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How do?

First up. This isn’t an attack or a criticism of those who enjoy the genre, just the genre itself. You crazy cats keep on enjoying whatever tickles your pickle.

But.

Yeah.

Steampunk.

It’s just so boring. And largely, inexplicable.

See, I’ve a keen interest in Victoriana. It’s an odd mix. Glimmers of modernity, distinct shades of the Middle Ages. It was the first time that, truly, technology moved faster than standard morality could keep up with.

The Railways were the first part, enabling the movement of people and goods far faster than humanity had ever seen, and with ever greater reliability. Visionaries such as Brunel really pushed the metaphorical envelope. And society eventually adapted. As much as it attracted bumpkins from the country into the cities (man has to have a job, after all), the cities weren’t yet adapted to such an influx.

And from that, we kept on developing new and evermore efficient technologies (if not cleaner). Had the steam engine not happened first, we’d never have got to the internal combustion engine, and liquid fuels. From there (via War, which is horrific, but a helluva a motivator) nuclear power.

That? That is my beef with steampunk. It traps humanity in a certain time period, and forcibly strips us of the drive for advancement. No xh would both trying to make a steam powered walker, because the machines themselves were quite efficient enough, until other fuel sources were perfected, and the machines around them.

Then there’s the sheer logistics. Steam trains worked because the next carriage was purely fuel. Diesel and then electric trains trumped that through sheer efficiency.

As a species, we pushed steampower as far as we could, and hence sought out new ways.

But no. Not Steampunk. Just hold it there, for like, ever. No more advancement. No more discoveries. Apparently everything is suddenly steam engine powered. Never mind what that’d do the world’s respurces,

Now, there is Damned good steampunk out there, but a lot of it is, to my mind, tremendously lazy. It’s a zeitgeist, and the proles will lap it up. To quote a song, ‘just glue some gears on it, and call it steampunk’. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Lazier than me on a hungover Summer’s Sunday morning, when a Bacon sandwich involves actually getting dressed and nipping round the corner for a half-loaf.

And it doesn’t need to be. Consider HG Wells, the arguable father of science fiction, and indeed his contemporaries. They wrote about the technology of the time, where the future of technology (any technology) might lie.

But in the 21st Century? Ah sod it, steam powered Warlord Titan, with no real supply line. Because I’ve glue some gears on it.

TL/DR? There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. The era is fascinating enough. And a bit of fantasy goes a long way with ‘what if’. Just, it’s kinda lazy, and appeals to lazy hacks.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from. Generally I prefer dieselpunk, myself.

It's not that Steam punk holds advance its that they find means to extend the power of steam engine to the point where there's no requirement to research other power sources; or where such advance is limited to the point of not affecting the world at large.

Also you ignore the fact that a lot of steampunk have steam engines, but often throw in a few other materials. A super fuel that makes steam burning more efficient; magical floating magical rocks (unobtainium style magic). Some even blend science and magic together.



And in the end most stories fix the world in a single state. Indeed I'd say that Discworld is one of the more unique fantasy settings in that it does actually start to advance through some big shifts in technology and society.

Also don't forget that there are lots of periods in history where technology stagnated and advanced within a niche. If the world the steam punk is set in never discover oil or never discover large deposits of it then it stands to reason they'd not have oil powered engines en-mass.






And in the end a big part of steam punk is visual in its nature. It's the vision of seeing moving parts, cogs, steam engines. It's capturing that sight of a steam locomotive thundering along with the pistons moving, the bars moving, the wheels turning, the steam billowing out and turns it up to 20 (totally blasting past 11!).


Of course each to their own, though I feel as if you've got a jaded view of steam punk.

squidhills wrote:
Yeah, I get where you're coming from. Generally I prefer dieselpunk, myself.

Word.

And, you know, actual Cyber Punk as well.

The first science fiction was written in the real historical era of steam.

The same stagnant kind of thing happens in fantasy. If elves live for hundreds of years then why are they not making several technological advancements with every generation. Surely ANY of their legendary intelligent and masterful artisans could invent a better type of bow, or learn about combustion and develop simple guns.

