Steampunk Pirates

I was sent this interesting image which seems to have been produced by an artist calling themselves Winter Rose. It is apparently a steampunk pirate flag. It has excellent steampunk elements with that Victorian art nouveau styling. The curling plant imagery reminds me of the Natural History museum in Oxford which has a roof supported by iron pillars each of which was cast to resemble a different type of tree.

Steampunk Pirate Flag by Winter Rose

Anyway, this got me thinking about what examples I had seen of steampunk pirates. They effectively appear in the computer game 'Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura' (2001) with an attack on an airship in the opening short movie. There were a couple of other examples that I could think of. Of course the first comes from Jules Verne one of the grandfathers of the steampunk genre. In 1886 he wrote 'Robur the Conqueror' which is about an inventor called Robur who has constructed a heavier than air vessel, called the 'Albatross' capable of flying around the World, leisurely, in three weeks. It has numerous vertical propellors to keep it aloft and horizontal ones to drive it. At one stage it attacks the 'Goahead', which, in the story, is the most sophisticated airship of the day. Robur gives himself the title 'Master of the World' and has a secret island base on Island X. In many ways he is the precursor of the 20th century super villains. Robur has a flag which I have not found anywhere on the internet: a golden sun on a black background which he places on the top of numerous large structures around the World. In 1904 Verne produced a sequel called 'Master of the World' in which Robur produces a vehicle called the 'Terror' which can turn into an aeroplane, a car, a speed boat or a submarine and can travel at 150 mph on land and 200 mph in the air.


'Robur the Conqueror' can be read online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3808
'Master of the World' is found at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3809

These are some book covers which show how people interpreted these stories visually:

I found this image of a similar vehicle called 'The Eclipse' but have been unable to track down which novel, if any, it comes from. Any ideas?

In many ways Robur resembles Captain Nemo in 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' written by Verne in 1870 in that it features a man who has created a vehicle ahead of its time, in Nemo's case, the submarine 'Nautilus', which allows him to travel the World unchallenged. His motives are his own which put him in an ambivalent moral position and suggest to the reader that society needs to be careful in developing these new technologies. Nemo and Robur are rather like Greek heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus who roam the World, often driven by personal tragedy, and sometimes with a nihilistic attitude to those they meet. The parallel between the two characters is brought out notably in the movies. '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' (1954) features James Mason as a bearded Nemo who looks very much like Vincent Price's Robur in 'Master of the World' (1961). They are the black-bearded ones in the posters below.

The 'Master of the World' movie owes much more to the first book, 'Robur the Conqueror' than to the book it is titled after, though apparently there were abortive plans to make a movie of that too. Price's character seeks to bring peace to the World by threatening to bomb any country which does not comply. This was a common theme in novels of the 1920s and 1930s, i.e. the use of airpower as a deterrent to war.  It can be seen as a parallel to how people perceived nuclear weapons during the Cold War which was at its height at the time of these movies. Notice that the movie makers went for an airship rather than the heavier-than-air vessel featured in the novels.

I should mention 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971) written by Michael Moorcock, the first in the Oswald Bastable triology which features an Edwardian soldier from our world travelling to an alternate 1970s in which the First World War never occurred and there are still colonial empires. Bastable becomes a member of the British airship fleet but increasingly becomes disillusioned with the oppression of peoples that has kept the empires in place.

Whether, even Verne's characters, can be seen as true pirates is for discussion. They do not raid in the way we would expect pirates to do, but they look very much as we imagine 'sea dogs' to appear and they have a moral ambivalence about them. Recently I saw the movie 'Stardust' (2007) which features Britain in, it seems, something like the 1840s and a link to a world where magic and witches are real. In this alternate world there is a clear aerial pirate (also a transvestite and there are implications that he is gay), Captain Shakespeare played by Robert De Niro. He is more clearly a pirate with an appropriate crew and his vessel is a pirate ship with a large balloon on top. However, he does not go on pirate raids, rather he harvests lightning in the heart of storms. The lightning is stored in tubes, is marketable and is useable as a weapon. The style of Shakespeare's vessel is more 18th than 19th century.

