Steampunk— a subculture-slash-style that is best known for adding Victorian-inspired flourishes to today’s tech and fashion— has lurked beneath the pop-culture surface long enough. Now, as cultural historian James H. Carrott and futurist Brian David Johnson argue in their new book Vintage Tomorrows, it’s breaking through.
The road from tiny movement to omnipresent aesthetic has been long, but they see indications everywhere that steampunk is about to cross over from subculture to culture at large. They identify the 1999 movie Wild Wild West as a key starting point for the mainstreaming of the steampunk look, and the word has received style-writer shout-outs for years. Then, this January, IBM announced that their metrics to measure online sentiment had picked out “steampunk” as the next big thing. If Carrott and Johnson are correct, we’re already on our way there. And it won’t just be top hats and gears: steampunk has already made its way into the world of entertainment.
The authors spoke to Time about how to recognize steampunk entertainment, how steampunk allows us to understand today’s world, what will happen to the movement when once it’s totally mainstream— and what will come next.
So, first question. What is steampunk?James H. Carrott: It’s about taking the things that we have around us, the past, the technology, the objects and the ideas that we have around us, and messing with them, turning them on their heads, twisting them around and telling new stories with them. Steampunk in particular focuses on a 19th-century past. The ideas underneath it don’t necessarily have to, but it really comes down to this idea of being able to play with our stories, giving us license to break the warranty on our textbooks as well as breaking the warranty on our devices.
Brian David Johnson: For me steampunk is a subculture. It’s about fashion and books and comic books and movies and even spills over in to politics and tech. It’s people taking the technology of today and putting it into Victorian times and playing around with the past.
But people think it’s little hats and goggles. How do you recognize it in an entertainment setting?
JHC: It started out as a literary movement. The first steampunk book, The 21 Balloons, by William Pène du Bois, was written in 1947, a technological science fiction set in a specific historical past. The idea that science is inevitable progress came into question and people started looking backwards. But this explosion in the cultural trappings of steampunk really comes out of the mid 2000s. The goggles and top hats are like the tie-dyed t-shirt from the 1960s. They’re the symbols that this is catching on in mainstream culture. It’s easy to say ‘That’s just the image and not the substance’, but that’s also how culture changes. Image kind of is substance. Other people take a look at that and it maybe makes them think about the past. And, when they do that, things start to shift slightly.
BDJ: It means it’s making its way into popular culture. Really. anything can be steampunk, from books to movies to fashion to music to politics. When you see a Justin Bieber video that has steampunk in it, or you see America’s Next Top Model do a whole thing on steampunk, it means that our culture is searching for new ways of thinking about the relationship with technology.
You mentioned hippies, and talk a lot about hippies and beatniks in the book. How is steampunk similar to, or different from, those movements?BDJ: Much like James had seen in his previous work with beatniks and hippies, people were using this as a way to talk about challenging culture as it is now. So, for beatniks and hippies, it was around gender roles, it was around the economics of self-expression— and one of the things that made steampunk really interesting is it was doing very similar things, but focusing on technology. It didn’t hate technology, but it said we want something different from technology than we have gotten before. By playing with the past, they were playing around with a different future. For me, that’s what was so fascinating about it, just the numbers. Since we started the project it’s come so much more into mainstream. Even IBM said that 2013 is the year of steampunk, that we’ll be seeing it more. This is an indicator of something going on in broader culture.
And you mentioned that Justin Bieber has a steampunk-inspired video.JHC: Justin Bieber is not counterculture, obviously, but he’s a sign of the counterculture catching on and becoming cool, and that’s part of the life cycle of counterculture.
BDJ: Even the beatniks. It became about the striped shirt and the jeans and the beret when it started moving into the mainstream, like the Justin Bieber effect. When it moved into American television, which is when most people actually found out about it.
JHC: Yeah, the character of Maynard G. Krebs on the Dobie Gillis show is the ultimate beatnik stereotype. A columnist in San Francisco, Herb Caen, coined the term beatnik, from the Beat Generation, this literary movement. The people gathering around it started to become a countercultural scene in San Francisco, and Caen put together Beat and the most subversive scary communist thing that was going on, Sputnik. He created this bugaboo, and the image caught on in popular culture. People started to see it. And because they saw it, it sparked a lot of the interest and brought more people into the 1960s counterculture. A kid in rural Iowa who never had the opportunity to come across On The Road, except for a sensationalist piece in The New York Times about these frightening beatniks that are everywhere, goes: “Hmmm, that’s really interesting, I wonder if I should look into that.” Those sorts of things start to draw people in. It’s a gateway drug.
