The Null Device

Charlie Stross is becoming annoyed by the glut of "steampunk" scifi, partly because of the surfeit of mediocre hangers-on that are jumping onto the hugely profitable gravy train, but mostly of the toxic political undertones romanticisations of the late 19th century carry when unexamined:

We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good. If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It's the world that bequeathed us the adjective "Dickensian", that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It's the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next).

Viewed as a fashion trend for corsets and top hats, steampunk is no more harmful than a fad for Che Guevara tee shirts, or burkas, or swastikas; just another fashion trend riffing thoughtlessly off stuff that went away for a reason (at least in the developed world).

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans' Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn't bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right? Might as well pick Zombies for our single one impossible ingredient.) 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. The casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King's shilling to break the heads of union members organizing for a 60 hour work week. The fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forced to labour on steam-powered looms, weaving cloth for the rich. The empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips and breeding stock for their fathers' fortunes. In other words, it's the story of all the people who are having adventures — as long as you remember that an adventure is a tale of unpleasant events happening to people a long, long way from home.

¶ charlie stross scifi steampunk 2

A few art-related items today: firstly, Boing Boing's Offworld video-game blog has a gallery of video-game-inspired artwork by Melbourne street artist/illustrator Ghostpatrol. It's mostly influenced by old Nintendo games, and is drawn in Ghostpatrol's characteristically organic twee watercolour style, avoiding the clichés of isometric/8-bit/pixel-art styles. Quite lovely stuff; I recommend listening to some Qua whilst looking through it.

Meanwhile, there is Banksy's ongoing exhibition at the Bristol City Museum, which is going until the end of the month. Entry is free, though prepare to wait up to four hours in the queue, and get there early. It's well worth it, though; Banksy's animatronics, for example, are superb, and his oil paintings and other non-stencil pieces are excellent (the large oil painting of Parliament occupied by chimpanzees, for example, is splendid). I had occasion to see it recently; my photos are here, though they don't quite capture the works in all their glory.

(According to The Times, Banksy charged the Bristol City Museum just £1 for putting on the exhibition, on the condition that all CCTV footage that could identify him was destroyed. Also, only four staff were informed of what was being planned (the rest were told that filming was taking place). Given the level of technical skill in his pieces, I suspect that the reason Banksy is so keen to keep his identity secret has to do not so much with fear of getting caught for illegal graffiti as fear of being outed as working for The Man; I wouldn't be surprised if his day job was in advertising, film production or similar.)

Finally, French street artist Invader (i.e., the chap who sticks tile mosaics of old-school video-game characters to high surfaces) is exhibiting in London until 17 September.

(via Boing Boing, MeFi) ¶ art banksy dan hillier ghostpatrol illustration invader josh keyes steampunk video games 1

A few interesting posts from LiveJournal: Momus writes about the nihilism of heat:

In hot places, human life seems to be worth less. Iraq is a place where an army of Mersaults in the form of soldiers and "contractors" are constantly on the brink of breaching their own culture's taboos, driven to acts of violence by the murderous heat. Under the sun, nothing matters any more.

In hot places, human life seems to be worth less. Iraq is a place where an army of Mersaults in the form of soldiers and "contractors" are constantly on the brink of breaching their own culture's taboos, driven to acts of violence by the murderous heat. Under the sun, nothing matters any more.

Some say that cultural psychology changes as you move closer to the equator. In Discovering Psychology with Philip Zimbardo, a precis of a film about cultural psychology made for the University of Stanford, James Jones of the University of Delaware argues that a way of being has evolved near the equator featuring particular uses of time, rhythm, improvisation, orality, and spirituality. What he describes is a failure to defer gratification:

Cod-Vic usually has an element of knowing perversity to it, relishing its bad taste rather than recoiling from it. Cod-Vic has also opened the floodgates to a host of one-liners, cheap novelties, and dead ends--some delightful, others less so. The most successful Cod-Vic offerings seem to strike a deft balance, borrowing from overwrought Victorian forms while maintaining a modern crispness and rigor.

Cod-Mod is another form of retro, but an altogether less problematic one than Cod-Vic since its clean lines, unadorned materials and simple color schemes lend a laid-back, contemporary air of unaffected sophistication, making it much easier to defend as an aesthetic. Cod-mod has been mined heavily by indie music (Camera Obscura and Belle & Sebastian, anyone?), as well as interior design types like Jonathan Adler and film directors like Wes Anderson. Oh yeah, and Ikea.

