Friday question!

[princess]

I'm going to try to remember to do one of these every Friday, since I like weekly things! I'm going to toss out a question which people may (or may not, if my questions suck ;) ) wish to discuss!

This week's question: What is "steampunk" to you?

(My answer in the comments when I get home from work.)

Comments

[hatman]

It's a form of super-retro futurism which turns (sometimes everyday) objects into shiny and nifty things with gears and gleaming metal and suchlike. A beautiful geeky artistic style.

[gblvr]

When I think of steampunk, I think of gadget-y Victorian stuff with lots of gears and random chains and dials. Some of it's shiny, but most of it is grungy and mismatched, because whatever the cool thing is, it was made of whatever scraps the inventor had around. Things like what Jules Verne wrote about....

The huge cyberman in this past year's Doctor Who Christmas special is probably my favorite bit of cyberpunk *ever.*

[princess]

I totally failed to answer my own question last night... :)

Steampunk, is, to me brass and gears and cogs and a DIY ethos. It's about beauty mixing with function, and about making it with your own hands. For me it's primarily victorian and neo-victorian inspired, although recently I've been getting more into art deco 'punk.

[princess]

Oooo! I love the huge cyberman!

[peachtess]

Steampunk to me is romanticized look back into the past and a game of "what if?" on all those theories of science and what the future would look like had turned out to be true. Its going back to the days of when there were Explorers, true survivalist who went out to see the world that we still knew so little about. When travel, any kind of travel, was a BIG DEAL and was an adventure in itself and not just about getting from point A to B. When someone with just a wrench and some parts could create something amazing and new that changed the way people did things forever.

[greenmansgrove.livejournal.com]

Steampunk to me is a throwback to the serial pulps, and further back, to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, with Victorian or other period trappings. Doc Savage, Impey Barbicane, Podkayne of Mars, Artemus Gordon, and even Buckaroo Banzai are all heroes of steampunk, in my mind.

Steampunk embodies a "do-it-yourself" philosophy, not just in building things, but an attitude of "That's wrong, I should fix it!" Action heroes, but intelligent ones, fixing problems and resolving situations through brain-power, not through the use of high explosives.

...Well.... Not always through the use of high explosives.

The webcomic Girl Genius is a fantastic (and very light-hearted) example of what Steampunk can be.

[elisem]

(I'm going to answer this before looking at any comments. Then I'll come back and read what everybody else has said.)

We were talking about steampunk -- don't recall exactly who, don't recall exactly why -- and one of us said something like, "Ah, yes: the inviting smell of machine oil, the patina of hardworking metal, the romance of rivets, the goodness of gears...." "The romance of rivets and the goodness of gears" became my descriptive shorthand for steampunk aesthetics from then on.

Also, to me at least, steampunk celebrates the kind of tech that could be fabricated by a single inventor working in a home-based workshop, as opposed to mass-produced tech. The involvement between artisan and each piece of work allows for -- no, encourages -- personalization and those artistic technological fillips that are the mark of engineer love. Each device is purpose-built and hand-fabricated, rather than stamped out as a lowest common denominator gadget which encourages lowest common denominator problem-solving.

Huh. Hadn't realized it before I wrote that, but I guess philosophically speaking, steampunk might be the unholy and delightful love-child of William Morris and James Watt. Wouldn't they be surprised?