Fiction
'The Mammoth Book of SteamPunk' ed. by Sean Wallace
There was a recent debate on the Never Was online journal about whether you could be steampunk and right-wing: https://neverwasmag.com/2019/06/can-you-be-right-wing-and-steampunk/ I had said that it was not that simple and there are elements of the genre such as the excitement of heavy industry and portrayal of Victorian social structures that could be seen as favoured by right-wing commentators. However, reading this anthology which came out in 2012, I realised that my reading in the genre was dated. Almost every protagonist in the 30 stories of this collection is either disabled or gay or from a black, Asian or other group in a minority in Western Europe. Indeed Ekaterina Sedia has written an opening essay that emphasises what she feels is the prime purpose of steampunk to paint a better picture of the alternatives available in the past as this can be the only basis of a brighter future. Though a number of the stories connect more clearly to the fantasy genre, Sedia links them explicitly to science fiction, bouncing from the past into the future.
If this was your first contact with steampunk (or SteamPunk as Wallace has it) you would assume that these were necessary parts of the genre and perhaps, in the late 2000s they had already become and are this firmly in the late 2010s. In many ways by emphasising all the bad that steampunk has kept concealed beneath its bluster, this collection showed me that the genre is effectively dead or, at best, a very gloomy type of writing. It has turned me away from the genre completely to the extent there seems no point in me ever writing in it again. I guess for the authors featured in this book, that would be a victory because it is apparent my kind of steampunk has no place in their universe. I am sure the authors would tell you that as a white, middle-aged, formerly middle class man from Western Europe, I have no place in the genre anyway given the views that I must hold given that background.
All the stories collected are certainly informed by feminism. This becomes anti-man in James Morrow's 'Lady Witherspoon's Solution'. I do not know why editors of steampunk anthologies feel obliged to include horrific stories that really, despite their steampunk trappings, belong in the horror genre. I still shudder when I think of 'The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down' by Joe R. Lansdale in 'Steampunk' (2008) by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer which is effectively torture porn; 'Victoria' by Paul Di Filippo in the same collection features bestiality. Morrow's story featuring the reduction of men to beasts and their castration and the collection of testes as entertainment for Victorian ladies, is of the same ilk. The men are portrayed as the worst of their kind, but even the USA, parts of which tolerate the death penalty would not permit such abuse of prisoners let alone lionise it the way Morrow does. Simply putting something into a steampunk setting does not excuse authors from churning out such vile work. If they feel obliged to include such 'stories', editors should include a warning. The inclusion of the story undermines the feminist approach adopted elsewhere in the book by suggesting it is no better than male chauvinism. Imagine if Morrow had written a story in which women were injected with chemicals that reduced them to beasts that were then compelled to fight to the death and then the victors were mutilated; he would have been roundly condemned.
'Machine Maid' by Margo Lanagan, is almost as bad. It sees a skilled woman left largely deserted in a house in the wilds of Australia, altering a clockwork 'sex robot' to mutilate her husband. Fortunately Lanagan uses implied outcomes more than Morrow. However, it does alarm me how we have come to such a bad situation in relations between the sexes that it is seen as alright to have a 'mild' little story having men mutilated and this not been deemed to be horror if not a form of sick pornography. Apparently if an uncaring man, let alone a malicious one, is the victim then it is acceptable. Even the USA has a law against 'cruel and unusual punishment' of the kinds apparently happily shown by the authors in these stories. Such porn has no place in true steampunk.
Aside from Morrow and Lanagan's chapters, there is a mixed bag of stories. Interestingly, a number of them shade from strict steampunk into fantasy. 'Clockwork Fairies' by Cat Rambo is set in Ireland and features real fairies countering the ones of the title. 'Icebreaker' by E. Catherine Tobler, concerning a dwarf widow of a scientist taking his remains to bury at the South Pole has fantastical creatures at the pole too. 'Tom Edison and His Amazing Telegraphic Harpoon' shows North America fragmented as the Mormons have summoned forth demonic flying creatures to defend Deseret. In both cases, the steampunk technology helps the protagonists win through. 'Prayers of Forges and Furnaces' by Ailette de Bodard combines her use of South American contexts with both a post-apocalyptic setting and a vampire. 'Numismatics in the Age in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu' by Alex Dally MacFarlane, is one of the stories that uses 'artefacts' as the basis of the story rather than telling the story in a straight forward way. It is a feminist story in a fantasy setting and shows how a queen went off to form her own realm, via the coins that she and her followers produce. It is an interesting idea but a bit lifeless.
'To Follow the Waves' by Amal El-Mohtar is one of a number of Middle Eastern set stories, a context unusual for steampunk stories; one of the lesbian romances in the book and features a woman who can craft dreams into jewellery that reminded me a lot of crafting in 'Humility Garden' (1995) and 'Delta City' (1996) by Felicity Savage. 'The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jula-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar' by Shweta Narayan is told by a clockwork bird and straddles not only those stories which seem to be more from mainstream fantasy than steampunk, but also come over as morality tales. 'The Clockwork Chickadee' by Mary Robinette Kowal is another of these, set among clockwork toys with a rather nasty revenge story. 'The Ballard of the Last Human' by Lavie Tidhar is in a similar vein though even less realistic as the heroes are a clockwork dog and a clockwork spider. 'Clockmaker's Requiem' by Barth Anderson is a surreal story about a world shifting from personal time to clock-based time, something which happened in our world, but not in a context as bizarre as this. As a result it is one of the philosophical stories of the book rather than one with real action. The clearest of the morality tales is 'The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi' by Peter M. Ball in which very little happens and it is really a parable than a standard short story.
Less fantastical, but with the same philosophical questioning at its heart is 'To Seek Her Fortune' by Nicole Kornher-Stace which features a single mother travelling the world with airship gypsies seeking a true prediction of her death. It is really about how she raises her son and is better on the context than the story. 'Fixing Hanover' despite being by Jeff VanderMeer a writer I have come to strongly disapprove of, is rather a parable too, about fixing a humanoid robot that washes up in a seaside town where a technician has fled. However, like the best short stories it hints at a far larger world that could easily fill a novel. It has a feel a bit like the settings of the 'Dishonored' (2012-16) computer games. Perhaps similar if 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' by Caitlin R. Kiernan is like the warnings seen in the 'Terminator' movies (1984-2019) about robots becoming aggressive and/or dominant. It also highlights how much more sophisticated machinery is now portrayed in steampunk.
'Arbeitkraft' by Nick Mamatas is similar in seeing clockwork cyborgs to do dangerous jobs. It combines a robot takeover story with a Marxist critique as Friedrich Engels is the hero of the story. It is easily assumed in these stories that with steam and clockwork technology robots with the intelligence of machines we see in science fiction would be possible, further ensuring that link to the genre I highlighted above. To me, though, this is really breaking down steampunk as having a level of rational limits and so making it simply a science fiction or indeed fantasy sub-set. 'Dr Lash Remembers' by Jeffery Ford, straddles such 'warning' stories with a fantastical element in which steam has been made into the carrier of a disease that leads to loss of control among humans so wrecking the steampunk world. 'Reluctance' is a steampunk zombie story with a disabled airship postman fighting against zombies in a remote USA town in order to refuel and escape. It is fast moving but very much as I have described it.
In my view the best story in the book is around a lesbian romance. This is 'The Effluent Engine' by N.K. Jemisin and sees an alternate history in which the uprising on Haiti has led to a black sovereign nation seeking help to defend its position by making use of the by-products of rum manufacture. Though a short story it is a great little adventure with a romancing of a female engineer at its heart and certainly hinting at a far greater 'world' that could feature in a novel. Another one, though with an tragic lesbian theme, is' Hands that Feed' featuring a Jewish female engineer and people in a city that she encounters, one a young female thief. Again, it is set in a rich context that you want to find out more about. You hope for a happy outcome but I guess with the tone of much of this collection a tragic one should be predicted from the oppression of the setting. Similarly mournful in tone is 'The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois' by Megan Arkenberg. A ghost hunter is brought to the house of the former lesbian lover of the late margravine but finds that really all that is happening is all the clockwork devices she built are decaying on her death; melancholy and little more.
I wonder if it is the alternate history facet that attracts me, but I feel another strong story is 'The People's Machine' by Tobias S. Buckell, not only in a steampunk context but one in which the Aztec Empire, rather as Japan did in the 19th Century, has persisted and the geography of North America is different with New Amsterdam having persisted and the British having won two American Wars of Independence have kept the independent USA no greater than the Thirteen Colonies. It is a murder mystery with a computer at the heart of it, like 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' addressing concerns that many science fiction stories look at.
'A Serpent in the Gears' by Margaret Ronald is a strange story about a robot protecting his master while they are approaching a cut-off settlement which has sophisticated technology combined with biology, it is a kind of steam version of cyberpunk, though it is unclear where this is located even though the story is in theory set on Earth. It is not bad but rather unsatisfactory. I found I mixed it up easily with 'Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum' which is by Benjamin Rosenbaum who in a conceited way has put himself into this alternative world. This story sees a steampunk world in which India has become the dominant force in the world and its culture supreme. In the book while avoiding airborne assassins he considering writing an alternate history novel in which Western philosophical approaches are used and aeroplanes rather than airships predominate. The background rather stymies the action presented, though jumping between airships after the assassin is well done.
'The Zeppelin Conductors' Society Annual Gentlemen's Ball' by Genevieve Valentine is not really a story but one of these 'artefact' chapters, in this case a series of fragments outlining how men working in airship envelopes become physically distorted, so effectively it is another story featuring disability as well as highlighting the detrimental impact of steampunk developments. However, it is really a series of notes for a setting rather than a developed story. 'The Anachronist's Cookbook' by Catherynne M. Valente is another artefact one. It has a bit more of a story but it is largely outlined in flyers that the heroine carries calling on revolution against what a lot see as traits, certainly pre-2000s, of steampunk in being socially oppressive and misogynistic. It is an interesting approach but basically you are reading bombastic political leaflets for a fictional setting, so it is imagined propaganda rather a real story. Not an artefact story but one in which very, very little happens is 'The Armature of Flight' by Sharon Mock which is about a male gay couple splitting up as one goes to be fitted with mechanical wings and the other marries a woman. It is more like ideas for a story, rather than an actual story.
