Tee Morris began his writing career with his 2002 historical epic fantasy, MOREVI The Chronicles of Rafe & Askana. In 2005 Tee took MOREVI into the then-unknown podosphere, making his novel the first book podcast in its entirety. That experience led to the founding of Podiobooks.com and collaborating with Evo Terra and Chuck Tomasi on Podcasting for Dummies and its follow-up, Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies. He won acclaim and accolades for his cross-genre fantasy-detective Billibub Baddings Mysteries, the podcast of The Case of the Singing Sword winning him the 2008 Parsec Award for Best Audio Drama. Along with those titles, Tee has written articles and short stories for BenBella Books’s Farscape Forever: Sex, Drugs, and Killer Muppets, the podcast anthology VOICES: New Media Fiction, BenBella Books’ So Say We All: Collected Thoughts and Opinions of Battlestar Galactica, and Dragon Moon Press’ Podthology: The Pod Complex. When he is not writing, Tee enjoys life in Virginia alongside Philippa Ballantine, his daughter, and five cats (3 female, 2 males). Considering the male-to-female ratio in his house, Tee understands how General Custer felt near his end.
Foggy Goggles: The Problem with Steampunk Sub-genres
by Tee Morris
When reading a recent blogpost from the Parasol Protectorate’s Gail Carriger, I felt my hackles rise. They stood a hint taller when I followed a link to The Steampunk Scholar who gives an in-depth look at what I believe to be the silliest trend currently running amuck in steampunk. The gist of both posts is that Gail’s New York Times bestselling series really shouldn’t be considered “Steampunk” but a softer cousin of the genre — “Bustlepunk.” Gail, as she is a class act, opens her commentary on this as follows:
I tend to not weigh in, Gentle Reader, on the controversial subject of bustlepunk, and prefer to let the experts argue amongst themselves as to whether my books are officially steampunk… Since Soulless came out in 2009 I have obeyed to the letter the old Internet adage “do not engage.”
I admit—I’m a new kid in the community. I know this. It was only in March of this year when I (with Pip Ballantine) stepped fully into the fray. Our first steps into steampunk were with the launch of a steampunk podcast anthology. We followed this first step with our second step — the book, Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel, now just over two months old.
And yet, reading both of the earlier cited columns, I’m asking the same question:
Bustlepunk?
Seriously?
Seriously?!
With the accomplishments Gail has achieved with the Parasol Protectorate series, I’m stunned that there are Steampunk SMOFs (Secret Masters/Mistresses of Fandom) who believe she doesn’t write steampunk on account of — as described by Gail herself — her books being unabashedly frivolous and fun. “Of course that can’t be steampunk!” these SSMOFs trumpet from pulpits on high. “We must give it its own classification — bustlepunk! Yes! That’s it! Bustlepunk! The softer side of nitty, gritty, icky, grimy, and dirty steampunk!”
Yes, I’m the new guy, but I’m just going to say it — Enough with the sub-genres!
It’s not just bustlepunk (and yes, every time I say that word, a kitten dies) that I speak of. It’s all of these contrived sub-genres that are cropping up in order to distinguish themselves from “true” steampunk. I first discovered this segregation when explaining to a curious bystander what steampunk was. When asked for some examples from film and television, I went with a favorite example: Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang.
One of the steampunks in our group turned to me and said:
“Well, Tee, Chitty Chitty, Bang Bangis more dieselpunk.”
Not only was the steam-curious furrowing his brow at that, so was I. Dieselpunk? What the hell is dieselpunk?
The hair-splitting continued, particularly at WorldCon 68, when I heard bandied about the other “just-like-steampunk-but-different” sub-genres:
- Sailpunk
- Sandalpunk
- Ricepunk
- Atompunk
- Teslapunk
- Stonepunk (No kidding — Stonepunk. Think The Flintstones.)
To those in the mainstream struggling to understand what steampunk is, dropping sub-genres like these only muddy the boiler’s water, making for a really poor performance and a bad stink coming from your analytical engine’s exhaust.
So if this rule of “a case of the whimsies” applies and Gail Carriger therefore doesn’t write steampunk, then you better tell Kaja and Phil Foglio they aren’t writing steampunk either. And someone call The League of S.T.E.A.M. They are having their steampunk card revoked, regardless of their delightfully witty writing and artistic direction.
And while you’re at it — best proceed with caution when reading Phoenix Rising. Between the explosions and intrigue, our whimsies are strong.
