Steampunk’d, Or Humbug by Design

Steampunk is one of my guilty pleasures… I think of it more of an asthetic than a literary movement, and I own neither a pair of aviator goggles nor a wind-up pocketwatch. Nevertheless, it happens that at this moment in another window I’m rendering a 3D view of an brass-and-glass spaceship ethership that features in the steampunk bedtime stories I’ve been telling my kids ever since I saw the last name “Gearhart” in a student roster.  Randy Nakamura sounds a little mystified by the popularity of the steampunk style, though he does a fair job exposing its sillier excesses.

[A]s Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, “In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it.” Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin’s theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: “Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended.” The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

2 thoughts on “Steampunk’d, Or Humbug by Design

  1. Ahhh, nerts to all such critics! Steampunk is not about Victorian England. It’s about a colorful, gritty, archaicly-advanced, romantic, adventurous, handmade, past-present-future-alternate dimensions-pre and post apocalyptic world view that only exists in our combined imaginations. It’s an aesthetic that cannot be tied to any one time or place and has more variations than Carter’s got Liver pills. It’s fun, gosh darn it! It’s got aether-swimming dirigible flying air pirates who can sing and dance while stealing the change from your pocket. It’s Miyazaki’s animations come to life. It’s something that so resonates within a Steamy’s little heart that they just HAVE to make things that would fit in that world just to have a physical part of it nearby, be that a pair of goggles, a Steamy computer (soooo want one!), or a Steampunk’d mouse that looks like a bloody tank (note, they wired a little fan into the palm part of the housing – neatly covered with a brass grill – to keep your hand from getting overheated as you game…sigh). In other words, it’s fun. And that’s all it has to be.

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