'Zeppelin City' by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick is a fast moving story in a city ruled by brains in glass tanks where aerial bombing has become a sport. It has interesting ideas and is adventurous with a couple of engaging heroines. However, it is clearly dieselpunk, even with 1950s US slang, rather than steampunk and it belongs in a different collection to this one. 'Cinderella Suicide' by Samantha Henderson which seems to be set in Australia is so full of slang from that context that it is very, very difficult to work out what is going on. I do not know if Australian readers could make any sense of it. It seems to be about an exploration to where a spaceship has crash landed on the interior of Australia. It might be more mainstream science fiction than steampunk, it is hard to tell.
Overall, how tiresome I have found reviewing this anthology has brought home to me that I was largely unimpressed by the stories. Aside from the horrific, many lecture the reader as if we are all ignorant of various essential lessons and readers. Others drown the reader in the authors' conceits. You read a novel or short story for entertainment rather than to be harangued as happens so often in this collection. There are some good and interesting stories but in a large anthology they are quickly lost amongst the bulk of the others. In the future I will certainly avoid any steampunk anthologies, even if, as with this one, I find them cheap at a carboot sale.
'Silesian Station' by David Downing
This is the second book in Downing's 'Station' series set in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s. This one begins in the summer of 1939 and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe that September. His hero, John Russell returns from the USA where he has visited with his son and has been given a US passport in place of his British one. He now also writes for a San Francisco newspaper. As in the first book, 'Zoo Station' (2007), Russell spends a lot of time simply travelling around, whether in parts of Berlin or out to various countries. In this one he manages to go to Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia and Poland as well as visiting the Silesian region of Germany. There are various motives for his journeys. In Berlin he socialises with his girlfriend and takes his son by his divorced German wife to various locations. Ridiculously he is working not only for US intelligence, but also the German SD counter-intelligence organisation and the Soviet foreign intelligence body at the time, INO. Russell is also given personal missions, to help track down a missing Jewish woman from Silesia and help another Jewish woman who is the mistress of a high-ranking SS officer to escape Germany. This web detracts rather than adds to the tension of the novel. There is far too much about where Russell is going with his girlfriend, a film star, or his son, where he parks, where he has lunch, what he has for dinner and so on. Downing gives us loads of detail about Prague and Bratislava and other locales Russell visits, but largely to show off his research than truly add to the story. There is tension but only right at the end of the novel when Russell seeks to rescue Jewish women from an SS brothel and get a friend who has committed a murder, out of Germany. Downing simply has too much going on for his main character and insists on so much detail, for the novel to really work. It is all very interesting but there are only brief moments when he snares you as a reader of a work of fiction rather than a book of popular history.
'Sherlock Holmes and The Hentzau Affair' by David Stuart Davies
As you might guess from the title this is a double pastiche, on both the Sherlock Holmes novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Ruritania novels of Sir Anthony Hope. It is written as the Holmes stories were from the perspective of Dr. Watson. It is very much in the style of one of those stories and Davies only makes a few slips, most jarringly when he uses to the term 'surrealistic tableau' to describe when two men masquerading as King Rudolf V of Ruritania encounter each other on a platform of Streslau station. The story is set in 1894 and supposedly written in 1919, five years before the first meeting of the Surrealist group. He might have got away with it if he had said 'Dadaist'. Overall, however, it is a brisk action story with sword fighting, abductions and numerous deaths. It is a pleasure to read if you enjoy either Doyle's or Hope's work and can avoid trying to spot where Davies erred.
Non-Fiction
'Creative Editing' by Mary Mackie
I bought this book when it was published in 1995. I have dipped into it periodically since then but have never before read it cover-to-cover. While it shows its age, wordprocessors were only really coming into common use when it was published; it suggests you go to a library to do research because there were no internet searches and novels were still submitted on paper rather than via email, it has many principles that remain useful today. I should have read this book sooner because it has become apparent recently that with my school's strange aversion to direct speech, at times insisting on only reported speech in creative writing, what I learned about it was wrong. I was depressed to realise that I had not noticed my errors from reading hundreds of books since then. This added to the sense of despair that I will come back to at the end.
I did find Mackie's guidance on handling points of view much better than other commentators who insist on just one. I do disagree with her on the passive voice as she seems oblivious, like many people, to how it can distort the intended meaning and lead to highly contorted sentences. One compensatory thing is that Mackie, while highlighting various aspects to consider, keeps emphasising that it is down to the author themselves to decide how to apply them, rather than insisting that the author follows her prescriptions to the letter the way that some other help books on authoring do. Added to that, including exercises, the book in the edition I read is only 208 pages long and is broken up into easy to access sections. Thus, while I would recommend reading the book right through, it can be dipped into in the way I foolishly did over the past 24 years. Having read the book in its entirety, I now recognise that even from this 'light touch' rather than dictatorial book, there are just so many things that you must get perfectly right to just get your book to a level at which a publisher might consider it, that it is an impossibility and that I should have abandoned my fantasy of ever getting a book published, decades ago.
Audio Books - Fiction
'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' by Ian Fleming; read by David Tennant
Unlike for most James Bond books, the movie of this one stuck very close to the original novel. As a consequence, if you have ever seen the movie, you will have a very good idea of what happens and even individual lines from the book feature in it. At the start of the novel, Bond is back in Royale-les-Eaux a fictional town between Étaples and Montreuil-sur-Mer that featured in 'Casino Royale' (1953), following Teresa 'Tracy' di Vicenzo who had beaten him racing recklessly through neighbouring towns. Paying her gambling debt he is then abducted by Tracy's father, Marc-Ange Draco who happens to be head of the Union Corse organised crime group. He tries to bribe Bond into marrying his daughter. Draco puts Bond on to the trail of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. he has been pursuing since the end of 'Thunderball' (1961). Bond goes undercover as a member of the College of Arms to Piz Gloria, a mountain top base in Switzerland where Blofeld is hypnotising British and Irish women to spread agricultural pests and diseases to wreck the British economy.
This novel actually feels like a James Bond movie, with the chases and the final climactic explosions. While lining up to marry Tracy who is murdered at the end by Blofeld and his accomplice Irma Bund, he still sleeps with one of the hypnotised women. While Bond is ambivalent about marrying Tracy until very late on, he seems to have less self-doubt than in the previous novels, though he wearies of chasing Blofeld with so little outcome. His relationship with Tracy is almost accidental but he feels that he has found someone of his nature who is as equally reckless as himself driving and gambling. Bond does not, however, have any qualms dealing with Draco despite him being a major criminal engaging in smuggling and prostitution. In fact the burgeoning relationship between the two men develops more steadily than that between Bond and Tracy and is reminiscent of the relationship between Bond and Felix Leiter which features in a number of the novels. For Fleming to have continued the series Tracy had to be killed to free up the agent once more. As a result, perhaps you come to expect it and it is less cutting when she dies than you might expect.
There are longeurs when Bond is undercover at Piz Gloria. He seems very dim in failing to work out what Blofeld is up to. This leads to an extended section of Bond being at M's house working with various ministers over the Christmas period, which as it is laboured, fortunately does not feature in the movie. For some reason Fleming felt compelled to replicate large tracts of a US government document on biological warfare as if he feared readers would not believe the basis of the plot featured in the story, but at times it is just a list, slowing the story unnecessarily. The action scenes are well handled but interspersed at times with too much 'info dump' sections.
Tennant does pretty well and seems to have been brought in for this book because his natural accent is Scottish which Bond uses when pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray while undercover at Piz Gloria. He is generally good on all of the voices, though, as he outlines in the interview at the end of my edition of the book, he struggled with the French and German names. Overall, this is perhaps the book in the series which we would see as being most clearly 'James Bond' as it is understood in popular culture and it does that job pretty well, but could have been tauter. Perhaps by this stage of his career, Fleming was not being edited as thoroughly as in the past.
Showing posts with label steampunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label steampunk. Show all posts
Wednesday, 31 July 2019
Saturday, 31 January 2015
The Books I Read In January
Fiction
'The Affinity Bridge' by George Mann
This has classic elements of a steampunk novel set in 1901 it features a mad scientist, crashing airships, automatons and a sword stick with an electric charge. There is a pairing of an experienced investigator and his young female assistant very much in the Steed/Peel mould. There are even zombies in East London. It romps along very well, doing what steampunk does best mixing issues around Victorian society with stories reflecting on the impact of the steam technology on that society and the people within it. There are some great adventure scenes climaxing on an airship over London. The stunning scene is when Queen Victoria is revealed to be still alive, ten months after she died in our world, as a result of life support technology. One oddity is that electricity seems to be readily available but lighting is still all gas both in houses and on the streets. This seems a little anomalous given that air travel and cybernetics are far advanced on our history and yet lighting lags behind the situation as it was in 1901 in our world. There is no explanation for this.
The key problem, one that might be connected to the gas light issue, is the lack of editing. This is ironic given that Mann is a very experienced editor of science fiction magazines and other writing. I think his standing may have meant that those he lists as helping him gave him a very light touch in terms of critiquing his work. One problem is the constant switching of points of view, sometimes between three people in a single paragraph. This is something that any creative writing tutor would emphasise as needing to be avoided. Yes, you can have different perspectives but they need to be handled carefully to avoid confusing the reader. Another problem, especially in the first third of the book is simply how many cliches that Mann uses. Surely he has a more extensive vocabulary to allow him to stay away from so many hackneyed phrases. Another aspect is the repetition of words in the same sentence or consecutive sentence. An example comes at the start of Chapter 6: 'It was not yet eight, but she expected that Newbury would already be sitting at his desk, reading the morning newspaper as was typical of his morning routine.' [My emphasis]. This is not wrong, but if I did not know the author I would think s/he was far less experienced than Mann seems to be. Possibly the worst example of this lack of checking and the proper application of a 'fresh pair of eyes' is the use of 'hanger' when Mann means 'hangar'. This leads to some comic elements when the heroes are shown around a vast hanger.