But no.

They have had the exact same tech for thousands of years.

This feels like it belongs on the MDG Blog site.

I mean, I certainly hope we're not going to be treated to a series of posts about anything else you find boring?

Also, I like Steampunk just fine.

You should check out the Twisted! line of miniatures - and their game is quite nice too.

I really only enjoy it as a game setting. It’s the best place to mix guns and swords since the tech of the former hadn’t QUITE completely eliminated the latter.

I imagine steampunk is best used when it exaggerates the issues of the time. Older technologies look so mundane to us that, as a society, we forget how powerful of a changing force they were. So we crank steam-power technology up to 11 on the insanity scale. Show the plights of colonialism with a building sized locomotive or zeppelin showing up with an army to flatten your town. Make electricity this terrifying weapon so that we feel just how strange and terrifying it was to people back then. I haven't read too much steam punk so I can't say if this is what people are using for, but I think steam punk should be used to explore the issues that were relevant at the time.

I like to call it Peamstunk.

I'm the kind of person who likes to make up obscene lyrics to sing along with pop songs on the radio.

It seems your hatred for Steampunk is just a hatred for bad writing and a lack of imagination by the writer.

 Lance845 wrote:
The same stagnant kind of thing happens in fantasy. If elves live for hundreds of years then why are they not making several technological advancements with every generation. Surely ANY of their legendary intelligent and masterful artisans could invent a better type of bow, or learn about combustion and develop simple guns.

But no.

They have had the exact same tech for thousands of years.

This and the OP sound like the same complaint people often have about some sci-fi properties, and the response is the same in both cases - the problem is not the material, the problem is your choice of material.

You two seem to want the "hard sci-fi" - the speed of light is a constant and ships travel under or at it, technology is a reasonable extrapolation of the trajectory we're on right now, things take a realistic amount of time to happen, society is generally an evolution of the present day rather than a paradigm shift, etc etc - equivalent of Steampunk/Fantasy, but here's the thing; that genre is called History.

Steampunk(and dieselpunk, and most other 'punks except perhaps for cyberpunk because we seem determined to make it our actual near future) are "soft" fictions by their very nature, because of MDG's core complaint - if they were "hard", then tech would advance, the social revolutions that steam and subsequent techs enabled would happen, and it would stop being steampunk.

While I must admit I don't know that much about the genre, beyond the fact I find it very visually appealing, I thought the whole idea was that technology doesn't stop advancing, it's just all done with steam.
When you can already make clockwork androids and steam-powered cybernetics, why bother inventing the petrol engine?

"Steampunk" as a genre was only invented for one reason.

So that goths could wear brown every now and then as a change from the black on black with black accessorising.

From a perspective of a steampunk enthusiast (and other related late XVIII - early XX "punks") there is so much wrong with the OP that I don't even know where to start...

First of all, "steam" in the name does not narrowly define technology available in the setting nor time period or reasons behind technology. This is a major problem in all discussions about steampunk, because the term encompasses stories ranging from near-historically accurate XIX century, to fantasy-with-elfs-and-steam-power, to post apocalypse devoid of oil, to alternate realities where the next technology advancement after steam engines wasn't into oil but into ether or other fictional resource... And because this all falls under "steampunk" label people like OP can get a false idea, that steampunk somehow "freezes" technological advancement, while the true focus of the genre is on the very idea on how exactly technological advancement influences history and society. Moreover, this setting usually focuses on the period when those advancements are not only rapid but also numerous and unpredictable in nature of the area of influence, as was true in XIX century.

Another reason why steampunk is how it is, is that it was the last era in the history of technology when most advancements were based on single-man discoveries/inventions. Even advancement from coal to oil power happened because of one humble apothecary from Poland, Olgierd Łukasiewicz, who found a way of refining crude oil into kerosene and inventing kerosene lamp, changing society deeply in less than a decade by enabling activities after sundown impossible before. In historical context, it was an era where we weren't yet on a path that lead us to present day and many different turns were possible and best steampunk stories go deep into that possible forks, not fixating on cheap steam powered penny dreadfull stories.