Pa
rt of what appeals to me (and, I imagine, outsiders of the steampunk circles) with this Science Fiction sub-genre is the passion, wit, and downright cleverness and creativity of “what could be.” From the possibilities K.W. Jeter, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock first envisioned back in the late-1980’s came a “future-that-never-was” along with a wide definition of what steampunk is all about. When Pip and I attended The 2011 Steampunk World’s Fair, we were struggling not to gawk and gape at what people defined as steampunk, but never did I hear anyone describe someone’s outfit as being a great ricepunk outfit or how their elaborate cannon and teapot was an amazing dieselpunk creation. And when I saw rayguns of Grordbortian inspiration, never did the term retropunk ever bandy about people’s lips. What we were a part of was a celebration of ingenuity and do-it-yourself technology with style. It wasn’t about the niche you fit into, but what you as an artist were defining as steampunk.
Now as steampunk begins to approach mainstream in its appeal, we as writers, costumers, and artisans of various media should stop and ask ourselves how wise it is to search for that magic genre we fit in. If we are not edgy enough are we merely writing bustlepunk? (And there goes another kitten…) If we decide to set our steampunk in Calcutta, have we ventured into currypunk? What if our steampunk traces its true origins back to the earlier era of the Restoration? Do we dare explore the possibilities of powderpunk?
How silly can this hair-splitting get?
Steampunk is more than an era, more than Victorian London, and far more than the technology of Babbage taken to a higher plane. Steampunk is a celebration of what you can accomplish when your heart and your imagination is behind it. It is adventure. It is wonder. It is, as Nathan Fillion’s Richard Castle so eloquently puts it, “…a subculture that embraces the simplicity and romance of the past but at the same time couples it with the hope and promise and sheer super coolness of futuristic design.”
Not ricepunk.
Not retropunk.
And certainly not bustlepunk.
This is steampunk.
Let’s keep our sights on what we do together, not searching for our own little niches. That way, we are better artists, a stronger community, and an artistic movement that changes perspectives.
-Tee Morris
STEAMED! 
wow… please tell me ricepunk isn’t real… or tell me what it deals with, cause as a Japanese girl i DEMAND my membership card.. lol.. but i did get a HUGE laugh at currypunk… and now i’m hungry…
Tee, hats off to you… I am a huge fan after Phoenix.. can’t wait for more
Bustlepunk?!?!?!
Still being a relative newbie to the wonderful world of Steampunk I didn’t realise there were so many sub genres – some of which I don’t even pretend to know what they mean. Ricepunk?!?!?!
I’d heard of Dieselpunk and Cyberpunk up to now.
I find myself puzzled by your response to the Steampunk Scholar’s post on the Bustlepunk scenario; he raises the proposed differentiation to examine and disagree with it, but specifically says that Carriger should NOT be confined to a “soft” subgenre, and strongly advocates that she is solidly within the steampunk aesthetic.
As I whole, I agree with you about the silliness of subdividing steampunk, and the steampunks I know are excited about diversifying its possibilities. However, dieselpunk does have a solidly differentiated aesthetic; it’s post-Edwardian, so the technology and the fashion are distinct. Again, I don’t know of anyone excluding it from the steampunk umbrella (parasol), but it’s the one term of all of those you mentioned that has solid credibility.
I do beg your pardon, but the “just-like-steampunk-only-different” subgenres had me laughing. Seriously? I know cyberpunk, and I’ll admit to hearing of dieselpunk in passing (and according to spellcheck, that’s even a recognised word!) but I agree with you. Hairsplitting is a problem with most genres of writing, and I think it’s just ridiculous.
Brilliant article! 😀 do like.
careful there, Chippy- Cyberpunk’s not really Steampunk at all. It’s different- even wikipedia agrees!
Ahh, the nature of evolution. It is impossible to box-up indefinitely an art form & expect it to maintain its appeal to a fickle consumer. “Reinvention is the mother of necessity?” I’m afraid the necessity in this case is pick your win-able battles & move on my friend. Cheers! 🙂
It is Hunan nature to place things into boxes that we did most comforting. Perhaps Bustle-punk is one of these. Yes, Gail’s work is most assuradly Steampunk, and shall remain so. Let’s try not to muddy the water too much with our classifications. A Resla coil is a Tesla coil whether it be 20 feet tall or concealed in the palm, just as a rose is a rose…
I’ve heard of dieselpunk and cyberpunk as well. I’ve also heard some people mention (and scoff at) the term “gaslight fantasy”. The subdivisions are just silly. It’s like a bunch of kids sitting in the sandbox at the playground and telling anyone who isn’t in shorts and a superhero t-shirt that they can’t play there.
