In the last post, I discussed what makes something a genre or not, relying on the fuzzy set theory of fantasy and applying it to the three main punk genres- cyberpunk, steampunk, and dieselpunk. Today, we’re looking at the two main thematic concepts I see across all of these genres- technology and society, and the relationship between them and the protagonist.

Cyberpunk

We can begin with cyberpunk, since that was the first of the three genres to be firmly identified. In this case, the technology is primarily cyber. It focuses on the technology of computers and the internet (or its equivalent) and has a somewhat more dystopian vision. Not necessarily of technology itself, but certainly about the impact of technology on society.

Society in Cyberpunk & Society in Real Life

Much of this derives from its original historical context- the 70s and 80s. Starting in the 70s, we see the end of the post-war economic boom, the start of personal computers, the end of the Vietnam War, the start of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, broader awareness and pressure for feminism, civil rights, and decolonization. Meanwhile, the tiger economies in Asia disrupted the traditional concept of Western economic dominance.

As has become abundantly clear, technology and society are closely intertwined, and I’m not entirely sure they can be separated, or if they are, they are the twin strands in double-helix DNA. This became particularly notable in cyberpunk, where we have the glimmers of what will become cyberspace, the internet, hacking, advanced personal digital devices, and so much that we take for granted. Neuromancer is the archetype of course, featuring an ex-hacker-turned-contract-killer having to complete a heist in exchange for a cure to his injuries that keep him sidelined in the game between corporations, governments, and those in power. Technology and society have become the same, and both exist to extract value from the people beneath them.

Hence, cyber punks. We touched briefly on the etymology of punk in the last post, but we can revisit it here. Prior to the development of the punk music genre, a punk was a social undesirable— an outcast, misfit, criminal (especially juvenile or petty criminals), or men on the receiving end of homosexual acts (willing or not). Cyber, of course, refers to computers and the technology around them. The Shockwave Rider is a great example of the intersection between technology and society. The protagonist is a fugitive from an authoritarian dictatorship that uses his computer hacking skills to hack into public telephones (after all, this was published in 1975) and create a new identity, in a society run by technological oligarchs who use information control for their advantage, financial and political, after destroying the country through laissez-faire economics. Ahem.

Brief Case Studies

Blade Runner is the one cyberpunk example that most people think of, given its huge success. This one twists the archetypes somewhat, as Deckard begins as an enforcer of the status quo. He is the titular blade runner, a bounty hunter who tracks down synthetic, bioengineered replicants to ensure they remain on space colonies. Throughout the movie, we see numerous examples of corruption and double-dealing. Not only a cyberpunk cornerstone, but it also has significant influences from film noir.

Switching mediums, we have the classic tabletop roleplaying game Shadowrun (and its many, many d6s). This one takes fantasy tropes- like Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Humans, etc— and transfers them into a future setting where technology and magic co-exist. Its setting is more complex, but take everything we’ve discussed in cyberpunk, add magic, shapeshifting dragon CEOs, and orc mercenaries. It keeps many of the same tropes and archetypes of the previous examples. Otherwise, the setup is much the same. Super-rich corporations rule the world, and they hire criminals to do their dirty deeds as a form of corporate espionage.

These all have some pretty strong thematic threads tying them together. The story focuses on criminals, renegades, social dissidents, and others who don’t fit into mainstream society or abide by its rules. Again, the essence of punk. Most of these rules are not created by constitutional or democratic methods, but through wealth. Corporations, when they aren’t openly ruling, make their own laws and use the government to enforce those laws to protect their profits. The true villain of cyberpunk is capitalism. And in this world, technology is a two-edged sword. It is used as a tool of oppression and corruption, enforcing the will of the rich on the rest of us.

Punk is fundamentally political. Cyberpunk is fundamentally political. Steampunk and dieselpunk are going to be fundamentally political because politics is about how people interact with and interpret the world. So yes, art and literature are inherently, fundamentally, and inescapably political. The *punk genres are no exception, despite the wishes of many of their adherents. (Check out this article from Never Was and then read the comments.) Unfortunately, when we deal with any part of retrofuturism, there will be those who romanticize the past, whether they’re teens thinking they were born in the wrong generation because they prefer older music or trad wives with multi-thousand-dollar stoves pretending to be a pioneer.

If you don’t believe me about steampunk, refer to one of the originals- Jules Verne. Its submersible captain/antihero, Captain Nemo, is the son of an Indian prince whose family was murdered by the British during one of the fights for independence in the 19th century. Nemo then takes that intellect, what remains of his fortune, and uses his burning desire for vengeance to forge them into the famed submarine Nemo to enact his revenge against a colonial and imperialist system. Tell me how that can be apolitical. Cyberpunk’s social commentary has been explored in the previous examples: anticapitalist, anticorporation, antimonopoly, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist. What about steampunk and dieselpunk?

Steampunk

Steampunk is messy, as you may have guessed by Dr. Christopher’s article. Here’s another article from 2011, by Margaret Killjoy, talking about the radical political origin of steampunk, citing H.G. Wells, socialist and anarchist. Here’s another, including social media comments and commentary, including a comment that proves so many points. Here’s one, once again from Never Was, saying steampunk isn’t political at all, and we return to Nick Ottens with another one, more recent, and one on how he changed his perspective on “Victorientalism.” All that to say, it’s complicated, and the steampunk community has been arguing over this for more than two decades.

