On Steampunk

by

Gillian Polack

I chose steampunk for my reading last weekend (two books by K.W. Jeter, re-issued by Angry Robot) because I’ve had an interesting week (some amazing things, some appalling things, a definite amount of mundane wrongness) and thought steampunkery would cheer me. Steampunkery is a very cheering thing, unless one hates it absolutely. Steampunk polarises people and polarities are usually worth exploring.

So what were these two books? And, just what by-the-way, is steampunk? The two questions are closely connected. I’m hoping that a definition of steampunk will emerge in a discussion of the books. Whether it’s a clear definition or not depends very much on K.W. Jeter, who apparently first coined the word when he wrote (in a letter to Locus magazine, 1987): Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like “steampunks,” perhaps . . .

Morlock Night and Infernal Devices are short novels. Longer than a novella, but short than most novels are these days. This made entire sense when I took the unprecedented act of looking at the copyright dates. Morlock Night dates to 1979 and Infernal Devices to 1987. In fact, they come from an earlier time when steampunk was not yet a fashion accessory and speculative fiction novels couldn’t take the place of a caber in caber tossing. When a decent page length for a book was under two hundred. I may be rude about my mega-novels, but I enjoy reading them (including Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) but I do think that these shorter ones require something quite different in terms of craftsmanship. It’s good to see Angry Robot bringing them out.

The Time Machine is one of my lesser-favourite H.G. Wells novels (my favourite is The History of Mr Polly) which means I have little invested in it, which is a very good thing, given it’s one of the Wells’ novels that creates the most spin-offs. It almost has its own life-force. Morlock Night is one of these spin-offs.

I still watch for Wellsian strength and the social change agenda that lies beneath his writing whenever I read a spin-off. I also watch for a rattling good yarn with really good characterisation and a good sense of England anytime from the late Victorian until the 1930s. I suspect this means that I’m a difficult audience for this kind of book, despite my love of steampunkery. While I love some elements, I’m always watching for that social change agenda.

For the record, too, Jeter is one of the few authors Charles Stross (author, critic and himself somewhat of a social change agent) regards as not part of a latter day falling off. He commented on it in an article in 2010.. He began by saying “I am becoming annoyed by the current glut of Steampunk that is being foisted on the SF-reading public” and went on to state categorically that recent steampunk “is in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect.”

Since then a significant number of speculative fiction writers and critics have weighed in on the subject. His ‘gold standard’ classification means that Jeter’s work is free of the stain of being a derivative work. That is, it’s a derivative work in that it riffs off Wells, not in that it riffs off other recent steampunk. This makes me want to ask Charlie if he realised that he wasn’t quite being consistent—except he probably knows because a thousand enthusiastic fans have probably informed him of this.

And now you have an inordinate number of paragraphs before I reach the books themselves. Such short books for such a long preamble. Me, I’m channeling George Bernard Shaw, not H.G. Wells.

Morlock Night is a nice tribute. Jeter speaks the foreign language of earlier English convincingly enough for alternate history. It’s melodramatic, but entertaining. Does he write a good novel, or merely set the standard for modern steampunk (I love that ‘merely’)? The opening is good. It scene-sets, it gives a sense of manners at the time, it gives the context (as the mysterious Pale Man says “in about three years time I see Mr. Wells writing it. Yes, 1895 would be the date.”), it foreshadows potential doom, and it’s entertaining. What’s more, it starts with a sense of the fragility of the British Empire (that same character tells Mr Hocker, the protagonist, “Cavities of blood and horror yawn beneath your steps, and all you worry about is the condition of your shoe leather.”) In short, it’s neat.

Unfortunately, the dramatic language means that we don’t have a referential point for Wellsian Britain for very long. For the most part, the narrator doesn’t use the ordinary to explain the extraordinary or to keep the reader grounded, although his language does tone down somewhat for the latter half of the novel. This makes sense with what steampunk became after Jeter—the fabulous told with rich, decadent language—but it cuts the link with H.G. Wells. Even when H.G. Wells used melodramatic language, there was always the sense of the ordinary to compare it to. With The Time Machine, the ordinary was the dinner party from which Hocker (he of the shoe leather, the narrator) has just emerged. His speech is everyday, but Edwin Hocker’s narratorial voice is somewhat florid.

So, forget Wells as a deep influence. He was the provider of the backstory and the inspiration, but has been left behind.

It’s very much a book of the time. Lots of action, not too much concern with every single piece being connected, lots of life and sound and movement. It’s closer in mood (once the first few pages are past and the Morlocks have appeared on the scene) to a sword and sorcery novel, but with guns and time machines, than to straight science fiction. This works with most modern steampunk. The science is almost magic and the adventure levels are usually very intensive.

Mike Resnick’s The Buntline Special for instance, unashamedly uses the high adventure of the Wild West (and even has steampunk’d gunfire at the O.K. Corral). Historical depth, there is none. Social commentary is very limited—and all the women in the novel are prostitutes. What’s in The Buntline Special is the structure probably begun by Jeter: tributes to known history and known writers and then embroidering from that using twentieth century technology in a nineteenth century world. The language differs and the plot arc differs and Resnick writes a modern 300 page novel. The lineage, however, is quite clear.

