Shameless: Confessions of a Steampunk Addict

Recently (last Sunday), I was lucky enough to attend SF in SF's release tea party for Timeless, the final book in Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series.  Shameless endorsement: Go buy these books RIGHT NOW.  They are hilarious, poignant, sexy, beautifully written, and as she herself pointed out, you don't have to worry about the author dying before the series ends!

And the whole set looks really sexy on your shelf.

Anyway, one of the nicest things about attending this was, of course, getting to meet Gail Carriger herself.  Aside from the fact that I am PAINFULLY AWKWARD and felt like a ditzy fangirl every time she was within speaking range, it was fun because she happens to be a normal person who will chat about whatever and go off on tangents and what-all, who also happens to write amazing books.  As a result, the Q&A was great fun.

Now, one thing that came up at various points in the Q&A, directly and indirectly, was what books/authors etc. most influenced Miss Carriger - which is a pretty standard question that authors get asked, and if you've read her books and/or follow her blog and Twitter religiously (like me - again, shameless fangirl), then the answers she gave weren't much of a surprise.  Most of her list was female written/driven YA fantasy, and comedic fantasy and sci-fi, with a few classic witty Victorians thrown in for good measure.  And that's what got me thinking a bit about what a weirdo I am in regards to how I got interested in steampunk, specifically steampunk literature.

I have no idea what I'm talking about, so here is a picture of a book  with gears on its pages.

There are many many fantastic members of the steampunk community out there who I follow regularly via their blogs and Twitters, too many to list them all in this post (though I'd like to).  But one common thread I notice in the steampunks I stalk is that  the vast majority of them seem to have entered into the steampunk literary aesthetic via fantasy or science fiction literature.  And here we enter the part where I'm wondering if I'm kind of a freak, because:

- I don't read sci-fi.
- I barely read "high" fantasy anymore.
- I dabble in paranormal, but only because of my vampire fixation.

I got obsessed with steampunk literature because of its connection to historical fiction and classic lit.

As a side note, there are a lot of crossover elements between science fiction, fantasy, and steampunk, and I'm not going to get into all the divisions and the concept of genre vs aesthetic (especially because Mike Perschon, the Steampunk Scholar and another of my favorite Twitter stalkees, has already dealt with that much better that I would).  I'm looking at this solely in terms of how I classify what I read, and the connections I see, so just roll with me on this.

If I take a quick look back on movies and such I really liked before I knew about the concept of steampunk, it's not that surprising that I ended up there.  I'll go ahead an cop to an embarassing list that includes things like Atlantis: The Lost Empire, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (movie and comic both), and Van Helsing.   You know what all of those had in common?

If you said "They all take place in alternate history settings with use of advanced technology," then congratulations! you are overachieving in trying to figure out if this was a trick question.  However, if you said "They all have some relation to classic literature and/or pulps," then congratulations! you've identified why I liked them so much, despite the arguable fact that two of those three kinda sucked and all three flopped at the box office.  (Two of those three also had planned TV series spinoffs that were cancelled when the movies flopped and I'm still bitter.)  But seriously, despite the fact that the movie version of LXG was entirely ridiculous, it was my geeky classic lit crossover wet dream and I still want to get together a cosplay group and all that sort of thing.  Because I'm a history geek.

I read a lot of historical fiction.  A lot.  A lot.  And most often I gravitate to Victorian era which, surprise surprise, also happened to be the era of the Industrial Revolution in which new technology like, oh, steam-powered engines played a huge part.  So if you hand me Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine I go: "Hey look, Disraeli!  And Lady Ada Byron!  And...a bunch of protocomputers...sure, I can buy that given the quasi-historical context in which they are explained as existing!"  Because I tend to dissect things as I read.  Heaven forbid you write a historical book and give someone a name that isn't appropriate for their era/age/language/country of origin, because I'll fixate on it to the point where I'll miss half the plot because I'm screaming about how you didn't do your research.  I want continuity.  And, despite my loooooong involvement with theater (or maybe because of it) I will only suspend so much disbelief before you need to explain yourself.  Example: Your protagonist cannot ride a single horse from Inverness, Scotland, to Winchester, England in a single day, period.  Caveat: Unless you have previously established that in this alternate version of Britain, all horses are descended from Balius and Xanthus and thus are born with the ability to run with the speed and tirelessness of the west wind.  I need enough strong backstory/history/mythology/whatever to convince me that there is an explicable reason from why things are the way they are in the world of a novel.  And if the author gives me enough of that, then I will be able fill in the gaps with explanations or excuses that I pieced together myself based on the world they created, and I won't be distracted by what might in fact have been an overlooked let's-just-handwavium-that item.

The words "airship" and "goggles" alone do not a steampunk novel make.

So that's why I think I'm drawn to steampunk from the historical side.  History, especially post-printing press history, is pretty well recorded, so it's just a matter of looking it up.  The particular breed of steampunk I'm drawn to, that of Carriger and Gibson and Westerfield, really is a kind of alternate history, taking the existing facts and judiciously applying  a few "what if?" questions to reinvent them a bit.  As a result, everything makes sense and the existence of the technology/science/magic/etc. that make the stories "steampunk" all originate from logical beginnings.  It's the literary equivalent of finding actual metal gears and tooling them into jewelry, rather than buying a necklace made of crappy molded plastic from the local Hallowe'en store.  They'll both have the right vibe, but one of them is obviously better quality and more likely to stand the test of time.  (Not that your accessories all have to be welded or anything - my pocketwatch cameo is held together with glue dots and safety pins, but I think you get my point.)  And this is not to say that I dislike fantasy or sci-fi.  I like both of them just fine, although I personally tend to prefer sci-fi in visual media.  I'm just so incredibly critical in my reading that it takes a lot to impress me and hold my interest, and so far most of the steampunk authors have managed to do that.  Don't disappoint me, my bustled and begoggled friends.

So in conclusion, steampunk is nifty, and here is a link to videos of Mike Perschon and Gail Carriger reading from the first chapter of Soulless, which is all kinds of awesome.