Captain Shakespeare's Vessel

The final example I would look at comes from what I would term a bakelite-punk movie, 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow' (2004). This features a British military base which flies above the Pacific. One of its officers is Captain Franky Cook played by Angelina Jolie sporting a eye-patch. The movie is set some time in the 1940s but in a world where the Second World War has not occurred, though it is implied Japan has invaded China. Technology has advanced faster than in our world. Cook serves the British empire but her manner, to some extent, is like that of Robur and Nemo. She could be seen as being in the privateer rather than a pirate. However, the vessel that is her base owes a lot to that envisaged in 'Robur the Conqueror'. The fact that Sky Captain Joe Sullivan has a base close to a lake in eastern USA and is a freelancer has some parallels to Robur. Getting images of the flying bases over the Pacific featured in the movie has proven tricky and I could only find the one below. Beneath that is Jolie in her role as Cook (of course this can be seen as a reference to the real Captain Cook in the Pacific). Her outfit and pose seems to owe much to Mussolini and the uniforms of the Italian Fascists rather than anything from the British Royal Airforce or Royal Navy.

British Flying Aircraft Carrier

Captain 'Franky' Cook

So, what we have seen so far, rather than real steampunk pirates, are either inventors who hope to shape the world by using airpower or really privateers (or, in Shakespeare's case, a kind of electrical trawlerman). A real aerial pirate story in a steampunk setting would be interesting. I would be grateful, if you have come across any, in whatever media: book, movie, game, etc. if you would alert me to them. This is a potentially wonderful subset of the steampunk genre.

P.P. It turns out I am not the only one on the quest for steampunk pirates, some people are actually doing something about it, check out: http://www.brassgoggles.co.uk/brassgoggles/200709/mr-dantes-skypirate-costume

and: http://sky-oddity.blogspot.com/2008/04/concepts-of-steampunk-pirate.html

and a female steampunk pirate outfit: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/set?id=3656020

and another: http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=274128.0

This Halloween, steampunk pirate outfits seem to be de rigeur.

'The War In The Air' and Steampunk

'The War in the Air' by H.G. Wells

This is the only image I can find online of this 1970s Penguin book cover for 'The War in the Air', the one I remember reading as a boy and again in that turn of the century style that I like.

When commenting on H.G. Wells's 'The War of the Worlds' and steampunk aspects of some of its spin-offs I was reminded of 'The War in the Air' (1907; novel 1908) also by Wells. I came to this novel as a boy, prompted by the small airships which flew over my house in the summer, out on short pleasure trips or off to film sports events. Of course, they were tiny compared to the airships of the past but that droning sound of their engines as they approached probably stirred up in me a feeling of excitement as it would have done in a boy fifty years earlier. Maybe I was destined to have an interest in counter-factual and steampunk ideas from that stage on.

'The War in the Air', possibly, has more use for current steampunk thinking, or, even, bakelitepunk/Zeppelin Age work than 'The War of the Worlds'. This is because, rather than featuring technology developed by aliens, it as about a war between different Powers on Earth. It was pretty prescient about the kind of airborne combat which would develop during the First World War 1914-18 that broke out just a few years later and would cost the life of Wells's son. The politics of the world Wells portrays are interesting with an aggressive Germany, Russia divided in revolution (the 1905 Russian Revolution would be fresh in readers' minds at the time), China and Japan in some kind of alliance (this is the least likely outcome more feasible was a collaborationist government installed in China by the Japanese as occurred 1931-45) and the USA in tension with Japan; the USA itself seemingly facing a repeat of the tensions of the 1850s that resulted in the American Civil War (1861-5).

