Hi. For the new visitors, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Rina, a character from Leonid Korogodski’s science fiction novella Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale
Recently, going through some old archives from the early 21st century, our software archaeologists discovered a post by Charles Stross called The Hard Edge of Empire. It took a while, as software archaeology goes, but I don’t think it’s too late for me to bring it up. The barrage of contemporary response was also discovered together with the original post, which however failed to notice the irony that, being anti-totalitarian himself, Charles Stross blamed the also anti-totalitarian movement steampunk for having a “totalitarian urge”:
The romanticization of totalitarianism is nothing new (and if you don’t recognize the totalitarian urge embedded in the steampunk nostalgia trip, I should like to remind you that “king” is a synonym for “hereditary dictator” and direct you to the merciless skewing Michael Moorcock delivered to imperial hagiography in his Oswald Bastable books).
Charles Stross must have mistaken certain apparent trappings of the steampunk literature for its sociological roots, equating its look backward in time to a nostalgia for the “ancien regime.” Indeed, he wonders why on earth would anyone bring back the time when
Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat.
Of course, looking at any era doesn’t mean wishing it all back, the bad with the good. A perfect society did not exist, does not exist, and never will. As we now know, the “post-scarcity” concept, popular at the time, is an illusion: not only our wants, but even our necessities, are a moving target; besides, there will always be scarcity of power.
Yes, there existed monarchies in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the time that steampunk was mostly drawing inspiration from. And life wasn’t perfect, as it never is. But there was also something that most of the 20th and the early 21st centuries lacked: trailblazing individual entrepreneurship instead of the corporate culture of the later time (ironically, so abhorred by Stross), hands-on science done by enthusiasts instead of scientific bureaucracy, individual inventors versus corporate patents. I could go on. The individual freedom aspect of it, with the attendant sense of adventure, was what was spurring steampunk on.
Since the steampunk movement began as a subgenre in science fiction, I will focus mostly on science here. But similar arguments apply also to other walks of life.
In his The Bing Bang Never Happened book, Eric Lerner described the sociological pendulum in science, corresponding to the relative weight of the inductive (experimental) and the deductive (theoretical) approaches to doing science. On one end is the time of hands-on science, the time when theories are dime a dozen, when an ugly experiment can ruin a beautiful theory and no one will give a damn, when science is comprehensible by laymen, when the process of doing science is constant brainstorming asking for crazy ideas—the time of the enthusiast. On the other, the scientific bureaucracy, where a sufficiently beautiful theory just must be true and woe to the experiment that disagrees with it, where science is incomprehensible by laymen who must believe in what few experts claim, where one is often afraid to suggest a novel or even contrary take on a subject for fear that one’s scientific higher-ups would not approve—the time of the career-maker.
The 19th and the early 20th centuries were an example of the former. Most of the 20th, as well as a part of the 21st, were of the latter kind. Again, this sort of polar opposition was observed not only in science. The World Wars and the destruction of belief in progress, the rise of totalitarian states (which is a feature of the 20th, not the 19th, century) and fundamentalist or charismatic cults… I could continue. The progressive versus the reactionary. But the important thing is that, like any pendulum, this one swung back in force. It was not yet obvious at Charles Stross’s time but, looking from the vantage point of the 31st century, I must confirm that steampunk was a part of a greater phenomenon, the counter-culture expression of the yearnings that later manifested in the second scientific revolution and, more generally, in the Second Age of Reason.
Back in the early 21st century, it was not yet easy to imagine that the science that had turned so totally incomprehensible to laymen could somehow straighten itself out. But science is a social phenomenon. Any scientific theory is but a model, designed to approximate reality to a certain degree. And every theory has its own domain of applicability, beyond which another model must be constructed. It must have been the still totalitarian spirit of the time that led one to believe the scientific theories could actually express the absolute truth. And, since one’s thinking is of course affected by the spirit of the time, the way the theories—the models—were constructed had to reflect the same.
When the times changed, the models followed. But the experiments—the facts—remained the same.
P.S. If steampunk was anti-totalitarian at heart, then what can be said in this regard about cyberpunk (and postcyberpunk) ? Here, anti-totalitarianism was clearly a given… most of the time. Stay tuned for a discourse on a subtly totalitarian strain in the (post)cyberpunk fiction of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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