I liked this book as I am a fan of steampunk. However, with more care and attention it could have been better still. Maybe younger readers are less concerned about these niceties. Yet the strength of a story comes from people being able to engage with it, follow what is going on and not keep running up against tired phrases they have heard so many times before. A revised edition of this book would be worthwhile recommending.
'Hannibal: Clouds of War' by Ben Kane
This is the third book in the Hannibal series and features events during the 2nd Punic War (218-201 BCE); a conflict I have fought on 'Rome II Total War' hence this book being bought for me. It focuses on three characters: Quintus - an upper class Roman now serving in the light infantry; Aurelia his sister and Hanno - a Carthaginian friend of theirs who has fallen in love with Aurelia. This approach of having people on both sides of a conflict is a common one for war stories and there is nothing wrong with that. However, given that for most of the book they are in different parts of southern Italy and Sicily this tends to lead to a fragmented story. This is not aided by the fact that even for the stories of the three leads, what is shown is episodic with jumps when they are suddenly in a different city or involved with some new activity. The episodes in themselves are well portrayed and gripping. Kane does not baulk from the horrors of war and the impact on innocent people caught up in it, not just the soldiers. With his knowledge of the times and the locations he conjures up the settings and the dilemmas very well. However, the book overall is less than the sum of its parts and once you have finished it you feel that you have read a series of related though not connected short stories.
It is not a bad book but can leave you feeling dissatisfied. Furthermore as is the tendency with these long series you feel that each book beyond the first and the last is like a chunk of the story. It is like a stick of rock with the slice between one book and the other simply coming down arbitrarily. This seems to be acknowledged by Kane himself as in his Epilogue he outlines what happens to the characters after the events shown, rather than showing that to us as he could easily have done. Clearly it is to get them into position for the next book based in Spain. The edition I have has a compliment from Wilbur Smith the veteran historical author. Kane would benefit from reading and learning from more of Smith's books. Smith is a populist author, but does manage to weave the stories of various characters together very well and bring the books to a proper conclusion. Kane may be being applauded but he certainly needs to keep working at his craft if he is going to produce books that are as effective and enduring as Smith's.
There is a good glossary of terms in the back of the book. As regular readers know I like thorough historical notes. Kane may take note of what I have been advised if he brings his books to being e-books and have dynamic links to the relevant notes from the text and back again. What is utterly unnecessary is Kane's showboating in the Epilogue. I do not feel he needs to tell us what happens next to the characters; he could have handled that better in the narrative. Certainly he does not need to go on about where he has been and his wonderful travels in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in Europe. If we did not have faith in his knowledge then we would not read the book. Thus, his travelogue just jars. I do not know his background but he seems to be compelled to tell us how much better his life is than ours. He forgets the bulk of the people reading his book do so to escape from their mundane lives and the fact they cannot afford to gallivant around the places he mentions. Yes, acknowledge people but do not laud what is effectively a closed shop guild to block out other aspiring historical authors. Excite the reader with descriptions of places and people, do not make them feel small. This is something Kane could also learn from Smith a bit of noblesse oblige.
Again, not a bad book, but one that could be better, Editing has died as an art and this means that books now often have elements that readers are not keen to pay money for. If you want to talk about your travels put it on your blog, do not bulk out your books by saying how wonderful you and your mates are.
'The Affinity Bridge' by George Mann
This has classic elements of a steampunk novel set in 1901 it features a mad scientist, crashing airships, automatons and a sword stick with an electric charge. There is a pairing of an experienced investigator and his young female assistant very much in the Steed/Peel mould. There are even zombies in East London. It romps along very well, doing what steampunk does best mixing issues around Victorian society with stories reflecting on the impact of the steam technology on that society and the people within it. There are some great adventure scenes climaxing on an airship over London. The stunning scene is when Queen Victoria is revealed to be still alive, ten months after she died in our world, as a result of life support technology. One oddity is that electricity seems to be readily available but lighting is still all gas both in houses and on the streets. This seems a little anomalous given that air travel and cybernetics are far advanced on our history and yet lighting lags behind the situation as it was in 1901 in our world. There is no explanation for this.
The key problem, one that might be connected to the gas light issue, is the lack of editing. This is ironic given that Mann is a very experienced editor of science fiction magazines and other writing. I think his standing may have meant that those he lists as helping him gave him a very light touch in terms of critiquing his work. One problem is the constant switching of points of view, sometimes between three people in a single paragraph. This is something that any creative writing tutor would emphasise as needing to be avoided. Yes, you can have different perspectives but they need to be handled carefully to avoid confusing the reader. Another problem, especially in the first third of the book is simply how many cliches that Mann uses. Surely he has a more extensive vocabulary to allow him to stay away from so many hackneyed phrases. Another aspect is the repetition of words in the same sentence or consecutive sentence. An example comes at the start of Chapter 6: 'It was not yet eight, but she expected that Newbury would already be sitting at his desk, reading the morning newspaper as was typical of his morning routine.' [My emphasis]. This is not wrong, but if I did not know the author I would think s/he was far less experienced than Mann seems to be. Possibly the worst example of this lack of checking and the proper application of a 'fresh pair of eyes' is the use of 'hanger' when Mann means 'hangar'. This leads to some comic elements when the heroes are shown around a vast hanger.
I liked this book as I am a fan of steampunk. However, with more care and attention it could have been better still. Maybe younger readers are less concerned about these niceties. Yet the strength of a story comes from people being able to engage with it, follow what is going on and not keep running up against tired phrases they have heard so many times before. A revised edition of this book would be worthwhile recommending.
'Hannibal: Clouds of War' by Ben Kane
This is the third book in the Hannibal series and features events during the 2nd Punic War (218-201 BCE); a conflict I have fought on 'Rome II Total War' hence this book being bought for me. It focuses on three characters: Quintus - an upper class Roman now serving in the light infantry; Aurelia his sister and Hanno - a Carthaginian friend of theirs who has fallen in love with Aurelia. This approach of having people on both sides of a conflict is a common one for war stories and there is nothing wrong with that. However, given that for most of the book they are in different parts of southern Italy and Sicily this tends to lead to a fragmented story. This is not aided by the fact that even for the stories of the three leads, what is shown is episodic with jumps when they are suddenly in a different city or involved with some new activity. The episodes in themselves are well portrayed and gripping. Kane does not baulk from the horrors of war and the impact on innocent people caught up in it, not just the soldiers. With his knowledge of the times and the locations he conjures up the settings and the dilemmas very well. However, the book overall is less than the sum of its parts and once you have finished it you feel that you have read a series of related though not connected short stories.
It is not a bad book but can leave you feeling dissatisfied. Furthermore as is the tendency with these long series you feel that each book beyond the first and the last is like a chunk of the story. It is like a stick of rock with the slice between one book and the other simply coming down arbitrarily. This seems to be acknowledged by Kane himself as in his Epilogue he outlines what happens to the characters after the events shown, rather than showing that to us as he could easily have done. Clearly it is to get them into position for the next book based in Spain. The edition I have has a compliment from Wilbur Smith the veteran historical author. Kane would benefit from reading and learning from more of Smith's books. Smith is a populist author, but does manage to weave the stories of various characters together very well and bring the books to a proper conclusion. Kane may be being applauded but he certainly needs to keep working at his craft if he is going to produce books that are as effective and enduring as Smith's.
There is a good glossary of terms in the back of the book. As regular readers know I like thorough historical notes. Kane may take note of what I have been advised if he brings his books to being e-books and have dynamic links to the relevant notes from the text and back again. What is utterly unnecessary is Kane's showboating in the Epilogue. I do not feel he needs to tell us what happens next to the characters; he could have handled that better in the narrative. Certainly he does not need to go on about where he has been and his wonderful travels in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in Europe. If we did not have faith in his knowledge then we would not read the book. Thus, his travelogue just jars. I do not know his background but he seems to be compelled to tell us how much better his life is than ours. He forgets the bulk of the people reading his book do so to escape from their mundane lives and the fact they cannot afford to gallivant around the places he mentions. Yes, acknowledge people but do not laud what is effectively a closed shop guild to block out other aspiring historical authors. Excite the reader with descriptions of places and people, do not make them feel small. This is something Kane could also learn from Smith a bit of noblesse oblige.
Again, not a bad book, but one that could be better, Editing has died as an art and this means that books now often have elements that readers are not keen to pay money for. If you want to talk about your travels put it on your blog, do not bulk out your books by saying how wonderful you and your mates are.
Sunday, 30 September 2012
The Book I Read In September
Fiction
'Steampunk' ed. by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer
This review does contain spoilers because there are a couple of stories in this collection which I feel are inappropriate and may offend readers, so I feel it is important to alert readers to them. Having begun work in the middle of this month I thought I would be reading more. However, deliberately socialising with colleagues has meant me sitting in the works canteen, it is not called that but it is effectively what it is, rather than spending an hour reading each lunchtime. In addition, in the evening I have been watching the two John Le Carre television series and now the entire 'Van Der Valk' series of DVDs on my laptop rather than reading.
This book is a collection of essays, short stories and novel extracts. It does rather pin the Steampunk genre to American attitudes though there is some reference to British and Japanese work in this field. One of the problems is the evangelist Jess Nevins who I have had problems with before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/jess-nevinss-steampunk-generations.html and continues to wheel out a similar attempt to nail Steampunk to US culture that he has done before.