In structure, the first part of the novel (back to Morlock Night) is more A Christmas Carol than anything else. This means I need to rethink The Time Machine. Its structure was also in several parts, each disconnected but being brought together by the thread of the person living through it. Jeter loses Wells’ politics and his sense of the everyday, but his use of Wells’ work is not just a vague inspiration. Although I still like to think of Dr Ambrose as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future and Mr Hocker as Scrooge. The way Ambrose operates also puts me in mind of Holmes and Watson, reinforced by Ambrose’s comment “Great things are afoot” when the visions are done and the plot to thwart the Morlocks begins.

This goes to the heart of the way Jeter has defined steampunk for me. His steampunk is not about adding cogs and wheels to Victorian England. It’s about playing with our ideas of the period based on several famous works and authors. It’s a clever game.

It’s perfectly possible to read this novel as an adventure alternate history of a peculiar sort, but what makes it steampunk is that awareness that it’s really playing with the worlds that other writers have devised. Resnick echoes this. The stories of Tombstone are the stories we know from newspapers and novels and movies.

This is not the whole of steampunk. This is a particular variety of it. It’s a very important variety, however, since Jeter is the writer who coined the word ‘steampunk.’ So are the other types of steampunkery that have developed since Jeter’s book first came out. These days it’s a sub-genre that covers a wide range of books. More of them may be influence by Infernal Devices than by Morlock Night, however: I’ll get to that shortly. More of Morlock Night first.

The problem with the literary tribute in Morlock Night, is that Jeter carries it a bit too far for my taste, adds a few too many elements. However, this has literary antecedents too, and it’s worth exploring them briefly. The big addition once the scene is set is to explain what had previously been hinted, that this is H.G. Wells meets the Let’s-Save-England version of the Arthurian tales. It swings the story suddenly into fantasy narration, the narratorial style is no longer too florid but fits in: it’s a sword and sorcery novel with Arthurian borrowings. I still think that there are too many themes and borrowings for one short novel. It does make a very fast read, however. And it left the door open for writers to bring both fantasy and SF elements together in later steampunk. The same publisher (Angry Robot) is bringing out a clockwork vampire series by Andy Remic. It has no England and no Arthur, but it’s 100% sword and sorcery with much steampunk.

Morlock Night is not the best book I’ve ever read. Its influence is undoubted, however. And it’s a book of its time. Some of the problems I’ve pointed to were strengths in 1979: literary fashions change. I’d argue that to understand where steampunk has travelled, it’s important to read Morlock Night. I’d also argue that to understand where Morlock Night came from, it helps to read Arthur Conan Doyle, HG Wells, Charles Dickens, Joan Aiken, Fritz Lieber . . . it’s an interesting pedigree.

Jeter did research and makes the lines of his research clear for readers, but the thrust of his novel is the adventure that is saving humankind (mostly mankind, but that’s another essay) from the perils that result from time travel. The tribute to Wells is as clear as the tribute to heroic fantasy. The ordinary man becomes the one who saves the saviour and we know the conclusion as soon as the scene is set; it’s simply a matter of adventuring along with Hocker. Hocker follows a typical hero’s quest—find these objects and achieve these tasks and the universe will be saved. Pretty standard Arthurian quest adventure, set in Victorian England (and other places). In many ways, this book is standard fare. The trappings however, and how Jeter sold those trappings, are the gold that Stross refers to. Those trappings were turned into a much better and more influential book in Infernal Devices.

Infernal Devices is a story about a man (Dower) who has inherited his father’s business, but not his talent for automatons and devices. His attempt to continue his father’s trade leads to bizarre and increasingly more bizarre occurrences. It almost leads to death, destruction, and doom. The plot is less straightforward than Morlock Night, with a sense of increasing disconnection and randomness pervading Dower’s life until the end, where all is resolved.

Infernal Devices is more confident in tone. It strides out more boldly. Jeter had a better notion of what he was about, perhaps. It pays tribute to nineteenth century literature (although neither as much as the previous volume, nor as openly) and it is more consistent in its decorative use of machines. Also in its high drama.

This is the real heart of steampunk. Not the first book in the new editions by Angry Robot, but the second. Some writers (like Mike Resnick  and Gail Carriger with her Parasol Protectorate novels) stick to the literary line, others (Cherie Priest, for instance, with her novels Boneshaker and Dreadnought or Scott Westerfeld in his Leviathan series) take the infernal machinery and alternate history and change realities a bit, and still others take the sword and sorcery route and take everything delightfully over the top (Andy Remic and Tim Akers, for instance). All those elements are contained in Infernal Devices. It's historically exceptionally dubious, it’s fun and it’s fast-paced.

Jeter named steampunk and pushed our awareness of it and made it possible for more writers to write this kind of work, but steampunk itself has been long in development and going interesting places. That literary pedigree is steampunk’s actual origin. What K.W. Jeter and steampunk coterie (Powers and Blaylock) gave us was a consolidation of talents and a useful term at a pivotal moment. We can now think of these strange stories as ‘steampunk.’

Books mentioned in this column:
The Buntline Special by Mike Resnick (Pyr, 2010)
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Penguin Hardcover Classics, 2010)
The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells (Dodo Press, 2007)
Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter (Angry Robot, April 2011)
Morlock Night by K.W. Jeter (Angry Robot, April 2011)
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (Ad Classic, 2011)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.