The steam-powered rocking chair

kw: book reviews, science fiction, historical fiction, anthologies

A couple of dozen years back, a new term was applied to a retro-Victorian style of science fiction writing: Steampunk. I grew up at the tail end of the steam-and-clockwork era. My best summer job was working a maintenance job at an amusement park, on a narrow-gauge live-steam train ride that is still operating at Cedar Point. I've ridden a Stanley Steamer. I also once did my math homework on a gear-driven calculator the size of a large typewriter, that sat in my Dad's office. And our family hobby of collecting and repairing antique clocks remains with me, in attenuated form, today. My favorite running clock has its gears exposed under a glass bell jar. Strange to say, this quintessential symbol of the age of analog devices is one of the first truly digital artifacts.

I also grew up in a time of protest. The comfortable life once called "the American dream" gave way to Vietnam-era disillusionment and anti-establishment became the norm. It is amusing today to see what has become of those who proclaimed, "Don't trust anyone over thirty!", as they reach their sixties. But the anger of the times got a name: Punk. Put nostalgia for steam trains with the anti-tradition edge that remains in today's empowered Boomers, and you get Steampunk, a collection edited by Jan and Jeff Vandermeer. This anthology gathers some very disparate strands of a genre that is a bit too big for one word, plus three self-conscious essays.

Steampunk is not just a literary genre. It has birthed an even larger genre of "graphic novel" (thicker-than-usual comic books) and a smattering of web sites. One of the best on the web is BoingBoing, which celebrates technology in toto, with a heavy emphasis on retro-steam/gear tech. This image is from a BoingBoing article that points to The Insect Lab, an artist's online studio for sculptures, not just of insects, but made out of insects with gears and other accessories added.

Such insects would fit right into "Minutes of the Last Meeting", the penultimate story in Steampunk, a tale replete with steam trains and brass-gear-driven machinery, coupled with nanotechnology that drives both medicine and surveillance. Could that cricket in the corner be watching you? (or be the eye of a supercomputer that is watching you?)

The stories collected in the anthology cast a wide net, one that laps a little beyond what I'd call Steampunk. Though "The Giving Mouth" has a steam-n-gear setting, it is a creation myth, and "Seventy-Two Letters" is a riff on Kabbalism. But other than these quibbles, I find that the thirteen stories collected in Steampunk present a comprehensive survey of all the tropes one might associate with the genre: gear-and-string-driven writing aids, steam robots of both men and horses (which graze at coal seams), a bustle-bound ladies' society that takes gardening to new heights, the doctrine of homunculi taken to its logical extension (in another story that becomes a creation myth), and several versions of the Frankenstein watch-out-what-you-create cautionary tale (from both 'scientific' and 'golem' ends).

What makes these stories (mostly) so satisfying to me: they tend to follow Campbell's Dictum, which was "Pose a problem, then solve it." With so much of today's so-called Sci-Fi falling into the mainstream trap of agonistic maundering, I do like a good story that Gets Stuff Done.