Before moving on to a broader survey of the book, I must address the two chapters which concerned me most. The first is 'The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel' by Joe R. Lansdale. The concept is fair: the time traveller from H.G. Wells' novel has torn the fabric of time and space by his travels, something also considered in 'The Time Ships' by Stephen Baxter (1995). In doing so the traveller has been turned into a vampire and has returned to 19th century Mid West America where he feeds on people, aided by an army of Moorlocks [sic - in the original book they are 'Morlocks'; this may be a reference to Michael Moorcock often termed the 'godfather of steampunk'; it may simply be laziness]. A group of adventurers travel to do battle with him in a man-shaped walking vehicle which he counters with one made of wood. The key trouble is simply how nasty the story is. It quickly turns into a sequence of descriptions in too much detail of torture. It turns out like a sadist text and any of the plot just disappears as Lansdale indulges his clear delight in describing torture. The warning given by the editors at the start of the story is far too mild and I really believe that they should have thought twice before including this story in the collection as all it is, is a perverse torture story given Steampunk elements.
The other story that jars with the collection is 'Victoria' by Paul Di Filippo which is set in 1838 and envisages Queen Victoria newly on the throne being installed in a brothel by Lord Melbourne, her prime minister, so that she may learn more of her kingdom. Her place is taken by a newt named Victoria that has been impregnated by human genes to grow to the size of a small woman of Queen Victoria's stature and who serves as a bestial prostitute in the brothel until the two have their roles reversed. The clear descriptions of bestiality in themselves are distasteful. Again this seems to be some perverse sexual story which has been wrapped up in steampunk trappings to get it a wider readership and yet completely brings the genre into disrepute.
If I had been the author of any of the other stories in this collection I would have been offended to see my work included alongside these others. There are extracts from 'The Warlord of the Air' by Michael Moorcock which despite being over forty years old stands out as an engaging novel. An excerpt from 'Tribes of the Pacific Coast' by Neal Stephenson is a decent post-apocalyptic story, though to me seeming more mainstream science fiction than steampunk.
'Lord Kelvin's Machine' by James P. Blaycock is a decent steampunk story about averting a meteorite crash into Earth and I liked the internecine battles between different scientists. 'The Giving Mouth' by Ian R. Macleod, is more like standard fantasy than steampunk, but for that, is pretty well written and I like the idea of living metal. Like a couple of the stories it takes viewpoints from the workers of a steampunk world as much as from the rulers who tend to feature in these stories. 'A Sun in the Attic' by Mary Gentle is very much in the clockworkpunk style of Gentle and does its job pretty well, looking at why technology might be stopped from developing. It also has the counter-factual element of a continent in the South Pacific which I liked. 'The God Clown is Near' by Jay Lake shows how you can write unnerving steampunk with genetic elements without sliding into obscenity of Lansdale. The creation of a powerful being in a city which sits parallel to 19th century North America in the uncharted areas of the map is an interesting one and Lake conjures up this setting with its own dynamics, quickly and effectively. 'The Selene Gardening Society' by Molly Brown about bombarding the Moon with compost in order to develop and atmosphere on it, is interesting, but Brown seems undeveloped in short story writing skills, as unlike these other authors, she does not create a world in miniature and really very little happens in the story and we learn little of its context.
'Seventy Two Letters' by Ted Chiang is the second story after 'The God Clown is Near' to feature golems. This story is set in a more standard 19th century Britain but in a short time shows a completely different society though with concerns of our own; it even envisages a different form of human reproduction. In my view this is probably the best story of the collection. 'The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance' by Michael Chabon, one of the more broadly better known authors in this collection, is very different from the title and features two boys whose parents were involved in the Ohio Uprising against British rule of North America in a steampunk world and what happens to them before they are liberated from a children's home by their airship flying uncle. This felt like proper steampunk with some counter-factual politics thrown in for good measure. 'Reflected Light' by Rachel E. Pollock is a little frustrating. It is features steampunk wax recordings of the friend of a woman who went on to be a revolutionary in the world Pollock creates. She does very well in quickly creating this world, but leaves the rest of the story to the reader's own imagination. I guess I like a little bit more in my short stories in the way that Blaycock, Chiang, Gentle, etc. do. 'Minutes of the Last Meeting' by Stepan Chapman almost goes to the other extreme featuring a cyber/steampunk Russia in 1917 where there are nanobots alongside steam trains. It features many historical characters and a whole host of scenes which rather overload the short story. However, the set-up and the ideas are refreshing. This one with Blaycock's have effectively encouraged me to abandon a steampunk short story I was to set in Russia on the grounds it would now appear derivative.
There are a couple of essays, 'The Steam-Driven Time Machine' by Rick Klaw and 'The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium' by Bill Baker. The former is better than the latter, though the limited space means they are naturally restricted. I think the editors envisaged this collection being bought by people who have not encountered steampunk before because the content of those essays will not be news to anyone who has followed the genre to any degree. I do worry because of the Lansdale and Di Filippo stories, this collection will drive general readers away from steampunk. Reading online reviews of new books in the genre it is noticeable that some are being dismissed as 'airships and lesbians' and the straying into unnecessary perverse sexual contexts (I am not saying lesbians are perverse, this is referring the torture and bestiality of Lansdale and Di Filippo which are perverse) is liable to damage the genre. Including such work in a book which is supposed to encourage general readers into the genre was a grave error on the part of the Vandermeers which steampunk authors should condemn.
'Steampunk' ed. by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer
This review does contain spoilers because there are a couple of stories in this collection which I feel are inappropriate and may offend readers, so I feel it is important to alert readers to them. Having begun work in the middle of this month I thought I would be reading more. However, deliberately socialising with colleagues has meant me sitting in the works canteen, it is not called that but it is effectively what it is, rather than spending an hour reading each lunchtime. In addition, in the evening I have been watching the two John Le Carre television series and now the entire 'Van Der Valk' series of DVDs on my laptop rather than reading.
This book is a collection of essays, short stories and novel extracts. It does rather pin the Steampunk genre to American attitudes though there is some reference to British and Japanese work in this field. One of the problems is the evangelist Jess Nevins who I have had problems with before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/jess-nevinss-steampunk-generations.html and continues to wheel out a similar attempt to nail Steampunk to US culture that he has done before.
Before moving on to a broader survey of the book, I must address the two chapters which concerned me most. The first is 'The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel' by Joe R. Lansdale. The concept is fair: the time traveller from H.G. Wells' novel has torn the fabric of time and space by his travels, something also considered in 'The Time Ships' by Stephen Baxter (1995). In doing so the traveller has been turned into a vampire and has returned to 19th century Mid West America where he feeds on people, aided by an army of Moorlocks [sic - in the original book they are 'Morlocks'; this may be a reference to Michael Moorcock often termed the 'godfather of steampunk'; it may simply be laziness]. A group of adventurers travel to do battle with him in a man-shaped walking vehicle which he counters with one made of wood. The key trouble is simply how nasty the story is. It quickly turns into a sequence of descriptions in too much detail of torture. It turns out like a sadist text and any of the plot just disappears as Lansdale indulges his clear delight in describing torture. The warning given by the editors at the start of the story is far too mild and I really believe that they should have thought twice before including this story in the collection as all it is, is a perverse torture story given Steampunk elements.
The other story that jars with the collection is 'Victoria' by Paul Di Filippo which is set in 1838 and envisages Queen Victoria newly on the throne being installed in a brothel by Lord Melbourne, her prime minister, so that she may learn more of her kingdom. Her place is taken by a newt named Victoria that has been impregnated by human genes to grow to the size of a small woman of Queen Victoria's stature and who serves as a bestial prostitute in the brothel until the two have their roles reversed. The clear descriptions of bestiality in themselves are distasteful. Again this seems to be some perverse sexual story which has been wrapped up in steampunk trappings to get it a wider readership and yet completely brings the genre into disrepute.
If I had been the author of any of the other stories in this collection I would have been offended to see my work included alongside these others. There are extracts from 'The Warlord of the Air' by Michael Moorcock which despite being over forty years old stands out as an engaging novel. An excerpt from 'Tribes of the Pacific Coast' by Neal Stephenson is a decent post-apocalyptic story, though to me seeming more mainstream science fiction than steampunk.
'Lord Kelvin's Machine' by James P. Blaycock is a decent steampunk story about averting a meteorite crash into Earth and I liked the internecine battles between different scientists. 'The Giving Mouth' by Ian R. Macleod, is more like standard fantasy than steampunk, but for that, is pretty well written and I like the idea of living metal. Like a couple of the stories it takes viewpoints from the workers of a steampunk world as much as from the rulers who tend to feature in these stories. 'A Sun in the Attic' by Mary Gentle is very much in the clockworkpunk style of Gentle and does its job pretty well, looking at why technology might be stopped from developing. It also has the counter-factual element of a continent in the South Pacific which I liked. 'The God Clown is Near' by Jay Lake shows how you can write unnerving steampunk with genetic elements without sliding into obscenity of Lansdale. The creation of a powerful being in a city which sits parallel to 19th century North America in the uncharted areas of the map is an interesting one and Lake conjures up this setting with its own dynamics, quickly and effectively. 'The Selene Gardening Society' by Molly Brown about bombarding the Moon with compost in order to develop and atmosphere on it, is interesting, but Brown seems undeveloped in short story writing skills, as unlike these other authors, she does not create a world in miniature and really very little happens in the story and we learn little of its context.