It's geting late so I have to stop here for now, but one last thing I have to write in the name of ballance - there is so huge mount of gak published/created under this genre, that me and my fellow steampunk enthusiasts use the term "sh..tpunk" for most of what we can get our hands on - in literature, crafts, cosplay, movie industry etc. But it is the same with fantasy, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, post-apo, space opera and even not-so-hard-sci-fi. For some strange reason however, steampunk has the strongest anti-fans out there. Probably because we don't really have any iconic, ongoing setting like Star Wars/Star Trek, LoTR or Fallout/Stalker to focus around.

Your criticisms of steampunk pretty much apply to every genre and setting of fantasy and science fiction.

Star Wars? Using the same exact technology for 4000+ years.

Tolkien? Zero technological development for millennia.

Warhammer 40k? Zero technological development in the past 10,000 years with the sole exception of the Tau. In fact, the general level of technological advancement is regressing over time.

etc. etc. etc

Mind you, I'm not defending steampunk. I used to love the gak, but I think the community that built itself up around it don't really have any vision and have made it a parody of itself by gluing unnecessary clockwork and rivets to everything (well, really as I think about it more and more I love "retropunk", I was just drawn more to "steam"punk because I love the heavy mechanical/analog industrial theme. Also corsets).

Starwars at least as the explanation that it's all adopted tech.

There was a galaxy spanning civilization that actually developed it all and it was after their fall that other races found and adopted it. Eventually learning how to reverse engineer it and create new designs based on the found principles.

SW tech hasn't advanced because 1) there is no reason for it to. They can literally do pretty much anything. And 2) they don't actually understand it enough to advance it. They know when you put the square peg in the square hole you get hyper drive. They even understand it enough to build different kinds of square pegs and holes. But the underlying science and understanding of their universe isn't there so nobody is developing anything more or greater.

The thing that bugs me about most steampunk / VSF is that the characters all seem to have modern sensibilities, except where it comes to wearing crinolines and corsets. If you're going to write literature set in the Victorian era, make the characters think like that, please?

There's also often a lack of "punk" - in that the magical steam technology is just sort of there in the background, and there's not any exploration of how this changed technology would have affected the society and the like.

The first "steampunk" book I read was The Difference Engine, which, being by William Gibson, was interested in the edges of society, and how the new technology was empowering or oppressing those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. There's a bit more to it that just wanting a setting where everyone has fantastic facial hair but you can't be bothered adapting the action to cope with the fact that no-one can simply phone whoever they need to, to advance the plot.

Cyberpunk went the same way - it started off as a way of looking at how the increasing computerisation of society would affect that society and its inhabitants, to being about looking cool in a trenchcoat and mirrorshades while stabbing someone in an alley with a katana. Ove time, as xxx-punk gets more popular, the "punk" fades away and we're just left with "xxx"-cosplay.

nou wrote:

For some strange reason however, steampunk has the strongest anti-fans out there. Probably because we don't really have any iconic, ongoing setting like Star Wars/Star Trek, LoTR or Fallout/Stalker to focus around.

I've never encountered an anti-steampunk person until reading this thread.

 dogma wrote:

nou wrote:

For some strange reason however, steampunk has the strongest anti-fans out there. Probably because we don't really have any iconic, ongoing setting like Star Wars/Star Trek, LoTR or Fallout/Stalker to focus around.

I've never encountered an anti-steampunk person until reading this thread.

Same - in general most of the major Steam Punk releases have had an overall positive reception. The problem is its never made is mainstream in the least and has remained very niche. Thing is there's also lots of casual steam punk - take that big Wild Wild West film; most casual movie-goers saw it as just an action film even though it was chock full of steam punk stuff.