People say that the medium is the message. Will entertainment meld with the technology we use to consume it?BDJ: People still like pop songs because people like pop songs. People like movies because people like movies. People still like books. What I find interesting is that technology is providing more capabilities for people to interact with all of those pieces of media. Steampunk allows people to talk back. It’s about dialogue and that is wholly new. Very early on when James was explaining why we should do this project, he said if you wanted to be a beatnik you had to go to New York City or California, if you wanted to be a hippie you had to go to the Haight Ashbury, but if you want to be a steampunk all you had to do was go online. I do think you can see steampunk as a manifestation of a lot of that change and what technology is bringing to the arts and to media.
JHC: At the same time that it’s something wholly new, it’s also very old.
BDJ: Says the historian.
JHC: Brian’s right, in terms of the speed of communication and the ability to travel and those interconnections, but in some sense the twentieth century was an anomaly from an entertainment point of view, because you started to really get this monolithic culture. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, receiving culture and not really getting to create it myself. Our imaginations for a long time were served to us. I grew up and my imagination was Star Wars. I saw it when I was five, and it changed my whole life but the stories got handed to us. Now people are able to take those things and create steampunk Star Wars.
What’s some of your favorite steampunk entertainment?JHC: Chap-hop, which is kind of steampunk hip-hop. There are a couple of rappers who are engaged in this chap-hop war: Professor Elemental and Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer. On the visual end of things, I’ve been really drawn into the great short film The Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello. And I see it almost everywhere I go. The beginning of Game of Thrones, for crying out loud— which is the least steampunk thing— the little graphic that they start every show with is the cities coming up in this mechanized gears kind of way. I’m like, “What does this have to do with Game of Thrones?” It’s the way people understand how to build a world now.
BDJ: For me, the first would have to be the Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It was how I came to know steampunk in a very deep way. The other one is Wild Wild West, the movie. It’s how most people, in a very broad, broad popular way, came into it. My third one is Dr. Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory. It’s by Greg Broadmore, and it’s this lovely collection of devices that are beautiful designed and have funny stories behind them. They have so much humanity behind them.
JHC: And Boilerplate, which I think is one of the best examples of using steampunk in a really smart way. It’s history with a robot.
If steampunk goes mainstream, does it stop being cool?JHC: Yes and no. I think one of the things that’s different about steampunk is it’s not a youth culture. It’s not a drug culture, so, unlike a lot of bohemian countercultures of the past, this one has a much broader root. It’s also come up in a media environment where people can talk back to one another and critique things. There’s a great little internet meme music video, Just Glue Some Gears On It (And Call It Steampunk). It’s this great playback of the steampunk culture talking back to the people who are appropriating it. It’s also multigenerational; steampunk isn’t going to be killed off by speed or exploded by youth rebellion. There’s something different about the context of what’s going on.
So people who started it won’t have to find a new way to express themselves now?BDJ: The people who started it, they were being themselves. Most of them have this moment where somebody tells them, usually at a conference or on the internet, ‘that’s a great steampunk sculpture’, or ‘that’s a great steampunk outfit’, and they go: ‘steam-what? Oh. Okay. That’s what we’re calling this.’ Cool comes and goes. People have been predicting the death of steampunk for a while and saying that it’s jumped the shark, but it still keeps rolling. And technology is not going anywhere. The modern ways of talking about devices just really fall flat and steampunk is filling that vacuum.
JHC: I’m not sure there really is a shark to jump anymore. We’re well past that. We have seen people who’ve left because of its popularity, who said “I’m not doing steampunk anymore”— and then have come back to it a couple years later. But as far as countercultures go, it almost certainly will move on. Another movement will take its place. It has an interesting staying power, but ultimately the creative core of any counterculture movement is people who are dedicated to doing things differently. Once their message gets across, they’re pretty far down the line doing the next thing already.
Have you seen hints of what will come after steampunk?BDJ: I don’t think it’s been named yet. For the longest time, you could only use a computer if you went to a university or to a business. Then we had personal computers— and they were something you had on a desk. Then you moved forward, and maybe everybody had a laptop. But now, people have laptops, have smartphones, have tablets, have multiple devices. Steampunk is allowing people to think about that. But what happens when we can turn anything into a computer? And it’s not a device? And we live in a post-device world? I think we’re going to need some new metaphors to think and talk about that.
And those metaphors are still being invented.JHC: Technology has grown so quickly, so fast, and we’re only just beginning to grasp what it is that we’re capable of. That opens up all sorts of different realms of play and understanding. Part of the reason why the past has become so rooted in a lot of this, is because there’s more past now. We’re surrounded by access to videos and recordings and texts. The amount of material that’s available on the internet at our fingertips today is astronomical. It gives us a palette of stuff to paint with that we never had before.
Rico says he was, and is, a huge Gibson fan... But surely the quintessential steampunk movie would be The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, given Captain Nemo's submarine (photo, below) and 'automobile' (photo, bottom)?
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