Steampunk is bad and you should feel bad for liking it

There’s a lot of things that are bad. Harry Potter. Hipsters. Lady Gaga. But you wanna know what else is bad?

Steampunk.

Yeah, that’s right. Steampunk.

The term steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue-in-cheek variant of cyberpunk, coined by science fiction author K. W. Jeter. Keywords being tongue-in-cheek, as in not serious.

Steampunk is what a derivative artist does when they lack real talent and/or original ideas. It’s the equivalent of scraping dried up vomit from the floor, taking digital pictures of it and signing your name to it, then posting it on the internet.

I mean, come on. Victorian guys with straw hats, bow-ties and candy-cane shirts – and laser-blasters, women in giant yellow dresses and parasols, with robot attendants, and a seedy, coal-burning, soot covered, sepia-toned underbelly of the emerging urban world? That’s all it is. There’s nothing original, despite what io9 keeps trying to tell you with their nonstop bombardment of Airship / Goggles / Pirate posts.

Do I know what steampunk should be? Other than a design trope, no. But I do know that there’s no more “punk” in steampunk than there is punk in Green Day. It’s just a repeat of the same old shite pumped at us 100x times a day.

Charlie Stross made a damn fine point about the over-saturation of the genre, but I’ll go one further. The internet with steampunk is like Fox News pushing their conservative agenda on Americans. 24 hours a day… it never stops. The internet turned the cool designs of steampunk into a joke – or worse yet, the new emo.  It’s filled (for the most part) with social rejects who think that wearing goggles and listening to one of the worst bands ever (Abney Park) makes them aloof, but yet still cool outcasts.

I feel like I’m in hell every single time I hear that someone is writing a “steampunk novel” or a “steampunk game”. No good will come of it – because we’ve seen it all before. It is a played-out, unwanted meme.

Look – girls in corsets and all that are cool. I get it. And I love the visuals of the gears and the brass and whatnot. But therein lies the problem. Steampunk is visual.

Take cyberpunk, for example. That genre appeals to those who speculate where humanity is headed vis-à-vis the hard and social sciences. With cyberpunk you get a different aesthetic and an entirely different set of tropes. Cyberpunk has generally benefited from a much higher profile regarding its literary merit; in terms of postmodern literature, it has found a place as a genre that explores many of the concerns of the late 20th century.

Cyberpunk has feeling and attitude, and is the antithesis of everything steampunk is not. In Cyberpunk, the main tropes are:

• Rebel against harmful or oppressive authority.
• Think yourself, question authority
• It is every person’s responsibility to take control
• Screw everyone but your friends
• Never trust anyone
• Never kill anyone… too cheaply
• Style over substance
• Anti-totalitarianism. Anarchy preferred
• Striving for a moral and spiritual Utopian enlightened despotism
• Striving for freedom as either personal dependence or independence from/on technology
• The supersession of sensory experience by digital simulation
• Computers as engines of liberation and tools of social control
• Attitude is everything

That’s Cyberpunk.

As a literary question, cyberpunk was used to describe ground-breaking writers like Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, and Shirley. It was an actual literary movement. It made science fiction better. As an aesthetic, it is only still slightly relevant, as it mostly speaks to the 1980′s, but it least it has core values that are about looking at the future from the bottom up, and looking at the future as a place that isn’t American, or British.

Steampunk is something much vaguer, rarely is it at all more than weak science fiction, so it can hardly be said to have made science fiction that much better.

And as much as I love the designs, I’m against having an aesthetic over having ideas. Cyberpunk, at least at it’s beginning was more about ideas. It was about making a future out of what was genuinely going on. Making a future that reflected what the world was actually like, and making plots that moved with the same sort of manic energy of the times. It just so happened that an aesthetic emerged out of those ideas. An aesthetic that could be co-opted and copied and rehashed long after it was relevant.

But as I said with steampunk, the “punk”-factor is nonexistent, so you’re left with just steam. It works in visual format – wargames, models, pictures… but there just isn’t the enough fluff to make it an interesting read.

End rant.

“Steampunk is bad and you should feel bad for liking it” is one of those blatant post titles designed to grab your attention and see if anyone actually bothered to read it. I do, in fact, love the designs.