"Mad Dogs and Englishmen"

Steampunk Volume One: The stuff you know.


My friends Jeff and Dave have begun discussing Steampunk more often. Steampunk, for those of you that don't know, is a media genre. It shows up in TV, movies, novels, games, comics, and more. Basically you can describe it as science fiction set in the 19th century, but it is much more than that. Some purists will claim that in fact steam must play a role, or that the setting must be British, during the time of Queen Victoria. But as a genre I find to be more inclusive than dismissive. If you want to wear a bowler hat, a leather apron, and build musical instruments that run on the power provided by a bicycle; or strap on a jet pack and fight the Nazis; or build an airship and help Watson and Holmes then dammit, I say good on you. Steampunk can be set in the modern world, the future, or even farther in the past, before the steam engine.

One of the basic themes of the genre seems to be the triumph, or downfall, of man. That's lowercase on purpose. One man, whose life is changed by the Steampunk devices he creates/carries, faces off against adversaries, who normally outnumber him, and at least conventionally "out gun" him. These adversaries are almost always in a secret society who mean to keep mankind down. Our hero then faces off against them and depending on the story; triumphs, with the help of his own sweat and blood (and his raygun) or fails, crushed beneath the weight of the oppressive secret oligarchy. But in the epilogue, somehow manages to pass his secret knowledge, and possibly a treasured device, on to the next generation.

The works of H.G. Wells, and Lovecraft often find their way into the background, if not the foreground of many modern Steampunk stories. In fact, the unnamed Time Traveler, from H.G. Wells The Time Machine is about as perfect a template for a Steampunk "hero" as you can get. He is smart, an inventor or scientist, and yet still an amateur at such pursuits. He is impulsive, inquisitive, and likely to get in trouble for a woman. When he returns from his first adventure, he writes everything up, like a good scientist, and then, alone, but better prepared, he begins another adventure.

I dig on Steampunk, and have been thinking about it a lot this last week because of this post over at the Aviary. So without further ado, I give you, the first batch of links!

Of course, Wikipedia is a great source of information on Steampunk but I've also found...

Now Dave already mentioned this one in the comments of Jeff's post.

Some Steampunk enthusiasts like the technology side of a little more than the fashion. They have formed a different live journal community: The Clockworkers Guild.

Another handy group here at The Steampunk Workshop.

If you needed any ideas for the look of you robots, cars, or odd alien races, you could do a lot worse than to take a peek at Stephane Halleux and crib from the best!

A great overall blog, covering film, creations, art, and whatnot is Brass Goggles. He's looking for help running the site if anyone catches the bug!

I've got more for later, including some ray gun stuff, some alternate timeline stuff, and hopefully some more on the literature that started this trend in the first place.

BTW, the song title and picture today are a little more obscure than usual. I'll fill you in next Steampunk post.