Against this background of global politics, the focus of the story is on Bert Smallways, a man who builds light aircraft as a hobby in the way men of the time were increasingly fiddling with bicycles and later motorbikes. This focus is reminiscent of the characters we see in the 'Steamboy' (2004) movie, where three generations of the Steam family: Lloyd, Eddy and James, are featured as keen amateur engineers whose work ends up being desired by governments. Smallways effectively creates a kind of flying motorbike which lands him in contact with Alfred Butteridge an aviator and then with the German airship fleet which goes to attack New York. However, at the same time, the Japanese-Chinese alliance forces, using similar flying motorbikes, also invade the USA, as well as Pacific islands and Australia. War breaks out in Europe too, between Germany and their Swiss allies and Britain, France and Italy. The widespread fighting leads to a desolate backward world. Interestingly, all of this was in a context when the Kaiser of the German Empire, Wilhelm II spoke in 1895, about the danger of the 'yellow peril' meaning the growth of states in East Asia.

Though 'The War in the Air' has not been as referenced as much in subsequent media as 'The War of the Worlds', elements of it do turn up in other stories. In the first volume of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' some of Fu Manchu's guards ride on flying motorbikes with long tails which are very similar to those described as used by the Chinese forces in 'The War in the Air' especially at the Battle of Niagara Falls. I take the lack of reference to these in critiques of the 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' novel as stemming from the unfamiliarity most people have with Wells's lesser-known novel. However, it fits Alan Moore's use of people and inventions from right across Victorian/Edwardian fiction.

In some ways Robert Conroy's '1901' (1995) which sees a German invasion of the USA in 1901 owes something to Wells's novel, but, probably, more to 'The Invasion of the United States' by H. Irving Hancock (1916) which envisaged an invasion of the USA by Imperial Germany in 1920-21; not an unreasonable suggestion given that the First World War was raging at the time and Germany was unbeaten and the USA had not entered the war yet, despite some of its shipping being sunk by German submarines.

A more recent example is 'Turning Point: Fall of Liberty' a PC and console first/third person shooting game which envisages a Nazi German invasion of the USA in 1953.  Despite it being set presumably after Britain and the USSR have lost the Second World War and jet fighters and long-range rockets have been developed, a lot of the invading German troops are brought by airship. There is one wonderful screenshot that shows this:

Unfortunately the game is apparently not very exciting to play and the story does not develop a great deal as you are a builder in New York fighting back against the Nazi invaders. It does stem from an interesting counter-factual however, that Winston Churchill was killed on 13th December 1931 when he was hit (in reality) by a taxi in New York. In this game Britain made peace with Germany in 1940, as was expected by people on both sides at the time.  The Japanese decide not to attack Pearl Harbor, presumably sated by easier gains in British, French and Dutch colonies and also, I imagine, fighting for gains in Siberia with Germany having turned against the USSR a little sooner.

'The War in the Air' probably does not offer the steampunk enthusiast a great deal beyond lots of airships and flying motorbikes, but it does put them in a context of the Edwardian era when steam trains were the main form of transport in the UK and steamships had not converted to oil from coal. It also has that context of the inventor in his garage building something that could be of a challenge even to governments. Of course, this was a time when car companies in Britain and elsewhere were becoming established in precisely that way. The ingenious individual against greater powers is always a nice perspective for stories and who of us could not dream of powering around the skies on a flying motorbike? This angle I imagine is one that we are likely to see featuring commonly in steampunk writing.

I am not the only one commenting on 'The War in the Air' on my blog:
http://praxeology.net/blog/2007/04/06/war-and-back-again/

I have to replicate the image from these blog pages used to illustrate the invasion. The image of large airships over New York was not an uncommon one as the Hindenburg (which was three times larger than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet aeroplane is today) and other German airships flew over the city in the 1930s and after the Germans, the Americans and especially their Navy, long had an interest in airships.

