Last week’s Blog For A Bete-Noire was surprisingly successful, proving that people love to discuss what they hate.
Things people hated included chosen ones, dragons, elves, fur and fangs urban fantasy, humans with wings, poetry, princesses, prophetic dreams, stereotypical characters, pure evil, talking animals, and thingamagigs.
In the end, we almost went with the talking animals:
But the stories with the kitty-cat companion, the quizzical intrepid ferret, the wizened owl. Jeez! It’s like a frakkin’ tootsie pop comercial! “Mr. Turtle, how many swings of my vorpal sword will it take to slay the dragon?”
“I dunno, ask Mr. Owl.”
“One, two-hoo! Three!”
Next thing you know, Nathan Lane is a voicing cartoon squirrel and Elton John is pouring his heart into a moving ballad about how hard it is to be an artichoke.
But in the end, Megan Arkenburg mentioned orbs:
Orbs. Dear God please, no orbs. No big glass orbs that channel magic. No little glass orbs that let evil wizards communicate with yet-more-evil wizards. No little gelatinous orbs controlled by extraocular muscles that glow violet when exposed to the possessor’s love interest (and yes, I am talking about eyeballs–er, eye-orbs).
In fact, can we just outlaw the word orb? How horrible must it be to go through life in fantasy-land, where you are unable to perceive anything faintly spherical without thinking ‘Orb!’? How do they shell peas? How do they eat plums? How do they watch the Harlem Globetrotters—er, Orb-trotters? Where will the madness end?
Mail us your address to be Paypaled your winnings, Megan. We presume you won’t use it to buy an orb or thingamagig.
This week, we’re opening that up halfway and saying, “What do you hate — as well as love — about steampunk?” What are the books that should or shouldn’t be included in the genre, and what is it with all the clockwork gears, after all? Do we need steampunk laptops? Conferences? Fashion shows? Who’s doing it right and most importantly, who’s doing it wrong?
What do you think of remakes of classics in steampunk – such as this steampunk Star Trek episode?
I asked for a steampunk observation on our Twitter stream and got the following:
tzinski@fantasymagazine Steampunk Observation: all steampunk characters must have amazingly exfoliated skin. And clear sinuses. Just saying. 
1 • Clint said:
May 1st, 2009 at 10:34 am, permalink
Since there seems to be two different angles to Steampunk, the sub-genre and the real-world aesthetic, I’m going to split this up. Sorta.
For the aesthetic: Goggles. What’s with all the frakkin’ goggles? And all the crazy crap people have hanging off their belts? I saw a woman at a Con recently with an assortment of bottle openers and keychains on her belt. It reminded me of the Ren Fair costumes we’d see. A broomstick dress, some bellydancer accoutrement, and what would pass for a corset. Sorta/kinda close to…well, not even really close to period costumery. Not for any era.
For the stories: Out of all the steampunk I’ve read, maybe 1/10th is taking anything Victorian or Edwardian, other than the art-deco movement or pretty clothes and hats into consideration. These stories skim the best of that era and moosh it together with gadgetry and invention. Yay.
The truth is that during the Victorian era, the Empires of the world were colonizing far-reaching parts of the world, and treating the people there as their livestock. Workers had few rights, children were forced into dangerous labor conditions, women had few rights and fewer opportunities to control their education or choices in a career. Let alone reproductive rights. Hospital patients were at the mercy of their doctors and were often used as human guinea pigs. Diseases like cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, syphilis, swept through cities like London, Paris, Prague, etc. unabated. We don’t see this in steampunk stories. We see feisty ladies in fluffy dresses, men in topcoats and hats. Gears, gaslights, airships, and silly facial hair is what we get for the most part. We get very little of the grit or the drama of that era. Why should there be? After all, the gears and gadgets solve so many of these problems.
2 • Cat Rambo said:
May 1st, 2009 at 11:06 am, permalink
Whoops, I added in last week’s winner, sorry about that. Go Megan!
3 • Cat Rambo said:
May 1st, 2009 at 12:15 pm, permalink
Going to try fantasy trivia on Twitter – if you’re up for playing, hop on there and follow @fantasytrivia
4 • Randy Henderson said:
May 1st, 2009 at 1:28 pm, permalink
I hate it and love it for the same reasons — it is not mainstream commercial enough yet where I can just get a steampunk laptop through Dell or Apple.
5 • Rachel said:
May 1st, 2009 at 2:06 pm, permalink
I love the aesthetic. I’ve seen some incredible pieces of furniture and clothing, and the jewelry and art are unbelievable.
However, I haven’t read steampunk because I love the potential of it. The idea of that curious melding of science and fantasy is compelling, and yet in some way I don’t want to risk popping that bubble of hopeful perception by purposefully seeking out the literature. I want to come upon it by surprise and be delighted by the find, not waiting to see if it lives up to my expectations.
6 • Jeromy K. Smith said:
May 1st, 2009 at 3:10 pm, permalink
Personally I love the aesthetic of steampunk. I love the idea that all of these crazy things could have existed in the late 1800’s – early 1900’s. I’ve always been interested in it, and loved the idea’s of Jules Verne and Wells.