Embrace the what if.
Thank you, all, for the comments (both “for” and “against”) on this trend in Steampunk. I chuckled a bit at Suzanne when she told me of “Elfpunk” yesterday. For the love of Pete…
And I forgot to mention Seleste’s reference — gaslight fantasy. Yes…that is steampunk last time I checked. How utterly silly.
“Embrace the what if.” I like that.
Feeling nudge-y, but . . . the original post doesn’t mention cyberpunk, but since several commenters do, I’m wondering if the history of the terms is known to everyone. Cyberpunk not only isn’t a subdivision of steampunk, but predates it — it is futuristic, not retrofuturistic, though it also deals with speculative technology, including virtual reality and a lot of things that look like they may be coming true any minute now . . . The “punk” in steampunk is a bit of wordplay by first-generation steampunk author K. W. Jeter, because of the immense popularity of cyberpunk at the time (late 1980s). Then cyberpunk heavyweights William Gibson and Bruce Sterling crossed streams and wrote their own steampunk novel, The Difference Engine . . .
We as a species constantly classify and segment to produce an ordered society. But I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that steampunk is far more diverse than one continent or decade, and as such should embrace, rather than sub-divide efforts such as Carriger’s (who’s books I adore!).
For instance, the books I write are set in the Weird Wild West of the 1880s and feature Hunters after supernaturals. I’d hate to think of people seeing it as bootpunk, or god forbid, cowpunk, rather than steampunk. It’s all steampunk, people. Can’t we just leave it at that and enjoy and celebrate our diversity within the astethic?
Theresa — if cows are involved, I suggest you lobby for your silly sub-genre to be “cowpie punk”…
I’m just saying… *LOL*
Yes, well… we do like to get carried away in labeling. But, in my humble opinion, there does need to be a way to differentiate between something taking place in Victorian London and something taking place during the American Prohibition era. There simply isn’t anything “steam” about the later. Thus the slippery slope.
Two notes:
I’m surprised you attended the SPWF 2011 and missed all of the dieselpunk events that were on the schedule, such as the “dieselpunk speakeasy in the sky” and the “what the pulp is dieselpunk” talks. Seeing that the SPWF was going to be entirely dieselpunk this year until we talked them out of it (steampunk has more commercial value), there was still an entire dieselpunk track of entertainment and lectures.
To define steampunk as any genre of retrofuturism blurs the meaning of the word. It’s hard to answer “what is steampunk” when you point to a brother or sister genre that has nothing to do with steam, Victorian culture, or the mid-to-late 1800s at all. In other words, we’re both fruit, but don’t call my apple an orange. Call it retrofuturism, or call it what it is.
I’m new on the scene, and Cyberpunk, Steampunk, and Dieselpunk I get. They relate to the technology used in the novels.
But bustlepunk (yet another kitten dies!), ricepunk and the others!!? Who is coming out with these?
Well. I must reluctantly recognize that my current WIP, being an extremely gay, slightly futuristic urban fantasy detective noir adventure, can only be called one thing. Cumpunk.
Or perhaps that should be Cumspunk. Or perhaps I should just be quiet now.
This is why I’ve long held that trying to classify genre (or subgenre, if you prefer!) by superficial trappings such as what time period of alternate history is represented, or what type of technology is focused upon is shallow and lazy.
Isn’t it much more useful and informative to look deeper and speak of the themes involved? It’s what we do for every other literary movement! You don’t pontificate about how Romanticism is Victorian fiction — that’s uninformative and useless! No, if you want to discuss the Romantic movement, you talk about how it’s a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment and Industrialization.