'Seventy Two Letters' by Ted Chiang is the second story after 'The God Clown is Near' to feature golems. This story is set in a more standard 19th century Britain but in a short time shows a completely different society though with concerns of our own; it even envisages a different form of human reproduction. In my view this is probably the best story of the collection. 'The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance' by Michael Chabon, one of the more broadly better known authors in this collection, is very different from the title and features two boys whose parents were involved in the Ohio Uprising against British rule of North America in a steampunk world and what happens to them before they are liberated from a children's home by their airship flying uncle. This felt like proper steampunk with some counter-factual politics thrown in for good measure. 'Reflected Light' by Rachel E. Pollock is a little frustrating. It is features steampunk wax recordings of the friend of a woman who went on to be a revolutionary in the world Pollock creates. She does very well in quickly creating this world, but leaves the rest of the story to the reader's own imagination. I guess I like a little bit more in my short stories in the way that Blaycock, Chiang, Gentle, etc. do. 'Minutes of the Last Meeting' by Stepan Chapman almost goes to the other extreme featuring a cyber/steampunk Russia in 1917 where there are nanobots alongside steam trains. It features many historical characters and a whole host of scenes which rather overload the short story. However, the set-up and the ideas are refreshing. This one with Blaycock's have effectively encouraged me to abandon a steampunk short story I was to set in Russia on the grounds it would now appear derivative.
There are a couple of essays, 'The Steam-Driven Time Machine' by Rick Klaw and 'The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium' by Bill Baker. The former is better than the latter, though the limited space means they are naturally restricted. I think the editors envisaged this collection being bought by people who have not encountered steampunk before because the content of those essays will not be news to anyone who has followed the genre to any degree. I do worry because of the Lansdale and Di Filippo stories, this collection will drive general readers away from steampunk. Reading online reviews of new books in the genre it is noticeable that some are being dismissed as 'airships and lesbians' and the straying into unnecessary perverse sexual contexts (I am not saying lesbians are perverse, this is referring the torture and bestiality of Lansdale and Di Filippo which are perverse) is liable to damage the genre. Including such work in a book which is supposed to encourage general readers into the genre was a grave error on the part of the Vandermeers which steampunk authors should condemn.
Friday, 7 October 2011
Blogging the Blog 12: Most Interest & Mostly Americans
I was looking around the various functions that this Blogger site provides for us bloggers and came across a tab I had not used before: Stats. I took a look at it and it revealed interesting data about you, yes, the people who read my blog. It was a little depressing but the information is not going to get me to change what I post here. However, it is interesting to look at what I have found out.The first thing I looked at was where the 99,000+ hits on my blog had come from. Over a third were from the USA and 16,000 were from the UK. I guess that I should not be surprised that half of those visiting the site were from English-speaking countries and these two in particular given that I write a lot about the UK and often feature US movies. The third highest source was Germany with 6,000 visitors followed reasonably closely behind by Canada and France, almost equal with each other; Australia in sixth place has provided 3,000 visitors, the Netherlands next with 2,000; Italy and interestingly, the Philippines both with 700+ and finally Sweden with just over 500. I guess this spread may come from the topics I have covered.
The tools with which people reach my blog are varied though 84% have come from a machine using Windows and only 10% from a Macintosh. Of new devices just over 900 used an iPhone, 713 used an iPad (one of those might have been myself), 223 an iPod and interestingly, 65 used a Playstation 3. The search engine people who did not come direct used is unsurprising, with 45% coming through Internet Explorer (recently it was reported the average IQ of users of this search tool was only 80; I assume because it includes numerous school children); 29% used Firefox, 13% used Chrome, 9% used Safari (the default search tool on the iPad) and only 2% used Opera and <1% Iceweasel, the search tools that are supposed to be the ones favoured by the most intellectual web searchers.
The main ways in which people have reached my blog through other links is in terms of the maps of imaginary places, especially Narnia, because my inclusion of six maps of that world is referenced on Wikipedia in the footnotes. Other imaginary maps are also high in those pages on my blog which are visited with large continents and then tube maps in second and third place of this sub-set. Getting featured on the 'Today in Alternate History' website has channelled more traffic to me and interestingly so has mlwodementia.blogspot, one which I was not familiar with but is proving to be the third highest channel through which direct traffic as opposed to searchers, is coming. It turned out to be a blog which has been running since 2007 with over 50 postings per year and is focused on making and playing with fantasy lead figures.
When I turn to the topics of interest, however, I begin to be rather disheartened. My most popular topic has been discussing James Bond villains, my first posting on this in April 2009 has attracted over 3,600 visits, the second posting over 11,000 and the third over 16,000. This pattern in itself is shaped by the search terms that have brought people to my blog, the term 'Sophie Marceau' is by far and away the most popular term followed by 'Le Chiffre' though only warranting a tenth of the interest that Sophie has done. He is followed by 'Robert Davi' and 'Toby Stevens' interesting pair of actors who have been Bond villains and the fifth most popular term is 'Tamriel'. Interesting my two postings on steampunk pirates have received 7,500 hits for the first one and 8,500 hits for the second, partly through people looking for 'steampunk pirates' specifically as a search term and partly people coming across it looking for images of Japanese flags. In terms of the counter-factual postings the top one with over 1,100 visits is 'What if the Bolshevik Revolution Failed?' followed far behind by 'What if Hitler Had Been Assassinated?' and 'What if Lenin Had Lived 10 Years Longer?'. I would have expected more coming to the Second World War and other better known 'what ifs?' but I guess there are a lot of sites covering those that draw them off before they reach me as a result. Whilst I know that some people have read my political postings and my fiction they must be so few in number so as not to turn up in the statistical returns.
I suppose we have perceptions of how people view our blog. It seems apparent that mine mainly attracts Americans looking for pictures of Sophie Marceau, perhaps reading about James Bond villains and on occasion looking for maps of Narnia or something on steampunk pirates. I guess I am filling a role that might not be filled by others, though I find it weird that people cannot source the hundreds of images of actors who have appeared in the James Bond movies from other places, there are hundreds of websites with this stuff on. As I said when I launched this blog, it was primarily for my own peace of mind and I would always rather be right than read. As time has passed I guess I did hope that people would at least read my views, but I need to be clear than unless I am commenting on James Bond or steampunk pirates then they are not, well, even then they are probably only here for the pictures rather than the text. It is also frustrating that the bulk of visitors come to look at pages from 2008 and 2009. I could easily have packed up after having posting something like 300 pages. I guess this information is useful for people looking to attract visitors to their blog. 'The Guardian' has been running a column about how to create and 'monetise' your blog. Clearly a good starting place is to whack on images of popular actresses and maps of fantasy places.
The tools with which people reach my blog are varied though 84% have come from a machine using Windows and only 10% from a Macintosh. Of new devices just over 900 used an iPhone, 713 used an iPad (one of those might have been myself), 223 an iPod and interestingly, 65 used a Playstation 3. The search engine people who did not come direct used is unsurprising, with 45% coming through Internet Explorer (recently it was reported the average IQ of users of this search tool was only 80; I assume because it includes numerous school children); 29% used Firefox, 13% used Chrome, 9% used Safari (the default search tool on the iPad) and only 2% used Opera and <1% Iceweasel, the search tools that are supposed to be the ones favoured by the most intellectual web searchers.
The main ways in which people have reached my blog through other links is in terms of the maps of imaginary places, especially Narnia, because my inclusion of six maps of that world is referenced on Wikipedia in the footnotes. Other imaginary maps are also high in those pages on my blog which are visited with large continents and then tube maps in second and third place of this sub-set. Getting featured on the 'Today in Alternate History' website has channelled more traffic to me and interestingly so has mlwodementia.blogspot, one which I was not familiar with but is proving to be the third highest channel through which direct traffic as opposed to searchers, is coming. It turned out to be a blog which has been running since 2007 with over 50 postings per year and is focused on making and playing with fantasy lead figures.
When I turn to the topics of interest, however, I begin to be rather disheartened. My most popular topic has been discussing James Bond villains, my first posting on this in April 2009 has attracted over 3,600 visits, the second posting over 11,000 and the third over 16,000. This pattern in itself is shaped by the search terms that have brought people to my blog, the term 'Sophie Marceau' is by far and away the most popular term followed by 'Le Chiffre' though only warranting a tenth of the interest that Sophie has done. He is followed by 'Robert Davi' and 'Toby Stevens' interesting pair of actors who have been Bond villains and the fifth most popular term is 'Tamriel'. Interesting my two postings on steampunk pirates have received 7,500 hits for the first one and 8,500 hits for the second, partly through people looking for 'steampunk pirates' specifically as a search term and partly people coming across it looking for images of Japanese flags. In terms of the counter-factual postings the top one with over 1,100 visits is 'What if the Bolshevik Revolution Failed?' followed far behind by 'What if Hitler Had Been Assassinated?' and 'What if Lenin Had Lived 10 Years Longer?'. I would have expected more coming to the Second World War and other better known 'what ifs?' but I guess there are a lot of sites covering those that draw them off before they reach me as a result. Whilst I know that some people have read my political postings and my fiction they must be so few in number so as not to turn up in the statistical returns.
I suppose we have perceptions of how people view our blog. It seems apparent that mine mainly attracts Americans looking for pictures of Sophie Marceau, perhaps reading about James Bond villains and on occasion looking for maps of Narnia or something on steampunk pirates. I guess I am filling a role that might not be filled by others, though I find it weird that people cannot source the hundreds of images of actors who have appeared in the James Bond movies from other places, there are hundreds of websites with this stuff on. As I said when I launched this blog, it was primarily for my own peace of mind and I would always rather be right than read. As time has passed I guess I did hope that people would at least read my views, but I need to be clear than unless I am commenting on James Bond or steampunk pirates then they are not, well, even then they are probably only here for the pictures rather than the text. It is also frustrating that the bulk of visitors come to look at pages from 2008 and 2009. I could easily have packed up after having posting something like 300 pages. I guess this information is useful for people looking to attract visitors to their blog. 'The Guardian' has been running a column about how to create and 'monetise' your blog. Clearly a good starting place is to whack on images of popular actresses and maps of fantasy places.
Saturday, 3 April 2010
I've Got My Orange Clasp - Steampunk Short Story
This story arose from thinking how different colonial wars may have turned out with steampunk technology available, in this case the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. The nature of the story was inspired by the song ‘Orange Crush’ (1988) by REM which is about aspects of the USA’s colonial war in Vietnam 1965-73.
