(urth) Steampunk books

Steven Hall sghall at comcast.net
Wed May 14 19:44:17 PDT 2008


Dan'l -

To paraphrase Stephen Colbert: "Thanks for agreeing with me, and I 
accept your apology."

Actually, I agree with everything that you wrote to clarify and provide 
nuance for my statement about steampunk.

(Well, everything except about _The Space Merchants_, that is; not that 
I disagree with you, but I am just not familiar with it enough to know 
that it is about the advertising/marketing industry of the 1950s.  So it 
would be improper for me to claim to agree with that.)

When I said that science fiction was about the present, I did not mean 
to imply that literally.  Rather, I was just hoping to dash off some 
quick thoughts about steampunk and science fiction without taking the 
conversation even farther off topic than it already was.

What I meant is that any evaluation of a work of science fiction usually 
reveals more about the time in which it was written than the future (or 
past, as the case may be) in which it is set.

I'm pretty sure you would agree with this, as your post lists three 
examples in support of this.

Thanks,
Steve






Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 6:18 AM, Steven Hall <sghall at comcast.net> wrote:
>> To add to this, science fiction is well understood to be about the present
>> in which it was written, not the future.
> 
> I quibble: this is only true for some values of the words "about," "science
> fiction," and even "is."
> 
> I.e., there is no doubt that in some important sense _The Space Merchants_
> "is about" the advertising/marketing industry of the 1950s. But there is
> another sense in which one can meaningfully say it is about a future
> extrapolated from that time.
> 
> I would take a much more nuanced approach and say:
> 
> Science fiction of any ambition comments deliberately on the world of
> the present in which it is written, by setting up a contrafactual world
> in dialogue with that world.
> 
> Science fiction lacking in ambition comments inadvertently on the world
> of the present in which it is written, by setting up a world that, failing
> to differentiate significantly from that world, depicts its commonplaces
> as if they were inevitable.
> 
>> Steampunk, then, is a combination of alternate history and science fiction.
>>  It is what we imagine the science fiction of the Victoria era might have
>> been.
> 
> Put the word "some" before that sentence and I will have far less
> trouble with it. But, some of the best steampunk (I think for example of
> Alan Moore's _League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_ -- not to be
> confused with the grossly inferior movie based very loosely upon it)
> can meet that description only by an inversion, because it uses our
> current view backwards of the Victorian era in an ironic pose that would
> literally not be possible to one living in that era. (Not that irony would not
> be possible to a Victorian, you understand; only that this particular form
> of irony, based on a historical view of Victoriana, would not be possible
> without that perspective.)
> 
> Of course, "the science fiction of the Victorian era" existed, in the work
> of Verne and others; it merely did not yet have a name, or an ironic
> view. That was introduced very specifically by Wells, whose early
> SF was very much "about" the world in which he wrote it (e.g., _The
> War of the Worlds_ as commentary on colonialism, or _The Island of
> Doctor Moreau_ as commentary on "vivisection").
> 
>> Or to put it another way: in the present, we go back to the past to
>> re-imagine the future.
> 
> Rather: in the present, we go back to an imagined (and usually
> explicitly fictional) past to imagine its possible futures.
> 

-- 
Steven Hall
sghall at comcast.net

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