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[danohu]

Charles Stross rages against Steampunk

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans' Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn't bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right?)

...which is almost appealing enough to make me try NaNoWriMo. Almost

Comments

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

By the same argument shouldn't mundane SF in the immediate or near future focus on chinese labourers in sweatshops making Nike trainers? I don't think I've ever read a piece of SF that mentioned the the people working in the spaceship factory.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

perhaps it should!

Personally steampunk annoys me more because, dammit, a genre with 'punk' in its name should involve some kind of rebellion. Instead steampunk tends* to worship money/power/hierarchy even more than cyberpunk does -- which, in its backward way, is something of an achievement.

But you're right; it's a little unfair to expect steampunk to do that much more than the rest of SF

* this may be an unfair generalisation -- the comments on the linked blog-post have quite a few suggestions of steampunk books/stories that don't fit this pattern.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

Maybe I should write one called 'an explosion in the anti-matter factory'. You spend the first half the novel detailing ordinary likable people getting on with their lives. Then you go to someone who works in the anti-matter factory for making spaceship fuel who causes a fuel leak that destroy everything in a million mile vicinity. You can then quickly revisit all the others for their extremely short death scenes with a final cut to a joy rider who's flying round the solar system using the previous lot of fuel.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Surely, then, this should be rant against the misnaming of the genre and not against the genre itself?

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Stross does tend towards overgeneralisation about subgenres, I've noticed, but I think he's entirely right about most steam-"punk" - the books spawned on the back of the lifestyle craze are mostly appalling (http://eithin.com/cirw/2009/07/06/jonathan-green-unnatural-history/). On the other hand, some of the trope namers (Powers, for instance) really do have interesting things to say about class.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Or for actual spaceships, Ken Macleod's The Sky Road.