I’ve Got My Orange Clasp
Extract from an article in the ‘Labour Leader’ edition for the week beginning Sunday 10th January 1904.
This article is based on an interview between our war and foreign affairs correspondent and a soldier who served in the Boer Wars. The soldier’s identity and other identifying elements have been concealed in order to protect him from retribution for coming forward to reveal a little more of the picture that is emerging of how British armed forces executed the recent wars in southern Africa.
Correspondent: What part did you play in the Second Boer War?
Soldier A: I served as a gunner aboard the _________.
C: An airship?
S.A.: Yes, but assigned to the __ Air Dragoons. People forget that the dirigibles of the Air Dragoons are manned by Army men, not ratings and officers from the Navy of the Skies.
C: What armament were you assigned to?
S.A.: The Hotchkiss machine guns.
C: What was the role of those guns?
S.A. They are to clear the ground before we come into land so the companies transported on board can disembark in safety.
C: What do you mean by ‘clear the ground’?
S.A.: Shoot anyone of the enemy who is visible. Other men would drop grenades.
C: How much hazard is there in such activity?
S.A.: Usually there is no hazard at all. I have fought against the Zulu and other tribes and on occasion we would keep firing with no response from them at all; just putting them Africans to flight. Once the dragoons disembarked they just had to clear up. The Boers though, well, they were different. They were a danger even before they started receiving those rockets from the Germans. The Boers, they are the best shots in the world, can hit a target at two thousand yards, so, a man in a slow moving dirigible a few hundred feet above them was all too easy. By late 1900 they were putting in armour plating around our positions on the airships because too many men were being killed; being shot up between the legs or shot through the head from some mountain top as we came down to land.
C: Did you have any moral compunction at shooting men on the ground who had no skyborne forces to support them?
S.A.: In the early days, perhaps, it did seem too easy. Some of the officers seemed to enjoy it too much; calling us something like the Angels of Death, raining bullets down on the ‘filthy farmers’. That was before the bombing from flights of Navy dirigibles over Pretoria started. With the quantities of bombs they were dropping our attacks then came to seem as nothing major. Once a couple of our men had been killed by Boer snipers then, well, we did not feel anything should stop us shooting them: it was a battle, they fired at us, we fired back. Then, of course, late in 1900, the German rockets, the ALRs, began arriving in the veldt. They sent them to the frontline units first, well two or three of them. I know they kept a lot for defending Bloemfontein and Pretoria, but from then on, you had to approach so carefully otherwise in a couple of minutes there would be a rocket coming through the gas envelope and in moments the whole airship would be a ball of flame.
C: You saw that happen?
S.A.: Yes. The air dragoons lost more dirigibles in southern Africa than the Navy of the Skies, but the numbers get lumped together. We always fly at lower altitudes, they can bomb from a safer altitude and actually hit something if they get their calculations right. Well, for us, we had to come in far closer, even if the dragoons slide down ropes the last stretch, and that is when a dirigible is most vulnerable. The rockets could destroy you in one, but even a well-aimed shot at an engine could end the mission and the Boers, well, they are ______ good shots. I have heard the air dragoons lost twenty-four airships up to 1902.
The worst had to be in the run into Mafeking when we were trying to drop food supplies. We had to fly so close and we dropped it at night, but the Boers would be listening, with look-outs in rings around the town, so even if we cut our engines for the last stretch and glided in, they would have already heard us a mile, two miles, back out. How my ship managed to survive I have no idea. Seeing the sky light up when a dirigible got hit at night was incredible. The only consolation was that the Boers more often than not would bring it down among their own lines. It was difficult for them not to do so because they were right around the town.
C: The supplies you brought helped Mafeking hold out for seven months did they not? Until Colonel Mahon’s relief column arrived?
S.A.: Yes, they did.
C: You were at Spion Kop?
S.A.: Yes, I was. That was a battle which drew in almost every dirigible we had operating in southern Africa at the time, certainly those that could do any good at low altitudes. If it had not been for us, then, well, I doubt the British force could have survived. I know here had been reconnaissance from the skies, but, you know, these generals in their steam carriages just blunder around. Saying that, a lot of the time out there, they could not get sufficient coal and they were reduced to going on horseback. Anyway, they have to see the land for themselves and they trust their view far better than the best collodion-calotype or sketch the Corps of Observers can produce from dirigibles. I can accept that, from above, it can be difficult to judge just how hard it would be to lead a unit up a particular slope; how well they can be seen by the enemy. However, at Spion Kop, they did not even seem to notice the whole other peak. Even if it had not stood higher than the hill they went up, it would have been a redoubt the Boers could have used.
The air dragoons saved the ground force at Spion Kop. We circled again and again. We were firing the Hotchkisses as much as we could without melting the barrels. That was the time we ran clear out of ammunition. The dragoons on board were firing from the windows. The thing that is eerie about any gunfire from an airship is how quiet it is. The slap, slap, slap as the air guns fire. The carbines do not have that long a range range, but the men with us kept firing at anything that looked Boer. There were a dozen, fifteen, perhaps twenty dirigibles circling by the end. They say that there is no square foot of that hilltop that is not peppered with lead. Then, of course, it was the air dragoons that we put down who cleared the top, not the units that had marched there. I know the dragoons are light troops but seizing hilltops that has always been the task for light troops; you only have to look at what Wellington did in Portugal and Spain.
C: You feel Spion Kop marked a change in the war?
S.A.: Certainly. From then on, every column then had at least two dirigibles assigned to it, at least one with a company or two of Air Dragoons. The Boers changed tactics too. I do not know if they were going to get the rockets before but it was certain that they had them afterwards and every man of them could use them. You would shoot dead one, two, three, teams setting a rocket up and then someone else would take up their position; boys, even women could fire those things. You learned to spot a cluster of Boers even if was underage boys, women or old men and you would target that group with Hotchkiss rounds, grenades, carbine bullets, whatever you could throw at them.
C: You were awarded the Orange Free State clasp?
S.A.: Yes, I have my Queen’s South Africa medal with my Spion Kop clasp, I have my Orange clasp; I have my Transvaal clasp. That will not identify me from many hundreds others who fought in the war. If you survived, you got those.
C: In the public imagination, however, the Orange clasp has become most associated with the latter phases of the war; the most controversial period.
S.A.: Perhaps. The fighting was different then. The Boers had seemed like worthwhile opponents; frightening men if you fell into their hands. By 1902, however, we had the impression they were fanatics, no different from dervishes, apparently willing to fight to their last rifle round. Normal countries would have surrendered by then, but they kept on and we were running out of ways to stop them. They would attack and scatter, attack and scatter. Grenades and machine gun bullets cannot stop that kind of attack. We took to ringing them with flame. If we saw a unit on the veldt, it would be out with the incendiary grenades, something you do not really want to be carrying on an airship, but you could burn up the veldt, burn the _______ Boers, kill herds of their cattle or ruin the grazing land.
C: Did the men, the ordinary soldiers, approve of those methods?
S.A.: Maybe back in ’99 or 1900 we would have griped, but by the end we wanted the war to be finished and we wanted all the Boers with their rockets out of the way.
C: And the arrests, the internment of the families? The ___ Air Dragoons were heavily involved in that?
S.A.: Yes, yes, we were. However, again, it had to happen. Until then we had simply flown over these isolated farms with women and children scowling at us from the verandas, but then we realised that, of course, the men would be hiding somewhere, not to far off, concealed among the rocks and, at night, they would come back to the farms and eat and then head out to attack one of our forts or a town or some supply column. If we took away the farms then they had nowhere to get the support.
C: You would shoot the farms and drop grenades before air dragoons were landed to arrest the families?
S.A.: No, not at first, but once the Boers knew what we were doing they would set traps. Dropping some grenades first was a precaution, send them running out. We had to burn the farmsteads anyway so it seemed we might as well do it straight off. It speeded things up a great deal; if they had ammunition or rockets they blew apart when the grenades detonated or fire burned through. Those Boers love their rifles like they love their horses, British people would not understand it. You would hear the rifle rounds cracking once you were burning even the most ordinary looking place.
C: In time, though, you came to see how invidious this policy was?
S.A.: Yes, yes, I did. By the end we were not fighting men we were simply rounding up wives and children; we were like cattle rustlers but taking people. As more and more of them were brought in to what they began calling the concentration camps, you know, where the civilians were concentrated, it became worse and worse. The battle was a long one, but by the end they were simply starving the young and the old, killing them with disease rather than bullets. Even the worst, most callous Boer rifleman, well, even he did not deserve that kind of death. You treat prisoners of war decently. Treat them like animals and you just make them as ferocious as animals; it made them fight all the harder. They would rather die with a gun in their hand than slowly of not getting enough food. In the end, we only won because they no longer had anywhere to hide, not enough bullets or horses and they saw their families would die for their continued resistance.
C: Do you believe the war was right?
S.A: I do not like the Boers. They are a very arrogant people and I can see why they caused problems with the Cape Colony and the lands Rhodes’s company set up. At the time I blamed them for the war, but now I feel the British, well, certainly the men of commerce and politics, were as much to blame. The cause appears to be not even about the growth of Britain’s empire, but the simple desire for gold and diamonds and rich men getting even richer.
C: Do you believe what was done to suppress the Boers has established methods the government may use against others who resist their will?
S.A.: I do not know. Southern Africa is a particular place; the Boers are very particular people. I guess though, someone has written manuals on how to repeat what we did in the last year of the war and so could do it again somewhere else.
C: Thank you Mr. A for speaking with me.
S.A.: Thank you for giving me the chance: there were things I had to get off my chest about what happened out there.
C: The people need to know what actually happened in their names.
S.A.: Yes.
The ‘Labour Leader’ opposed the war in southern Africa throughout its duration and now calls for a public inquiry into its conduct and in particular the methods employed against the civilian Boer population. This soldier’s account emphasises the nature of the methods of airborne assaults and the use of soldiers to intern the families of suspected combatants in what are increasingly being acknowledged as inhuman conditions. Such accounts simply add weight to this newspaper’s call for a full investigation and the calling to account of those involved.
