“Love the Machine. Hate the Factory”
So goes one of the anthems of the Steampunk movement, a social, literary, historical, dystopic, alternative phenomenon that
Cory Doctorow calls a “big vat of awesome.”
Steampunk (in the words of the panel at School & Library Journal’s Day of Dialog) honors an alternative history where we did not lose our relationship with machines. Each machine in the Steampunk sensibility is still hand-rendered, hand-maintained, and lovely in the eye of the creator and beholder.
Steampunk clings thus to the Victorian era when fashion and mannerisms integrated into an evolving new world of machines and world events. Google ‘Steampunk’ and you will find not only a solid and compelling literature outlining the truth of this imaginary landscape, but hand-rendered and stunning machines and costumes created by those who play and live in the Steampunk reality.
Author and panelist Cherie Priest said the number of Steampunk adherents and curiosity seekers reflects the oddity of living in a world totally run by technology –tech that we have no ability to understand, fix, or build upon. “It would be reassuring to know we could fix our tech with a wrench,” said Priest, “In Steampunk, we can.”
Steampunk is a highly visual phenomenon harkening back to the glorious days when illustrations, not photographs defined our world. Author and panelist Scott Westerfeld sees a Steampunk sensibility in the days when the Sears Roebuck catalog was our Internet –a visual catalog of all the world retail could offer. A lover of that Golden Age and of magnificent creations like the airship, Westerfeld created, Leviathan, a Steampunk novel heavily illustrated by Keith Thompson.
This new sensibility is inspiring illustrators everywhere. On our little scrap of ocean and towering, the Maine Illustrator’s Collective is holding a show of Steampunk inspired pieces. Gripping my imagination is this piece by book illustrator and gear engineer, Jamie Hogan. Check out the show at Green Hand Bookstore in Portland, Maine or be there for the Opening.
Iron upon iron and irony upon irony…Cory Doctorow of (deserved) Boing Boing fame concluded the panel with this brassy observation (as I remember it), “The irony, of course, is that the Steampunk movement that ‘loves the machine, but hates the factory’ reveres the handmade artisan object, but half the wheels and cogs attached to their handmade machines and outfits come mass-produced from factories in China where children are chained to machines all day to fill the shipping containers bound for America.” Yes, where we have the leisure and money to imagine a whole other reality for ourselves. Classic.
And if that Doctorow observation grabs you, don’t miss his new YA novel, For the Win takes on just this frightening new manifestation of the 3rd World / 1st World cultural and ethical divide.
See the the SLJ Journal’s Day of Dialog Steampunk discussion HERE.
