In the 1980’s and 1990’s a small group of science fiction authors wrote a series of novels and short stories about the links between social disruption and technological innovation. Unlike the myriad of such stories which had come before (imagine warp drives, hypersleep, cloning, Soylent Green), these stories were set in the 19^th century and the technologies referenced were dirigibles, steam-driven cars, and digital computers made from gears – but their subject was really the 20^th century and a world being radically remade by email, surveillance, and global capitalism. One of the authors, tongue firmly in cheek, labeled the genre “Steampunk” as a play on the more widely known school of dark near-future science fiction, cyberpunk. These so-called Steampunk novels were much loved, but didn’t seem more likely to inspire a cultural movement than any other literary micro-genre.

But around the turn of the millennium something unexpected happened. The world suddenly became a very uncertain place (or the fact that it had always been a very uncertain place became suddenly more obvious). Skyscrapers tumbled, teenagers became mass-murderers, entire industries (and much of the middle class with them) vanished, and schoolchildren embraced instantaneous communications technologies that people just a few years older couldn’t fathom. The insanity of a material culture dominated by concepts like planned obsolescence and downloadable book became undeniable and we realized that we were surrounded by things simultaneously ephemeral, disposable, and utterly replaceable.  It’s too much to say that the resultant anxieties spawned the culture of Steampunk, but it’s hard to ignore the temporal correlation with the proliferation of people who looked at those original Steampunk novels and saw not just enjoyable fiction, but inspiration for a lifestyle. And once people started looking, they realized that this backward-looking, whimsically material, willfully-inefficient Steampunk aesthetic was everywhere.

Not surprisingly, as the number of interested parties has increased, factions have formed and people have begun making a career out of deciding what is and isn’t Steampunk, and have become obsessed with creating elaborate taxonomies in which, for example, the gaslamp fantasy of the late 19^th century is split from the sleek retro-futurism of the early 20^th (called Dieselpunk by such splitters) or in which the social activists who embrace the “punk” in Steampunk are divorced from the culture of craftsmen and costumers who preferentially value the “steam.” These are the growing pains of any community and probably of no more relevance to what its members actually think or do than most of the rambling and ranting that happens on the internet.  

If you listen to those rants you can find people who will insist that:  Steampunk is a social revolution enacted in anachronism; that it must involve steam engines; that all steampunks are roleplayers with pseudonyms and imagined personal histories; that Steampunk is the style of an alternate Victorian era; that it’s about craftsmanship and durability; that it’s about goggles, bustles and improbable hats; or that’s it’s really nothing but those original set of sci-fi novels and that the tens of thousands who self-indentify as steampunks are delusional. We believe that, rather than risk Lovecraftian insanity by attempting to reconcile these (and more) definitions, it’s more profitable to eschew a single definition altogether and look between them for a common thread. There is something delightfully jarring and addictively uncanny about the mixing of the “new” and the “old,” of the things which seem familiar with remnants of other times, places, and lives which were so different from our own and yet eerily familiar.  It is that and yet that draws us to old tin-type photographs, discarded tophats, wrecked machinery, crumbling architecture, and music recorded on wax cylinders. That and yet is what leads steampunks to look at investment bankers and see robber barons, and detect in the geographies of our world the night tremors that were once a tea- and India-rubber-scented Victorian dream.  It’s that same and yet – let’s call it the ‘anachronistic tingle’ – that is a whisper in the heads of steampunks of all ages. We hear its murmurings from the horns of Edison phonographs recovered from antique stores and in media as diverse as summer blockbusters (e.g., Sherlock Holmes), artsy television shows (e.g., HBO’s Carnivale), local revival bands (e.g., Ann Arbor’s Orpheum Bell), and artists from around the world (e.g., France’s La Machine). It promises that by willfully ignoring today’s status objects, today’s arbitrary fashion rules and mores, it’s possible to excavate down to a more comfortable version of ourselves – or at the very least a more awesomely dressed one.  

Our world seems, at times, to be coming apart. Jeopardy is won by a machine and 21^st century bankers have all the power of 19^th century robber barons. It is incumbent upon us to look to the past to understand how our present came to be and not simply to long for imagined halcyon days prior to World War I in which the easy, morally-secure life of the Western middle class seemed destined to rule unchallenged forever. We are still living with dangerous legacies of the 19^th century, creations like joint-stock companies and diabolical factories (albeit now mostly relocated to the developing world).  But looking back in time also allows us to see history’s strengths – a love of decorative culture, novel experiments in democracy fueled by the dying of heritable aristocracies, and the embrace of technological innovation, just to name a few. Steampunk is a large house which certainly welcomes those who may only be interested in escapist fashion anachronism, but which also provides an opportunity to see the present through the lens of the past and thus to imagine a future better than either.