(via imomus, lord_whimsy) ¶ culture design heat helvetipunk modernism psychology society steampunk 0

The New York Times has a piece on the works of Paul Otlet, a Belgian who, between the late 19th century and World War 2, invented early forms of hypertext, search engines, the semantic web and even social software. Of course, not having digital computers to work with, his "Mundaneum" had a vaguely Terry-Gilliam's-Brazil quality about it, relying on telegraphs, vast numbers of index cards, armies of clerks and analogue terminals referred to as "electric telescopes".

The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

The archive’s sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet’s original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.

Just as Otlet’s vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world’s knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.

(via /.) ¶ history hypertext it retrocomputing semantic web steampunk web 1

An Australian human-interface innovation I hadn't heard of until now: the Marshalite, an early analogue traffic signal developed in the 1930s. Unlike modern pedestrian crossings (with the exception of those in some US cities), it not only displayed whether crossing the road was permitted, but gave an indication of how much time pedestrians had to cross, in the form of a clock face. The downside of the Marshalite was that, being mechanical, it was not adjustable, and worked on the assumption that traffic lights had a fixed duration. (And changing the speed of the moving hands is not an option; people would make assumptions about what the hand at a specific position would mean, and could not be expected to look at it long enough to gauge the speed.) At some point, they started adjusting the lengths of traffic lights to better manage traffic, and the Marshalites were all replaced by the now ubiquitous red/green man.

(via Boing Boing Gadgets) ¶ australia design human interface steampunk urban planning 1

The Boston Globe has an article about the Steampunk movement and the subculture of people who build gadgets that look like something from an imagined Victorian computer revolution:

Yet steampunk has also evolved as an aesthetic unto itself, drawing on a number of diverse references. Goth, which has its own anachronistic sensibility, borrowing heavily from Victorian styles such as corsets, offers an early glimpse of steampunk. Punk lent elements of leather and metal, as well as the DIY attitude. The film "Brazil" is of particular inspiration, where technology looks like junk, and the rebel fights against a technocratic authority. But one of the most important influences has to be Japanese animation, or anime, which is replete with images of mechanical robots, neo-Zeppelin starships, goggle-wearing hackers, and the melding of the techno with the organic.

Objects like the Infumationizer show that steampunk is also simply a love of the fantastic. Steampunk hackers are often science fiction geeks at heart. There's a love of things that don't exist, except in some alternate world, like the "Peltier-Seebeck Recycled Energy Generating Device" and the "Aetheric Flux Agitator Mk2." One of Datamancer's other inventions is a modified enclosure for his desktop computer, which he calls "The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine." He used the cabinet of 1920 tube radio, a turn of the century Underwood typewriter, and various parts and pieces to create a functional, completely anachronistic, impossibly real computer.

In all of the new steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it, like the "Nagy" of Datamancer's "computational engine." In the Victorian era and at the turn of the century, people watched in astonishment as technology changed their lives, but they were also in awe of the inventors and scientists, some of whom became celebrities in their own right, like Edison and Tesla.

(via Make) ¶ aesthetics copyfight culture cyberpunk scifi steampunk tech 0

The account of the steam-powered drum machine, or rave culture meets steampunk:

Soon after the crowd had entered, the doors were locked tight so as to prevent intrusion from representatives of the Law. Van Hoovenaars then unveiled a huge and terrifying contraption. A multitude of brass pistons, steam cylinders and horns had been fashioned together, as like the internal frame of a fire-spewing Behemoth burst forth from teutonic myth. The professor addressed his audience, explaining that each piston reverberated on to a canvas of varying thickness to produce a series of rythmatic beats. He warned the gathering that once set in motion the machine "would produce such rhythms that man has never dared imagine - over an eleven hour period".

(via MeFi)

¶ drum machines hacks music steampunk 2

Read: Seventy-Two Letters, a great, vaguely steampunkesque short story by Ted Chiang, combining kabbalah, 17th-century naturalism and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution:

Robert Stratton went on to read nomenclature at Cambridges Trinity College. There he studied kabbalistic texts written centuries before, when nomenclators were still called baalei shem and automata were called golem, texts that laid the foundation for the science of names: the Sefer Yezirah, Eleazar of Worms' Sodei Razayya, Abulafia's Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba.

(via bOING bOING)

¶ fiction kabbalah scifi steampunk 0