be a prime mover again, though, hard to see things getting less fragmented short of a widescale Collapse scenario.