Historical Notes
• Even in the 1970s, books would often have a patch of underlining in the place of a name or a date that was not to be revealed, e.g., 'In 19__ I was staying at the Hotel _____'. It was often used to cover expletives and you would see ‘b_______’ in the place of ‘bastard’ or ‘bloody’.
• The ‘Labour Leader’ was a Socialist newspaper growing out of ‘The Miner’ and launched as a monthly in 1888. It was run by Keir Hardie until he sold it to the Independent Labour Party in 1904 though he remained editor until January 1905 when John Bruce Glasier took over. It became a weekly in 1894 and turned into ‘Socialist Leader’ following the First World War. It was renowned for its high quality investigative journalism and it maintained a pacifist attitude in the face of wars, in contrast to the rival Socialist newspaper, ‘Clarion’.
• The Second Anglo-Boer War ran 1899-1902. It was over the British attempt to annex the Boer Republics: the Orange Free State (capital at Bloemfontein) and the South African Republic, commonly called the Transvaal (capital at Pretoria). The Boers had launched a pre-emptive strike in October 1899 and put British forces under siege at Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking. The Siege of Mafeking lasted 217 days being ended by Colonel Bryan Mahon’s forces in May 1900. In this story rations for the besieged did not fall to the level that they did in reality because of the availability of dirigibles to fly in supplies.
• The Battle of Spion Kop occurred in January 1900. British forces had sought to recapture the hill in Natal from Boer forces. It was the highest area in the western part of the region. In the dark they captured what they thought to be the summit only to find they were faced Boer troops on three sides on higher ground and with artillery in position. The Boers were able to pick off the British forces. Due to the continued misapprehension of their position, despite having exhausted the Boer forces, the British who had lost many of their senior commanders, retreated from the important high ground effectively gifting the victory to the Boers. In the steampunk version, the appeal for support semaphored out by Colonel Maltby Crofton led to the arrival of dirigibles able to mow down the Boers on the heights and force them to retreat. Of course, with air support the British forces’ appreciation of the topography should have been better, so potentially avoiding blunders of the kind that occurred at Spion Kop. However, the Second Anglo-Boer War was marked by errors on the part of British commanders anyway.
• The Air Dragoons are a branch of the British armed forces I have used in a number of stories. They are ‘dragoons’ in the original sense, i.e. infantry carried to the combat zone, in actual history on horseback, in this story by airship, and so they equate to an aerial version of the marines. By the 19th century, in our world, dragoons had generally become just another type of cavalry. The Navy of the Skies is the equivalent of the air force but developed far earlier in this steampunk world and based on dirigibles rather than heavier-than-air aircraft.
• Société Anonyme des Anciens Etablissements Hotchkiss et Cie, was an arms and car company established in France by American Benjamin B. Hotchkiss in 1867. It produced cannon and machine guns before also beginning to manufacture cars at the start of the 20th century. The Hotchkiss M1909 light machine gun was used by British forces in the First World War and was known as the Hotchkiss Mark I. In this story the British forces have adopted Hotchkiss machine guns earlier and have used them in their ground-support dirigible force.
• Collodion-calotype is a form of photograph that has featured in my other steampunk stories. Calotype was an early form of photography invented in 1841 and using a paper negative which made it less cumbersome than the glass and metal plates used in other processes such as ambrotype (invented 1854), tintype (1856), collodion process (1851 – because it created a negative first, it allowed duplicates to be made) and, the best-known, the daguerreotype invented in 1839. The collodion process needed trays of chemicals which were difficult to use in the field, but this was generally overcome by the use of an emulsion, invented by in 1864 in our world.
• The campaign medals issued for the Second Boer War were the Queen’s South Africa Medal and, after King Edward VII’s accession to the throne in 1901, the King’s South Africa Medal. A whole series of clasps were issued. Clasps such as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were issued to troops serving in particular theatres of the conflict but not at specific battles, this would apply to troops such as the dirigible gunners participating seemingly indirectly in a number of land-based battles. Of course, in our world no Spion Kop clasp was issued as it was a defeat, but, in this story, the intervention of the dirigibles altered that.
• In our world, Bloemfontein was captured by the British in March 1900 and Pretoria in June 1900. This did not end the war, simply changed it into a guerilla conflict, with, by September 1900, 30,000 Boer troops still in the field refusing to surrender. To combat these methods, the British followed the example of the Spanish approaches against guerillas used in The Ten Years War (1868-78) and by the Americans in the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. The British adopted a scorched earth policy destroying farm land and buildings; constructed 8000 blockhouses to defend strategic routes; had fast moving mounted units numbering 20,000 troops by the end of the war; used armoured trains to respond to Boer attacks and cut off their retreats and, most controversially, introduced concentration camps to intern Boer families in. The bulk of the 28,000 Boer prisoners-of-war had been sent outside Africa but 26,000 Boer civilians died while interned in the 45 camps in the country, which, by July 1901 held 93,000 Boers. A further 107,000 black Africans were interned in 64 separate camps and casualties are not known but at least 14,000 died. The causes of death of Boers and Africans were malnourishment and diseases such as typhoid, dysentery and measles.
I’ve Got My Orange Clasp
Extract from an article in the ‘Labour Leader’ edition for the week beginning Sunday 10th January 1904.
This article is based on an interview between our war and foreign affairs correspondent and a soldier who served in the Boer Wars. The soldier’s identity and other identifying elements have been concealed in order to protect him from retribution for coming forward to reveal a little more of the picture that is emerging of how British armed forces executed the recent wars in southern Africa.
Correspondent: What part did you play in the Second Boer War?
Soldier A: I served as a gunner aboard the _________.
C: An airship?
S.A.: Yes, but assigned to the __ Air Dragoons. People forget that the dirigibles of the Air Dragoons are manned by Army men, not ratings and officers from the Navy of the Skies.
C: What armament were you assigned to?
S.A.: The Hotchkiss machine guns.
C: What was the role of those guns?
S.A. They are to clear the ground before we come into land so the companies transported on board can disembark in safety.
C: What do you mean by ‘clear the ground’?
S.A.: Shoot anyone of the enemy who is visible. Other men would drop grenades.
C: How much hazard is there in such activity?
S.A.: Usually there is no hazard at all. I have fought against the Zulu and other tribes and on occasion we would keep firing with no response from them at all; just putting them Africans to flight. Once the dragoons disembarked they just had to clear up. The Boers though, well, they were different. They were a danger even before they started receiving those rockets from the Germans. The Boers, they are the best shots in the world, can hit a target at two thousand yards, so, a man in a slow moving dirigible a few hundred feet above them was all too easy. By late 1900 they were putting in armour plating around our positions on the airships because too many men were being killed; being shot up between the legs or shot through the head from some mountain top as we came down to land.
C: Did you have any moral compunction at shooting men on the ground who had no skyborne forces to support them?
S.A.: In the early days, perhaps, it did seem too easy. Some of the officers seemed to enjoy it too much; calling us something like the Angels of Death, raining bullets down on the ‘filthy farmers’. That was before the bombing from flights of Navy dirigibles over Pretoria started. With the quantities of bombs they were dropping our attacks then came to seem as nothing major. Once a couple of our men had been killed by Boer snipers then, well, we did not feel anything should stop us shooting them: it was a battle, they fired at us, we fired back. Then, of course, late in 1900, the German rockets, the ALRs, began arriving in the veldt. They sent them to the frontline units first, well two or three of them. I know they kept a lot for defending Bloemfontein and Pretoria, but from then on, you had to approach so carefully otherwise in a couple of minutes there would be a rocket coming through the gas envelope and in moments the whole airship would be a ball of flame.
C: You saw that happen?
S.A.: Yes. The air dragoons lost more dirigibles in southern Africa than the Navy of the Skies, but the numbers get lumped together. We always fly at lower altitudes, they can bomb from a safer altitude and actually hit something if they get their calculations right. Well, for us, we had to come in far closer, even if the dragoons slide down ropes the last stretch, and that is when a dirigible is most vulnerable. The rockets could destroy you in one, but even a well-aimed shot at an engine could end the mission and the Boers, well, they are ______ good shots. I have heard the air dragoons lost twenty-four airships up to 1902.
The worst had to be in the run into Mafeking when we were trying to drop food supplies. We had to fly so close and we dropped it at night, but the Boers would be listening, with look-outs in rings around the town, so even if we cut our engines for the last stretch and glided in, they would have already heard us a mile, two miles, back out. How my ship managed to survive I have no idea. Seeing the sky light up when a dirigible got hit at night was incredible. The only consolation was that the Boers more often than not would bring it down among their own lines. It was difficult for them not to do so because they were right around the town.
C: The supplies you brought helped Mafeking hold out for seven months did they not? Until Colonel Mahon’s relief column arrived?
S.A.: Yes, they did.
C: You were at Spion Kop?
S.A.: Yes, I was. That was a battle which drew in almost every dirigible we had operating in southern Africa at the time, certainly those that could do any good at low altitudes. If it had not been for us, then, well, I doubt the British force could have survived. I know here had been reconnaissance from the skies, but, you know, these generals in their steam carriages just blunder around. Saying that, a lot of the time out there, they could not get sufficient coal and they were reduced to going on horseback. Anyway, they have to see the land for themselves and they trust their view far better than the best collodion-calotype or sketch the Corps of Observers can produce from dirigibles. I can accept that, from above, it can be difficult to judge just how hard it would be to lead a unit up a particular slope; how well they can be seen by the enemy. However, at Spion Kop, they did not even seem to notice the whole other peak. Even if it had not stood higher than the hill they went up, it would have been a redoubt the Boers could have used.