Some Case Study Attempts

It’s difficult to identify common themes in the 70s/80s steampunk novels. Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, for example, starts with Egyptian magicians attempting to use time travel to bring the Egyptian gods into the present to destroy the British Empire, but that isn’t the main story. James Blaylock’s Homunculus is a bit more of a comedic science fiction in the Victorian era, playing with space aliens, necromantic science/magic, and some rather madcap shenanigans. Jeter’s own Infernal Devices maintains comic, or perhaps absurdist, elements, including a clockwork double, mistaken kidnapping, people who invented a machine to see the future and learn 20th-century slang, plus various secret societies within London.

If we look at the pre-Jeter, proto-steampunk work of Michael Moorcock, The Warlord of the Air, we see something else entirely. That is about a man sent forward through time (again by magic) into an alternate future where World War 1 never happens and never leads to the dissolution of the colonial empires/ As a result, the protagonist ends up supporting anarchists against his own country. Moorcock picks up this thread of alternate futures in The Land Leviathan, which features a devastated and barbaric Europe and North America receiving the same treatment they gave Africa and Asia in our world. In The Steel Tsar, the story continues in a third alternate future where the Confederate States of America won the Civil War and Russian history worked out differently. In this case, it leads to an atom bomb being dropped on this universe’s version of Stalin, destroying his theocratic army.

Then, more recently, there’s the 2012 Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace, which, according to the Amazon description, “is steampunk with a modern, post-colonial sensibility.” Several reviews referenced in a few other places described the book as being very “politically correct.” I haven’t read this one, as I was not overly impressed with the Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk (couldn’t finish it, sadly). The invention of the term silkpunk and Afropunk suggests there is a significant movement within steampunk to expand beyond its British imperial obsession.

I suspect part of the complexity is the nature of steampunk’s connection to the Victorian era. American society (and Anglophonic society in general) is still heavily influenced by the Victorians. And, while I can’t say this definitively, I think much of modern steampunk, at least mainstream steampunk, is very emblematic of the neoliberalism and imperialism of post-9/11 America. It tapped into the zeitgeist at the time that celebrated the possibilities of technology. That technology was the internet and the developing world of social media, which were going to revolutionize the world and bring about a new golden age of democracy, prosperity, and international goodwill.

Yeah, I can’t read that without hearing the irony either. I suspect that’s why steampunk began to fade toward the beginning of the 2010s. The optimistic and idealized view of technology no longer seemed to mesh with our lived experience, in which social media became a tool for government surveillance and the internet turned a shocking amount of people into far right fanatics who consider themselves sane and normal centrists and “classical liberals” (how’s that for an Overton window shift?).

Maybe, in time, steampunk will rediscover its identity and have a resurgence. I could see that being the case with what Radio Retrofuture is doing with their videos, tabletop RPG, and fiction. I think the perspective of their definition, that steampunk is cyberpunk in the Victorian era, will help them out, as it can tap into a different set of themes and tropes that feel more applicable.

Dieselpunk

This is where things get even more ambiguous. Dieselpunk has no fuzzy set or identifiable genre-defining works. I can’t go back and look at proto-dieselpunk or the pre-term examples and see what trends connected them. In this case, we’re even more heavily influenced by the interwar (and immediate post-war) era and generation than we are by the Victorians. Many people from this era are alive and remember it as part of their childhoods. Add in the disagreement over what makes something dieselpunk— is it Mad Max or The Man in the High Castle?

Based on the other two genres, we can start looking at the two elements discussed so far: technology and society. I suspect that the diesel– part will be significantly more difficult to untangle in the future, but the popularity of Iron Harvest and Scythe may be starting to settle that debate.

Technology in Dieselpunk

Let’s start again with technology. Now, I’m operating under the definition that dieselpunk is based on the technology or aesthetics of the Interwar years. I expand it roughly to 1906, with the commissioning of the HMS Dreadnought, but that’s because I’m a maritime geek, and yes, I know she used steam-powered turbines. I end the dieselpunk era at roughly 1947 with the invention of the transistor, laying the groundwork for what becomes the proto-computer age.

Media at the time was broad and very diverse, although much of the science fiction and fantasy stories were published in pulp magazines. That explains Indiana Jones being called dieselpunk, as he was a direct homage to the pulps of the past. That is also true for the Rocketeer and Sky-Captain. Ghosts of Manhattan has a much stronger noir influence, but there is still some pulp influence.

Pulp science fiction led directly into the more “sophisticated” science fiction of the 50s, which, in turn, led to the rebellious sci-fi of cyberpunk. That means there’s not as much of a divergent break between reality and science fiction as in steampunk. Retrofuturism is probably the best term to describe that divergence. Steampunk imagines a future technological system based on how people in the past imagined the future would be. Looking at pulp and other early sci-fi, we see a strong line of continuity between what they imagined and how the world ended up.

