Steampunking Technology

The roots of the current steampunk boom lie in a literary subgenre that peaked in popularity in the early 1990s and owes a direct debt to the work of 19th-century writers Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Both men wrote fantasies that featured fictional state-of-the-art technology powered by nothing fancier than steam and propelled by elaborate systems of switches, levers and gears (see: "Around the World in Eighty Days" and "The Time Machine," respectively). But their versions of tech weren't determinedly anachronistic, like those of later works: Michael Moorcock's "The Warlord of the Air" (1971) and James P. Blaylock's "Lord Kelvin's Machine" (1992). "The Difference Engine," a 1990 novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, takes place in an alternate Victorian Britain, one in which the real-life inventor Charles Babbage has succeeded in his astonishing dream of building a computer programmable by punch cards. In their wickedly fun book, the information age arrives 100 years early, steam-powered right along with the Industrial Revolution.

But now—thanks to Nagy, Slattery and their DIY ilk—this high-tech Victorian aesthetic has leapt from the page into reality, like the golem of some long-dead mad scientist. "I'm kind of touched to see these guys becoming pop stars," says Sterling, "The Difference Engine" co-author. "To me it's a sign of social health. People can look on the legacy of the past and grab it and use it. It's an industrial cut-and-paste aesthetic. And I think that the 20th century's love for 19th-century technology is going to be matched by the 21st century's love of corny 20th-century technology. We're going to see Atompunk." Somehow, though, the idea of a lovingly modified MP3 player made to look like an eight-track player just doesn't have the same appeal.

© 2007