Why Steampunk Lit makes sense

[Steam Girl]

Why Steampunk Lit makes sense

aldersgatecycle.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/why-victorian-steampunk-sf-makes-so-much-sense/

Author of the blog Aldersgate Cycle did a beautiful article on Steampunk here.

What I’m using:

History is beautiful puzzlement.

And then there’s science and technology. Victorian literature, and later much Edwardian literature, often brims to the edge with excitement and enthusiasm on the subject of growing technologies in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaire) or skeptical of the power of science (Robert Louis Stephenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”). That these stories still resonate with us today, still frighten us and inspire us over a century later, is quite remarkable.
I see steampunk fantasy, and steampunk science-fiction, then as a natural next step in this progression. We are, in a sense, reinventing the reinvention. We look to the Victorian period and understand their simultaneous excitement and tenuous approach to technology; we know what it is to want to discover our roots and delve into the mysteries of myth. New advances in DNA and gene research have given place names to people who sometimes feel as if their cultural identities have been lost in the melting pot.

and

And I think what I love about it most is that, like Victorian medievalism and early science-fiction, it balks in the face of definition. It is not strictly historical, nor is it easily explained. It is moving and changing, different things to different people.

[penguinsushi]

I like the wording the 'reinventing the reinvention'.

This may be pure conjecture and/or taking it in a slightly different direction, but i find steampunk to be a reimplementation of the awe & fear of technology described during the industrial revolution in a sort of different way - the feeling is still the same, but the frame of reference and the envisioning thereof is different:

For anyone with even the slightest mechanical intuition, the state of technology during the industrial revolution makes sense. We may not have a full understanding of exactly how a steam locomotive works, but we get the general idea. Gears, levers, pulleys and the like make sense because they behave according to physical laws we observe on a day-to-day basis. The advent of digital technology, however, changed that. It is difficult for the average person to conceptualize how a computer works simply by looking at its output. It works on a subset of physical laws that are not often observed by most and are a little abstract or unintuitive in and of themselves...

...ergo, Steampunk. The idea that fantastic devices and contraptions can exist through machines that operate only mechanically is wonderful because we can understand it - at least, in theory. I find it further amusing that often the aspects of such a quasi-mechanical device that cannot be obviously explained mechanically are attributed to 'magic' or some other supernatural/alchemical/fictitious set of funtions, almost as if to say "here's the bulk of the contraption, these bits we don't understand are just 'magic'" - and therefore inherently incomprehensible.

~PS