I am pleased to welcome Chris White back to SteamU. SteamU Professor White will be discussing the grittier side of the period(s) often depicted in Steampunk. If you have ever read a Charles Dickens novel, you know that life in London none too pretty during this period. On the one hand, we had the splendor of the Victorian era. On the other hand, you had droves of children working in horrific conditions in positions that amounted to nothing more than slavery. I was thrilled when Professor White offered to consider the darker side of the era. My new work, Chasing the Star Garden, is set in 1823 and my protagonist would have been considered little better than the gutter snipes of the day. So today, we head to the dark side . . . enjoy!
Today’s Lecture by SteamU Professor: Chris White
Chris White is
a freelance writer of many styles from
pulp-noir to literary fiction and magic realism to science fiction. He lives in Brisbane, Australia. His work can be found printed on several dead trees, and scattered
about the Internet.
Further Discourses Available: http://chriswhitewrites.com
Slumpunk: Coal Dust and Consumption; or, The Storm Inside the Silver Lining
I don’t know
about you, but when I think of steampunk I think of corsets, coat-tails and
gadgetry. That’s the first thing off the cuff. I think of upper-class Victorian
dandies. Toffs. And the image of Her
Imperial Majesty, Vicky herself, springs to mind. The Victorian era seems
to dwell in that part of history that is romanticised in our minds, an age of
glorious empires and of scientific discovery, a “Golden Age,” like Rome, or
Athens. Al Andalus.
"…broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have
been hurt in drunken forays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder
why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and why they talk
instead of grunting?" Charles Dickens, writing of slums in New York.
But all societies have an underbelly of
the poor, of the “criminal classes,” and none spring to mind (to my mind at
least) quite like those in the histories of European and North American cities.
Cities like London. Now everyone’s imagining the fog. That was a fog that could
kill, the pea-souper. Imagine Jack the Ripper, dim, gas-lit streets, the “women
of the night” plying their trade for enough coin to sleep indoors overnight.
Imagine the children in the workhouses, working twelve hour days, employed at a
quarter of the going rate for adult males (or half a woman’s wage.) Charles
Dickens’ London. A place where the rich and the poor didn’t rub
shoulder-to-shoulder, because the poor were in the gutter where they belonged.
“Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text,
but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be.
Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in
which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry.” William Gibson, in an interview
with The Paris Review
I think steampunk needs to go out of its
way to address this – and not only because (from the outside) steampunk seems
to be lacking this sensibility. China Mieville addressed the outrageous
poverty, both in Perdido Street Station and
in The Scar. Read some Dickens, and
he’ll show you some of the poverty and despair that stalked cities all across
the globe.
These people, the imagined bystanders,
lurking, unwritten in the backstreets of novels and short stories…what’s their
story? For every aviatrix or inventor there’s at least one slumlord, at least
one hundred families of the starving poor. Hell, the aviatrix probably was a
slumlord! She certainly wouldn’t have come from the workhouses or the textile
factories. How do these wonderful technological advances affect the poor? They
certainly couldn’t afford any of them. Imagine Crystal Palace, if you’d turned loose
a man who’s just burnt his front door to stay warm.
I want to know what
happens to the Suffrage Movement, when men have even more power. How long would
the battle for women’s suffrage have to rage into the twentieth century without
women working in the arms factories during the Great War? People tend to see
the wave of technological advancement as being a great liberator, but
historically we’ve used technology to oppress minorities. Think about Gunship
Diplomacy and the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. I saw a call for
submissions recently, for an anthology, Confederacy of Steam Vs Zombies, and
I first I was interested…but I think I was asking the wrong questions. I think
they were after Southern Belles and gentleman slave-owners. What I want to know
is if the Civil War still occurs, once machines replace slaves as the primary
industrial force. Would the slaves rebel, Luddite style, smashing the looms
that replaced them? Or would vast refugee camps spring up, only to be smashed
by the expansionist United States as they spread westward? Would Libya be the
name of an African enclave in the Pacific Northwest, or would they call it
Liberia?
“I hope we get the steampunk version of the
Belgian Congo and the steampunk version of the 1857 Indian Uprising and all
those things, to really interrogate some of the aesthetic assumptions in that
field.” Chine Mieville
The impact of steampunk technology on
Victorian society would be immense, and not only to those wealthy aristocrats
in London, speculating on the Irish Question or the intolerable opium
addictions of the young. And how would this unleashing of Victorian Industrial
power impact on the rest of the world?
Would the Empire have
fallen? Or would we see another Cold War, a war between proxies, as the
colonial powers exploit and pillage Africa and East Asia? Would India be free?
Or the Belgian Congo? How about the Philippines?
“A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic…would
reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns
of the white Europeans' Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise…It would share the
empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town
during a recession, unwanted children (contraception is a crime) offloaded on a
baby farm with a guaranteed 90% mortality rate through neglect.” Charlie Stross,The Hard Edge of Empire
How much sooner would the impending
environmental apocalypse occur in a world where coal-smoke is billowing into
the atmosphere? We are, after all, talking about levels of pollution so great
that the famous London “pea-souper” fog could actually kill you, about the
pollution-driven evolution of the Peppered Moth (went from a speckled white to
completely black, the better to remain camouflaged on trees covered in soot.)
We are talking about heavy industry located in the heart of poor districts,
about the Great Stink of 1858 and of
nightmen and toshers, rummaging in the cess-pits and sewers to make a living.
I think that we as authors, and as fans,
need to ask more of the genre, that we need to hear steampunk voices actually
imagining what would happen if Victorian morals and politics had been further
empowered, and had maintained a tight grip on the world. Even if these stories
are only tangential to our plots – you can still talk about the aviatrixes or
‘gentleman’ explorers, but what of the match-girl starving on the street
corner? Or the six year old pickpocket, imprisoned?
Steampunk needs to look at the truth of
history, and the truth of steampunk doesn’t lie in creating a poetic-idyll out
of the lives of slumlords and dictators.
Steampunk needs to become slumpunk.
Join us next Friday for another SteamU lecture. Unitl then . . .
No comments