Similarly, you’re bound to get lost in all the *punk nomenclature (and, indeed, Tee, invent frivolous new ones for the sake of trying to coin a phrase) instead of really getting at something useful. Instead of saying “Oh, cyberpunk is speculative fiction that focuses on computers,” sit down and think about things for a little bit, and come up with something more profound and interesting, like “cyberpunk represents a counter-cultural move against the formulaic, pulpy science fiction of the 60’s and early 70’s, advocating exploring societal evolutions and consequences of emerging technology and the rapidly converging and blurring realms of man and machine, or the real and the virtual, in a burgeoning information age.” (For the record, The Difference Engine may be set in a Victorian era, but it’s got just as many, if not more, cyberpunk themes and tropes running through its blood as it does steampunk. It’s espionage in the information age of cogs and ticker-tape…)
The problem, then, with Steampunk, is that much of the content claiming the title doesn’t share any coherent themes like that. It’s just been crudely brushed up into a pile in the haste to label it, or attach itself to a successful label. (A label that is, I might add, a complete misnomer to begin with. Take a look at cyberpunk in the late 80’s/early 90’s, and you’ll see strong veins of anarchism, anarcho-libertarianism, and other strongly counter-cultural attitudes and movements worthy of the association to the Punk movement of the 70’s. Steampunk bears none, or very little, of this kind of raw edginess in contrast, I find.)
Such a lack of coherency, a dissonance of message, leads me to be absolutely unsurprised that those searching for meaning in the genre seek to subdivide it in an attempt to find more order and alignment. They’re just going about it the wrong way. So what we’re left with is less about a message looking to be heard, than a gloss painted over a jumble and variety that might more aptly be characterized as Steampop.
Having read this post, I’m not changing the definition that I have in my head on what constitutes Steampunk, which is, to me having technology existing in a period where such technology could not feasibly exist due to a lack of scientific knowledge and engineering capability to truly replicate that technology in said period and that such technology still has a potential level of implausibility in our present.
Amen and well written.
My biggest problem with bustlepunk and terms like it is the inherent sexism behind it. It’s no coincidence, I think, that it’s more often female authors, with female lead characters, whose books get dismissed as the softer options — and who find themselves the victims of this sort of subgenre marginalisation. That’s far more insidious than distinguishing steampunk from dieselpunk, which does, at least, have the grounding of differentiating between historical era and dominant technology.
I have this to say on the subject of sub-genres: Sub means “is contained by”. Therefore the larger tag ALWAYS applies.
i.e. Don’t be a prat.
Doc
So the genre is a jumble. It’s still in the process of an evolving identity. The same pattern seen in an emerging scientific outlook where the established order has been called into question. Yet the new theories, since they have not been fully developed, are not yet accepted. Add to that the human tendency to prefer what’s known and to resist change. Thomas Kuhn made that clear in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
I agree that the term ‘BustlePunk’ rather strongly implies sexism. And that, especially for the author in question, there is no good reason not to simply include her work in the general category SteamPunk.
I agree, too, that it is more useful to talk about the reasons a genre arose– to what is a reaction. But it also needs to clarify what purpose it intends to serve. It shouldn’t be merely an unfocussed dislike ala the ‘I hate my parents’ school of 1960’s revolution or the ‘aren’t I just so shocking’ Goth. That’s pop radicalism and pop PoMo. No surprise there’s SteamPop. However, go read the introductions written by newbies on the various SP sites. Interesting how many of the teens express themselves well– and not just upper class Europeans.
A possible problem I see with SP is that there is an unrecognized tendency towards class prejudice. Witness all the Ladies This and Captains That. When truth is a century ago, few people were even middle class; those who were lived with constant anxiety. Perhaps that’s part of the SP movement: to revive the attitudes that enable opposition to the neoRobber Barons.
Which cyberpunk did not. I think it was very much a product of the Reagan/Thatcher era de facto revival of Social Darwinism. If this form of Post Modernism is that the isolated individual is the measure of all, then success is individual’s ability to dominate the new frontier. Conquest of cyberspace. A re-hash of the old myth of ‘rugged individualism.’ A view that never acknowledges how much any person is heir to scientific, cultural, and spiritual legacies. And is dependent on others. Who exactly fixes their own cars, computers, or selves with parts they totally made themselves?
The Boomers had assurance when young that the future could only get better. Not so today. I believe that’s part of the motive force driving SteamPunk. By rewriting the past, a future is made possible. And in contrast to cyberpunk and goth, it’s positive. It’s a new twist on appropriate technology. DIY plus the idea of work as art– like the medieval guilds or craft/trade unions. Work is not about serving some remote, power-mad econopathic behemoth that has no compunctions about destroying either ecosystems or its employees. Instead, it’s a way of expressing creativity and thus the deepest aspects of what it means to be a human being.
I think all these subgenres are being brought up by people who want to keep steampunk for themselves and desire to keep it Mysterious and Not For Mundane eyes.