Proto-Steampunk Literature
Or, where did retro-futurism start?
Guests at the 2018 DVSS Day at the Botanic Gardens
Our roots go back to the 70’s - that’s nineteen-seventies.
There was a lot of retro-futurism written before 1988 when the term Steampunk was coined by K. W. Jeeter. James P. Blaylock says that
““Steampunk began as a whim in the minds of three young writers in the mid 1970s. I was one of those writers. K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers were the other two. We spent long afternoons in O’Hara’s Pub in downtown Orange, working over plots, talking about Henry Mayhew’s fascinating London Labor and the London Poor, or about London’s underground rivers or the “scientific” evidence behind hollow earth theory.”
It is the results of those afternoons and associated literature with which we shall concern ourselves here; modern novels which are retro-futuristic, written in a contemporary manner and set in an era which evokes the past, containing arcane science or anachronistic technology.
The progenitors of Steampunk are generally considered to be the aforementioned Jeter, Powers, and Blaylock. As Blaylock relates, they had used Mayhew’s London Labor and the London Poor as their research and thus their protagonists tend to be fairly common folk. (Mayhew also turns up as primary source material in other research of the Victorian era.) Their seminal books are as follows:
K. W. Jeter - Moorlock Night, 1979 - Jeeter references H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine in Moorlock Night, and also King Arthur and Merlin as the saviors of Victorian England. Time travel is of course one of the most evident tropes later adopted by Steampunk tinkerers and adventurer scientists.
Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates, 1983 - set in 1983 and 1801, and features the Victorian-era rise of English power in Egypt, time travel, and an assortment of arcana and speculative technology. There’s no steam in it, but lots of paranormal, horror, and spring-powered shoes.
James Blaylock - Homonculus, 1986 and the rest of the “Adventures of Langdon St Ives” series - Langdon St. Ives, a Victorian scientist and adventurer, consultant to scientific luminaries, and sacred unheralded savior of humankind is the protagonist of Homonculus - which may be the first appearance of the Steampunk trope of the dirigable, and the inital example of the Steampunk archetype of adventurer scientist.
K.W. Jeter - Infernal Devices, A Mad Victorian Fantasy 1987 - includes clockwork, automatons, not-quite time-traveling, and humanoid fish.
We could also add Michael Moorcock’s Oswald Bastable novels (from the 1970’s) as well - tales of alternate timelines and time travel, with fantastic flying machines and a very confused protagonist. (I mean, aren’t all of Moorcock’s protagonists pretty confused?)
What makes it Steampunk?
One of the most punk characteristics of Steampunk is that it’s difficult to define. Part of its appeal, says the Steampunk crowd; it leaves lots of room for speculative history. We’re not here to gatekeep the bullet points, but there are some common elements.
Typically set in the nineteenth century, much Steampunk literature is set in Europe (England or France) or the United States of that time and is deeply inspired by Victorian-era industrialism. There is a prominent element of Victorian science, which was after all often pretty imaginative anyway and somewhat “mad”. Anachronistic technology abounds. The stories are often gothic and dystopian in nature. Victorian clothing and landscapes are described, Victorian sensibilities and manners are used.
Much of the genre deals with individual or systemic injustices, with the conditions of underclasses. It’s often subversive, commenting on politics or culture. And then there are the mashups with horror subjects, like zombies or aliens.
Many authors in this century have chosen to expand beyond nineteenth century settings, because of colonialism and other social ills including aboriginal displacement and chattel slavery, futher expanding the Steampunk universe beyond the foundations set forth by Blaylock, Jeeter, Powers, and Moorcock.
But they owe a debt to those proto-Steampunk authors.
But H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne!
Terifically influential authors, of course. But we don’t consider them Steampunk, and certainly not proto-Steampunk. Obviously, Steampunk as a genre owes a great debt to Wells and Verne - and Shelley, Stevenson, and their contemporaries - but the primary difference is that they were Victorian-era writers of Victorian-era science fiction, not mondern writers of retro-futuristic science fiction.
However, as an exercise in “where we came from” they are indeed valuable reading.
Melanie Unruh