Babel Clash

Ah, Viriconium…

Briefly off-topic, but the “dying earth” stories of Harrison, Vance, Charan-Newton and others are worthy of essays in and of themselves… (and Vance, the grand-daddy of the genre, writes in a principally rural setting, as contrast).

George hits the nail on the head with Steampunk settings - the genre kicks off in Victorian London. In a sense that’s not even the most logical place for it - the actual industrial revolution was a fair sight earlier, and there’s no reason you couldn’t have steam-tanks slugging it out at Waterloo, or even fifty years before that. Victorian London has one grand advantage, however, in that it’s one of the best known periods of history. Dickens, Conan-Doyle, Jack the Ripper, Victoria herself, it’s an age of very iconic historical and fictional characters that most readers already have at least a passing understanding of - whatever nation they’re from (1).

This existing familiarity is a great aid to the writer, because steampunk settings are usually about change. A writer of the traditional gazeteer fantasy stories we’ve been talking about presents you with a fantastical setting that in itself is static - a backdrop for the journey and the deeds of the hero. The steampunk world is usually going through the throes of revolutions both social and technological (and indeed the technological driving the social, something that seldom happens in classical fantasy). Increased automation, faster and more available modes of transport, advances in manufacturing, developments in warfare, all conspire to overthrow the old and settled ways of life, to disrupt the barriers of social class, to sow unrest in politics. This is the meat and drink of steampunk - the actual steam itself, the technology that is the most obvious fantastical element, is usually second fiddle to the social dynamics that it creates (2).

It makes a great deal of sense, therefore, to use an existing backdrop in order to highlight the changes that the writer is introducing. Most steampunk settings are therefore also alternate history settings, with the technology standing as the chief originating divergence. As well as George’s own work, other good examples of this include Keyes’ Age of Unreason, where the setting is considerably earlier than Victoria, and more global, and has characters luke Ben Franklin and Isaac Newton playing major roles, and, of course, Sterling and Gibson’s (3) The Difference Engine, one of the giants in the genre.

Steampunk has, however, also began to gather some secondary worlds to itself, as George notes (4). This is a delicate line, with the writer having to at once introduce  a world that is wholly alien to the reader, and also, in some respects, to itself, as it changes and evolves during the book. The masters of this kind of fiction are China Mieville (Perdido Street Station), Jeff Vandermeer (Cities of Saints and Madmen) (6) and Stephen Hunt (The Court of the Air) (7), They provide is with worlds that, although they may echo ours, are wholly distinct, where the human denizens rub shoulders casually with the alien, and yet where the chief concerns, of characters, of societies and of cities, are no less real for it. Possibly it’s the case that the familiarity with real history has now been augmented by a familiarity with the tropes of secondary worlds, a common toolbox of the fantastic born from a genre that has now sufficient decades under its belt to produce a broad class of reader ready for books that change a large number of the axioms at once (8), standing (to bring things back to Newton for no reason other than neatness) on the shoulders of giants. Or maybe on the shoulders of lots and lots of smaller people. Anyway, the view’s fine.

(1) mostly because the British Empire was so very, very outgoing and keen on exporting itself to everywhere it possibly could.

(2) One wonderful exception to this is Phil and Kaja Foglio’s ongoing Girl Genius webcomic, where the technology, and the prodigcal inventors that utilize it, really are the point. The Foglio’s creation, which manages that very rare balancing act of being consistently hilarious while at the same time deadly serious, is set, for reference, in an alternate history real world with some recognizable landmarks (such as England for example), although much of the world has been changed and devastated by steampunk technology run riot.

(3) Gibson’s and Sterling’s? Two writers of considerable seniority, and I don’t want to sleight either of them…

(4) And there is also a genre-territory which comprises very similar social fantasies that do not involve steam, some of them simply presenting entirely fantastic secondary worlds used to echo and examine real history, usually without magic (Manners-punk is the rather awkward phrase coined for them, and Gormenghast is probably the first, and also check out Fly-by-Night by Frances Harding, which is superb); others have similar socially-turbulent worlds where magic takes the place of the steam, and you should definitely check out Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle (5). then we have Mr Mieville, referred to above, who does both and all of it, and then some.

(5) or, for that matter, pretty much anything else by Mary Gentle.

(6) In fact arguably Vandermeer spends two entire books introducing us to his city, its world, and how it develops, before spilling the beans in Finch. Also, Vandermeer’s work is clearly science fiction. Unless it’s fantasy. Possibly horror. We are at the edge of the void, with books like this, and the conditions are such that easy classification is one of the first casualties.

(7) Hunt’s world starts off slyly looking like a familiar London (ish) in order to catch the reader unawares shortly afterwards when we find out it really, really isn’t.

(8) You don’t have to go back far to find an age when fantastic fiction was almost always linked to the real world - either a remote part of it, or a remote time, but always with one foot back in the understood. Tolkien himself casts Middle Earth as an earlier age of our world, just as Howard did with Conan’s Hyperborea.

Related posts:

• It’s alive!
  Perceptive chap, this Mr. Tchaikovsky. I think he’s absolutely correct in what he says about the grounding of characters in an urban setting. I’d add that urban settings are also easier for us, as the reader, to relate to, and that through that they also make it easier for...
• It’s all about the gadgets
  Adrian is absolutely correct in his assertion – I believe – that the steam in steampunk is secondary to the alternative view of history that is being presented. The airships and the clockwork and the brass goggles, they’re only so much window dressing (albeit some of the coolest window...
• Paving over the Shire
  Following on… Batman and Superman each have a city that they’re linked to, of course. It’s a traditional Superhero trope, to be a defender of such-and-such-opolis (1). Superman’s power scale makes him a defender of the earth, though - he can zip off into out space to fight the giant...