And that's the kind of issue - steam punk has never really had anything major that pushed itself out there. Steam Boy might have been one of the biggest, but Anime already starts out as a bit of a niche in the west (with the current exception of a few anime and films)



Of course not everyone like everything, it would be nuts if they did. But I don't see Steampunk having "antis" in the same way that you get, say, football hooligans being anti-their-rival team.

This seems relevant.




Basically, there is a lot of awful steampunk fiction out there which falls into using bad writing techniques and tropes and fails to address how such a society would actually function and evolve.

Cyberpunk is better than Steampunk. All day long, every day of the year.

Plus, all I see of Steampunk is just hipsters with absurd mustaches wearing funny hats and goggles with a gear aesthetic. It seems more like a fashion thing for cosplayers than an actual theme for anything.

Slap some gears, goggles, and a stupid mustache on Batman and now you're STEAMPUNK BATMAN OMG UNIQUE AND INTERESTING WOW SO COOL

 Overread wrote:

Same - in general most of the major Steam Punk releases have had an overall positive reception. The problem is its never made is mainstream in the least and has remained very niche.

I wouldn't call it "niche", my 62 year old dad knows what steampunk is. The problem is that devotees are hipsters.

I feel like posting positive Steam Punk stuff now https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/758530.page#10018736

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Cyberpunk is better than Steampunk. All day long, every day of the year.

Plus, all I see of Steampunk is just hipsters with absurd mustaches wearing funny hats and goggles with a gear aesthetic. It seems more like a fashion thing for cosplayers than an actual theme for anything.

Slap some gears, goggles, and a stupid mustache on Batman and now you're STEAMPUNK BATMAN OMG UNIQUE AND INTERESTING WOW SO COOL

Do you mean Gaslight Batman? Because that is a thing.

80% of everything is crap, and that's in the old world in which professional editors and talent scouts put a lot of effort into getting the best creators on to their platforms (record labels, publishing companies and so on.)

In the modern world when anyone can write a book and stick it on Amazon, there's a vast amount more stuff (and YouTube, etc.)

Inevitably much more of it is rubbish but a lot of it is cheap or even free so in some sense you get what you pay for and I have to say in my year of unemployment I was very glad to be able to read scads of super-cheapo SF and horror of many descriptions.

 Dreadwinter wrote:
Do you mean Gaslight Batman? Because that is a thing.

Gotham by Gaslight? I'm familiar.

No, I mean people who just take a random character and add goggles and gears and a stupid mustache. Maybe Batman wasn't the best example, but he didn't look that absurd.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
Do you mean Gaslight Batman? Because that is a thing.

Gotham by Gaslight? I'm familiar.

No, I mean people who just take a random character and add goggles and gears and a stupid mustache. Maybe Batman wasn't the best example, but he didn't look that absurd.

Gaslight Batman looks reasonable. But I agree with the goggles, gears, and 'stache trope. There isn't much creativity with the cosplayers, that I have seen. It all looks like old clock parts glued to things with some colored glass mixed in. Then if you are female, wear a corset and apply makeup, heavily. Think Moxxie. If you are a male, grow the douchiest mustache possible and wear a tophat or bowler derby. EZ PZ.

All genres have recognisable conventions or themes, that's what makes them genres.

Steampunk is based on late Victorian clothing with added science fictiony steamy bits like brass and gears and so on, because the late Victorian era was the high age of steam and early science fiction (Jules Verne, etc.) which supply the core inspiration.

You couldn't have a smooth metallic helmet like Daft Punk's. It would have to be a chromed British Army sola topee.

You couldn't have a Colt M1911 A1 for a weapon. You would carry either a big Victorian recolver, or a skiffy electric pistol made of brass and mahogany.

Anyway, practically all cosplays are recycling various tropes. How many superhero characters are really different from the core tights/pants/cape/mask format?

So, we've moved on to gaking on people for not being movie-grade costumers now?

Frankly some of you guys are coming across more as just folk looking for excuses to hate on other folk - what's next, slagging off kids' halloween costumes? Taking the piss out of goths/punks/trendies/[insert visually distinct subculture here]? It's like being back in school.