I never even realized it was turning into a movement until about a few weeks ago when doing research for my newest short story.
I’m frankly torn on the outcome of it being a movement (fad).
On a positive note, it means that I will get to see a lot more of it for the next 3-10 years. Terrible movies that with crazy Victorian machines, books, maybe a magazine. Most of it will be trite and shallow, aimed at 15 year old kids who are just chasing the next thing. Some of it will be good. Regardless I will probably watch and read because I am a visual person and enjoy the seeing of these things.
On the negative side, it means that once the fad has passed steampunk will be dead for at least ten years. Even those of us who enjoy it will have been so inundated, we will be as sick of seeing Victorian scientists create robots and airships as we are now of elves that do elvey things in their mystic elvey cities.
7 • Cat Rambo said:
May 1st, 2009 at 3:10 pm, permalink
That’s it, I like the -look- of steampunk things. Dunno that I would want to live in a steam-powered era.
This is my favorite steampunk story of all time – http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/anderson_03_07/
8 • Cat Rambo said:
May 1st, 2009 at 3:30 pm, permalink
Sorry to spam, but just glimpsed this on Twitter and thought people might like the pointer – http://riverotterwidgetstudios.blogspot.com/
9 • Kathy Hurley said:
May 1st, 2009 at 5:33 pm, permalink
Elven steampunk; that’s the ticket. Re-envision the mystical elvish cities with some gaslights, gears, and thingamabobs. Oh, and don’t forget the mechanical orbs. When your orb is not foretelling the future or providing a viewing eye for distant evil wizards to scry through, it’ll double as a pocket watch or versatile penknife. Swiss Army Orb.
10 • Chuck said:
May 1st, 2009 at 10:47 pm, permalink
Kathy Hurley said:
>Swiss Army Orb.
Oh! So that’s what those things in Phantasm were.
11 • Jonathan Rock said:
May 1st, 2009 at 11:23 pm, permalink
I just love the sound of clockwork tocking away inside a well made wooden box.
Two words: blimpboard artillery.
12 • Chuck said:
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 am, permalink
I was only a half block from my apartment. I turned the corner and…
Damn! Should have known — cold day like it was, lots of heat running through the pipes under the streets. That’s when they always show up.
I ducked back behind the corner, hoping they hadn’t seen me. But I’d gotten a decent look at them. There had to be four, maybe five of the hoodlums, or maybe more — hard to count, considering their wispy transparency and how they tend to merge into one another. They were all leaning — cool, tough, watchful — against a parked car, looking for the next opportunity to impose their brand of trouble on decent, innocent people like me. (And did the car even belong to one of them? Can people made out of steam even drive?)
I’d seen them gang up on people before, heard their taunts…
“Got asthma, huh? I hear humidity’s bad for that.”
“Stop saturatin’ yerself! Stop saturatin’ yerself!”
“Too hot, ya say? Well I hear it ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity. HAW HAW HAW!”
“Nice book store. It’d be a shame if your stock got wet.”
“Oh, hey, just went to the hair salon, didja?”
“What ya gettin’ all steamed for, huh? HAW HAW!”
…or even something simple as…
“Nice glasses.”
Where were the damn police? It almost seemed like the city had given up on what used to be a decent neighborhood. There was some ridiculous talk of whether the police had jurisdiction and so forth.
And what about the place these thugs came from — the pipes? Was this the best kind of people the pipes had to offer? Maybe the pipes had their own criminal element for a time, and whatever government existed down there managed to achieve some illusion of success by chasing these thugs up here. But dropping your problems in somebody else’s lap is no solution, and certainly no good for my neighborhood. I made a mental note to find out who I could call to complain.
It was obvious nobody was going to do anything about these guys any time soon. I was on my own, but I wasn’t going to be the next victim — no sir, not me. I decided to take the long way home — detour a few blocks, cross a distant part of the street where they wouldn’t notice me, and make my way to the alley behind my apartment.
I started walking.
Was that a hissing sound I heard? No, I was just paranoid.
…
13 • Clint said:
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:36 am, permalink
Chuck, that is funny stuff!
Cat, thanks for the link to that story. I’ve bookmarked it and will read it at my leisure. When dealing with Steampunk, that’s pronounced “leshure”.
14 • Megan Arkenberg said:
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:24 pm, permalink
Kathy Hurley said:
>Swiss Army Orb.
Ah, but does it help you button your knee-high boots? “Let me just get my shoes on and I’ll help you with the yard work” takes on a whole new meaning in Steampunk!
15 • Chuck said:
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:46 pm, permalink
Clint said:
>Chuck, that is funny stuff!
Thanks.:-)
Some time after I posted that, I started thinking that the narrator would somehow morph into someone like Horridge, the psychotic killer from Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die, which might make the steam punks a lesser issue. The story would still be a comedy, of course … I think.
16 • Fantasy Magazine » Blog For A Borg (How Could We Not Talk About Star Trek?) said:
May 9th, 2009 at 11:17 am, permalink
[...] The Editors Blog For A …, Friday, May 8th, 2009permalink, jump to commentsLast week’s Blog For a Brass Button, [...]