These days, portrayal of the near future usually has as bleak conclusions as those shown by Wells, but nowadays the technology is usually small scale and the stories about big business or big government. The individual enthusiast is still the focus through which we see the developments but these days he (and interestingly it does still tend to remain 'he') is likely to be a computer hacker or conspiracy theorist rather than a garage engineer. So, though there may be similar conclusions, the scope and the vision of how we reach such situations is much more constrained than a man sweeping over New York as part of an airship fleet.

As an aside, while researching this posting I came across a recording on YouTube originally captured on an Edison phonograph wax cylinder recording in 1908. It is very crisp given the age. The audio is illustrated by covers of books available that year, including 'The War in the Air'. Just right for the steampunk mood:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA4B5MVDM_0

As with 'The War of the Worlds', you can read 'The War in the Air' for free online see: http://www.wells.omnia.co.uk/war-air/ or http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/780

'The War of the Worlds' and Steampunk

'The War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells

This is probably my favourite book cover for an edition of 'The War of the Worlds' this is from a Penguin edition released in the 1970s and I feel really caputures that late Victorian aesthetic wonderfully.



I was reading on 'The Heliograph' website that there is an intention to make a $200 million movie of the novel 'Larklight' (2006) by Philip Reeve. It envisages a solar system which humans have been exploring since the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) so beginning with clockworkpunk, though the novels (this book was the first of trilogy) are set in the Victorian era when colonies have been set up on moons and planets. Apparently the Martians who were the same as those in H.G. Wells's 'The War of the Worlds' (1898) were surprised when invaded by humans. This is ironic because in part the Wells book was a critique of colonisation which was nearing its peak for the British Empire at the time he wrote it, with the British for a change being the 'native' peoples having to face up to an invasion by technologically better equipped colonisers.

My thoughts on 'The War of the Worlds' and its relation to steampunk had also been stimulated by recently reading 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II' by Alan Moore which features the league battling against the Martian invasion. (I also suggest reading 'War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches' ed. by Kevin J. Anderson (1996) which features a range of stories by leading science fiction authors viewing the events from the perspective of various historical characters around the world, in some cases leading to a string of counter-factuals, such as Chinese expulsion of European powers at the turn of the 20th century using Martian technology, though given Empress Cixi's aversion to the technology available at the time, I personally doubt she would have embraced alien techonology any stronger). The Martians are defeated by a biological warfare disease H-142 (a mix of anthrax and streptococcus) created by Dr. Moreau (from H.G. Wells's novel 'The Island of Dr. Moreau' (1896) which as a novel with its theme of a scientist creating animal-human crossovers through genetic engineering and given last week's announcement of the development of human-animal hybrid embryos in the UK seems even more prescient than 'The War of the Worlds') but is claimed for history that the common cold was the killer. This picks up some of Wells's own themes about biological warfare whether intentional or not, as killed out many native populations of the Americas.

Another interesting follow-up is 'Scarlet Traces' by Ian Edginton (2002) a steampunk graphic novel which sees the British Empire utilising Martian technology in the 1900s and expanding by the 1930s into space. Sequels were not common in Wells's era in the way they are today, but it would have been interesting for him to show life after the Martians have been expelled. There is a sense that the Earth would be purified of Marian influence and technology rather than that technology being exploited. Again there would be parallels with colonialism as the Japanese in particular, through adopting the technology of the colonial powers from the mid-1850s onwards, within forty years were able to make Japan a colonial power itself taking Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910.