What we see is the end of the technological optimism of the Victorians. The First World War traumatized the world, and the Spanish Flu added to that by showing that humanity was not the master of the natural world. There’s more ambivalence toward technology, except perhaps the new technology of heavier-than-air flight. That still held a great deal of romance and optimism, which turns up quite a bit in dieselpunk (Crimson Skies, Sky-Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Rocketeer). Flight was a means of escape, of a new future in the clouds, of a life far from the trenches of the mundane.

Having read many of the original pulps, technology is both a weapon of oppression and a means of defense. The reliance on technology and gadgets (as in the original Tom Swift books) is less important in pulp than the hero’s human capabilities. Doc Savage uses super-science, but many of his mysteries are solved through his intellect, strength, and willpower. The Shadow uses no technology except a red ruby ring and a .45 Auto.

There are, of course, a great many supervillains with doomsday devices. That suggests a significantly greater awareness of the danger of technology, especially industrial technology. Weapons of war and mass destruction are the most commonly thought of vehicles across all dieselpunk media. The elegant zeppelins of steampunk end up replaced by skyfaring, ironclad battleships.

Dieselpunk & Society

If anything, the weightiest thematic element of dieselpunk is war. The ghosts of the world wars haunt the shadows in dieselpunk, lingering in the background, hinting at more catastrophes on the horizon. Which, again, is very appropriately derived from its era of inspiration.

Global war followed by global pandemic followed by global economic collapse, with people trying to survive and then trying to live with what they did. The rich lived gilded lives above the dirt and misery of the working poor (The Great Gatsby), while radicals on both sides of the aisle grew more and more extreme. An entire generation had been hardened to violence and taught to kill in an industrialized, organized manner. We get the Prohibition level of organized crime as a result. Both Communism and Fascism reached their peak, often in direct response to the other, with the Spanish Civil War being the first hint of what was to come. Decolonization began to take root and cracked the rotted foundations of the old world order, and no amount of technology could fix them.

It makes me wonder if that’s because dieselpunk tech is more industrial and institutional compared to the quirky steampunk tinkerer or the cyberpunk outlaw hacker. In the Interwar period, science was a tool of economic and military power. There were optimistic and beneficial developments in science, especially in medicine. It wasn’t all gloom and doom, although there were horrifying outcomes (lobotomies and eugenics).

That lends credence to the idea that war, and ideological war, drives dieselpunk. And that takes us to the Nazi problem. The Man in the High Castle, Wolfenstein, any video game villain that wears an officer cap and a black leather trench coat– Nazis are very prevalent in dieselpunk. And unfortunately, there is a broader fascination with their aesthetic (and horrifyingly widespread acceptance of their ideas). A brief google search for images reveals a long line of war machines in gray and black as the image results. Swap to Decopunk and the results are Art Deco cityscapes instead. Gas masks and black trench coats are everywhere in dieselpunk media. There’s a perverse fascination with the aesthetic of fascism.

The Future of Dieselpunk

Where does that leave us? Can dieselpunk ever become a genre? What would a dieselpunk genre look like? Using my definition (science-fiction inspired by or extrapolated from the aesthetics and technology in use between 1906 and 1947), we may establish ourselves as a genre. It’ll be difficult and will take a great deal of luck to have a widespread break into the mainstream.

For that, I think we need to evolve dieselpunk beyond its current confines. Time to leave the Nazis in the past and look elsewhere. I wouldn’t even lean toward adapting RadioRetrofuture’s definition of steampunk as cyberpunk in a different era. The social context has evolved from the 70s. The media landscape has evolved since then as well. Rehashing the same tropes from the past will condemn us to irrelevance.

To accomplish that, we need to look beyond Nazis, war mechs, and gas masks. I see the dieselpunk timeframe as spanning 40 years. The Nazis and World War II made up less than half of that time. Let’s look elsewhere for inspiration and ideas. Let’s look at new types of stories. What are new connections and combinations that we can experiment with? I’ll talk more about my dieselpunk project in a couple of weeks, so I’ll dive more into that then. We also should lean into the punk elements. The punk elements made the early cyberpunk works stand out from the crowd. Right now, dieselpunk leans more toward “the 30s with fancy technology” and neglects the punk elements. Where is the rebelliousness? The anti-fascism? The anger at a corrupt society? What would a world where the technology went a different direction look like? So much of dieselpunk is focused on big cities- what happens outside those cities? What happens in the rest of the world or worlds? What would subcreation, to use Tolkien’s term, look like in a dieselpunk secondary world? Or dieselpunk mythopoesis?

We had the short-lived swing revival, but that’s hardly punk. Paul Shapera is a great example of what I’m talking about. He’s told an overarching story that goes from steampunk to dieselpunk to atompunk through very innovative opera. It’s so good and so unique and so punk. That’s a direction I think dieselpunk needs to move toward– innovation, unique styles, and innovative new forms.

That’s something that will take many of us working as part of a community, perhaps like the Dieselpunk Creators of the World. Collaboration and community discussion, like the Inklings, will be critical if we want to establish ourselves as a genre. Do you have ideas on how to do that? Toss your ideas in the comments!