Before leaving this graphic novels, there are a couple of asides, notably that the Martians who invade Earth are not the only occupants of Mars and in fact are portrayed as one-time invaders of that planet. The novel shows John Carter from Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series (1917-64 in novel form) and Gullivar Jones from 'Lieutenant Gullivar Jones, His Vacation' by Edwin Lester Arnold (1905) a novel about his adventures on Mars that was so badly received Arnold gave up writing, though it heavily influenced Burroughs and Carter is taken from another of Arnold's series. Barsoom's Green Martians also turn up alongside the Sorns from C.S. Lewis's (also responsible for the Narnia books) book 'Out of the Silent Planet' (1938) also set on Mars. The other point is made by the character Mina Murphy (who in the graphic novels actually demonstrates no extraordinary abilities, her equivalent in the movie 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', Mina Harker, is a vampire who can walk in daylight) who it is implied has been attacked by a vampire (referencing Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897)). When the extensive scarring at her neck is revealed in a sex scene, she says that people should not believe the stories about two plain puncture marks in the neck. This was the best comment I had read on vampires in stories for a long time. I had always wondered how vampires drained blood through the two puncture marks simply left by their fangs. The only conclusion I could make was that the fangs had to be hollow and the blood sucked up through them which would make it a lengthy process especially if seeking to drain a person of all of their blood. Of course these days vampires in movies simply rend through the neck and feed like a wolf or lion drinking as much blood as they need. After all fangs are only extended canine teeth which allow predators to hold on to and slice through meat. It is clear the two puncture wounds was only for the sensibilities of the audiences in less brutal viewing eras.

Anyway, another place where I see the steampunk crossover coming to the fore most is in the computer game, 'Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds' (1999). It is interesting since musician Jeff Wayne released his music concept album 'The War of the Worlds' in 1978 he has really snatched the title from H.G. Wells. A single of 'The Eve of the War' element did well in the charts in 1978 and when remixed and re-released in 1989 reaching number 3 in the UK. Wayne was early on the games bandwagon as I remember a game 'Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds' (1984) for the old ZX Spectrum home computer which itself was released in 1982. It was created by CRL and was poorly reviewed as the player often died very quickly. The iconography of his album production remains the enduring one despite the appearance of numerous other books referencing the original (just see the Wikipedia listing). The stage production was on tour around the UK last year to sell-out houses and even included a video of Richard Burton doing the narration as on the album.

The story is a gloomy one, though the with the human race really only spared by a twist of fate and to some extent reflects Wells's novels warning of the potential dangers of the coming 20th century. It is set in the 'early years of the 20th century' and the human technology portrayed is really the same as that available in 1898 so pretty powerless against the heat ray firing tripods, the black powder and red weed of the Martians.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen take on the story brings in more steampunk technology along with the approach adopted in those graphic novels, notably the facilities of Captain Nemo's submarine, Nautilus. Some of the most interesting steampunk suggestions come in the PC game. The game itself sees a second Martian invasion which lands in the Grampian Mountains of Scotland (partly for gaming purposes as the humans begin at the other end of the country in London) and though it seems to be set in a world before the First World War (so in line with Wells's novel) internal combustion engine run lorries are far more common than they were until after the war. One interesting element of the game is that you can play as the humans or as the Martians. Both sides can experiment to gain more powerful equipment and the humans can end up with not only armoured lorries but also caterpillar-tracked tanks; self-propelled artillery guns and mobile anti-aircraft arrays both of which in reality did not come in until the Second World War; a tunnelling vehicle and a special forces motorbike. Some of the technology was around in, say, 1905 such as submarines and observation balloons, but not as developed as they were to become. The Martians can develop a whole array from a 'flying machine' (in the novel the Martians pods are fired to Earth from great guns on Mars and have no motive power of their own) a rapid heat way and a 'bombarding machine' through plasma and laser fencing to an explosive 'tempest', a bio-chemical 'constrictor' and the black 'dust' chemical weapon. As the Martians spread so does the red weed.

'The War of the Worlds' was the first real alien invasion story and is likely to continue to have an impact on our contemporary culture, the latest movie version starring Tom Cruise came out as recent as 2005 and despite relocating the action to the USA and replacing the hero's wife with two children, kept many of the key elements including the tripods. The story and its spin-offs which seem to be growing by the year are an invaluable source of steampunk technology, but wait until I start going on about H.G. Wells's 'The War in the Air' (1907) an often overlooked novel with real steampunk elements.

Meanwhile you can access 'The War of the Worlds' freely downloadable/readable in its entirety from at least two websites: http://www.wells.omnia.co.uk/war-worlds/
and http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/36