The air dragoons saved the ground force at Spion Kop. We circled again and again. We were firing the Hotchkisses as much as we could without melting the barrels. That was the time we ran clear out of ammunition. The dragoons on board were firing from the windows. The thing that is eerie about any gunfire from an airship is how quiet it is. The slap, slap, slap as the air guns fire. The carbines do not have that long a range range, but the men with us kept firing at anything that looked Boer. There were a dozen, fifteen, perhaps twenty dirigibles circling by the end. They say that there is no square foot of that hilltop that is not peppered with lead. Then, of course, it was the air dragoons that we put down who cleared the top, not the units that had marched there. I know the dragoons are light troops but seizing hilltops that has always been the task for light troops; you only have to look at what Wellington did in Portugal and Spain.
C: You feel Spion Kop marked a change in the war?
S.A.: Certainly. From then on, every column then had at least two dirigibles assigned to it, at least one with a company or two of Air Dragoons. The Boers changed tactics too. I do not know if they were going to get the rockets before but it was certain that they had them afterwards and every man of them could use them. You would shoot dead one, two, three, teams setting a rocket up and then someone else would take up their position; boys, even women could fire those things. You learned to spot a cluster of Boers even if was underage boys, women or old men and you would target that group with Hotchkiss rounds, grenades, carbine bullets, whatever you could throw at them.
C: You were awarded the Orange Free State clasp?
S.A.: Yes, I have my Queen’s South Africa medal with my Spion Kop clasp, I have my Orange clasp; I have my Transvaal clasp. That will not identify me from many hundreds others who fought in the war. If you survived, you got those.
C: In the public imagination, however, the Orange clasp has become most associated with the latter phases of the war; the most controversial period.
S.A.: Perhaps. The fighting was different then. The Boers had seemed like worthwhile opponents; frightening men if you fell into their hands. By 1902, however, we had the impression they were fanatics, no different from dervishes, apparently willing to fight to their last rifle round. Normal countries would have surrendered by then, but they kept on and we were running out of ways to stop them. They would attack and scatter, attack and scatter. Grenades and machine gun bullets cannot stop that kind of attack. We took to ringing them with flame. If we saw a unit on the veldt, it would be out with the incendiary grenades, something you do not really want to be carrying on an airship, but you could burn up the veldt, burn the _______ Boers, kill herds of their cattle or ruin the grazing land.
C: Did the men, the ordinary soldiers, approve of those methods?
S.A.: Maybe back in ’99 or 1900 we would have griped, but by the end we wanted the war to be finished and we wanted all the Boers with their rockets out of the way.
C: And the arrests, the internment of the families? The ___ Air Dragoons were heavily involved in that?
S.A.: Yes, yes, we were. However, again, it had to happen. Until then we had simply flown over these isolated farms with women and children scowling at us from the verandas, but then we realised that, of course, the men would be hiding somewhere, not to far off, concealed among the rocks and, at night, they would come back to the farms and eat and then head out to attack one of our forts or a town or some supply column. If we took away the farms then they had nowhere to get the support.
C: You would shoot the farms and drop grenades before air dragoons were landed to arrest the families?
S.A.: No, not at first, but once the Boers knew what we were doing they would set traps. Dropping some grenades first was a precaution, send them running out. We had to burn the farmsteads anyway so it seemed we might as well do it straight off. It speeded things up a great deal; if they had ammunition or rockets they blew apart when the grenades detonated or fire burned through. Those Boers love their rifles like they love their horses, British people would not understand it. You would hear the rifle rounds cracking once you were burning even the most ordinary looking place.
C: In time, though, you came to see how invidious this policy was?
S.A.: Yes, yes, I did. By the end we were not fighting men we were simply rounding up wives and children; we were like cattle rustlers but taking people. As more and more of them were brought in to what they began calling the concentration camps, you know, where the civilians were concentrated, it became worse and worse. The battle was a long one, but by the end they were simply starving the young and the old, killing them with disease rather than bullets. Even the worst, most callous Boer rifleman, well, even he did not deserve that kind of death. You treat prisoners of war decently. Treat them like animals and you just make them as ferocious as animals; it made them fight all the harder. They would rather die with a gun in their hand than slowly of not getting enough food. In the end, we only won because they no longer had anywhere to hide, not enough bullets or horses and they saw their families would die for their continued resistance.
C: Do you believe the war was right?
S.A: I do not like the Boers. They are a very arrogant people and I can see why they caused problems with the Cape Colony and the lands Rhodes’s company set up. At the time I blamed them for the war, but now I feel the British, well, certainly the men of commerce and politics, were as much to blame. The cause appears to be not even about the growth of Britain’s empire, but the simple desire for gold and diamonds and rich men getting even richer.
C: Do you believe what was done to suppress the Boers has established methods the government may use against others who resist their will?
S.A.: I do not know. Southern Africa is a particular place; the Boers are very particular people. I guess though, someone has written manuals on how to repeat what we did in the last year of the war and so could do it again somewhere else.
C: Thank you Mr. A for speaking with me.
S.A.: Thank you for giving me the chance: there were things I had to get off my chest about what happened out there.
C: The people need to know what actually happened in their names.
S.A.: Yes.
The ‘Labour Leader’ opposed the war in southern Africa throughout its duration and now calls for a public inquiry into its conduct and in particular the methods employed against the civilian Boer population. This soldier’s account emphasises the nature of the methods of airborne assaults and the use of soldiers to intern the families of suspected combatants in what are increasingly being acknowledged as inhuman conditions. Such accounts simply add weight to this newspaper’s call for a full investigation and the calling to account of those involved.
Historical Notes
• Even in the 1970s, books would often have a patch of underlining in the place of a name or a date that was not to be revealed, e.g., 'In 19__ I was staying at the Hotel _____'. It was often used to cover expletives and you would see ‘b_______’ in the place of ‘bastard’ or ‘bloody’.
• The ‘Labour Leader’ was a Socialist newspaper growing out of ‘The Miner’ and launched as a monthly in 1888. It was run by Keir Hardie until he sold it to the Independent Labour Party in 1904 though he remained editor until January 1905 when John Bruce Glasier took over. It became a weekly in 1894 and turned into ‘Socialist Leader’ following the First World War. It was renowned for its high quality investigative journalism and it maintained a pacifist attitude in the face of wars, in contrast to the rival Socialist newspaper, ‘Clarion’.
• The Second Anglo-Boer War ran 1899-1902. It was over the British attempt to annex the Boer Republics: the Orange Free State (capital at Bloemfontein) and the South African Republic, commonly called the Transvaal (capital at Pretoria). The Boers had launched a pre-emptive strike in October 1899 and put British forces under siege at Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking. The Siege of Mafeking lasted 217 days being ended by Colonel Bryan Mahon’s forces in May 1900. In this story rations for the besieged did not fall to the level that they did in reality because of the availability of dirigibles to fly in supplies.
• The Battle of Spion Kop occurred in January 1900. British forces had sought to recapture the hill in Natal from Boer forces. It was the highest area in the western part of the region. In the dark they captured what they thought to be the summit only to find they were faced Boer troops on three sides on higher ground and with artillery in position. The Boers were able to pick off the British forces. Due to the continued misapprehension of their position, despite having exhausted the Boer forces, the British who had lost many of their senior commanders, retreated from the important high ground effectively gifting the victory to the Boers. In the steampunk version, the appeal for support semaphored out by Colonel Maltby Crofton led to the arrival of dirigibles able to mow down the Boers on the heights and force them to retreat. Of course, with air support the British forces’ appreciation of the topography should have been better, so potentially avoiding blunders of the kind that occurred at Spion Kop. However, the Second Anglo-Boer War was marked by errors on the part of British commanders anyway.
• The Air Dragoons are a branch of the British armed forces I have used in a number of stories. They are ‘dragoons’ in the original sense, i.e. infantry carried to the combat zone, in actual history on horseback, in this story by airship, and so they equate to an aerial version of the marines. By the 19th century, in our world, dragoons had generally become just another type of cavalry. The Navy of the Skies is the equivalent of the air force but developed far earlier in this steampunk world and based on dirigibles rather than heavier-than-air aircraft.
• Société Anonyme des Anciens Etablissements Hotchkiss et Cie, was an arms and car company established in France by American Benjamin B. Hotchkiss in 1867. It produced cannon and machine guns before also beginning to manufacture cars at the start of the 20th century. The Hotchkiss M1909 light machine gun was used by British forces in the First World War and was known as the Hotchkiss Mark I. In this story the British forces have adopted Hotchkiss machine guns earlier and have used them in their ground-support dirigible force.
• Collodion-calotype is a form of photograph that has featured in my other steampunk stories. Calotype was an early form of photography invented in 1841 and using a paper negative which made it less cumbersome than the glass and metal plates used in other processes such as ambrotype (invented 1854), tintype (1856), collodion process (1851 – because it created a negative first, it allowed duplicates to be made) and, the best-known, the daguerreotype invented in 1839. The collodion process needed trays of chemicals which were difficult to use in the field, but this was generally overcome by the use of an emulsion, invented by in 1864 in our world.
• The campaign medals issued for the Second Boer War were the Queen’s South Africa Medal and, after King Edward VII’s accession to the throne in 1901, the King’s South Africa Medal. A whole series of clasps were issued. Clasps such as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were issued to troops serving in particular theatres of the conflict but not at specific battles, this would apply to troops such as the dirigible gunners participating seemingly indirectly in a number of land-based battles. Of course, in our world no Spion Kop clasp was issued as it was a defeat, but, in this story, the intervention of the dirigibles altered that.
• In our world, Bloemfontein was captured by the British in March 1900 and Pretoria in June 1900. This did not end the war, simply changed it into a guerilla conflict, with, by September 1900, 30,000 Boer troops still in the field refusing to surrender. To combat these methods, the British followed the example of the Spanish approaches against guerillas used in The Ten Years War (1868-78) and by the Americans in the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. The British adopted a scorched earth policy destroying farm land and buildings; constructed 8000 blockhouses to defend strategic routes; had fast moving mounted units numbering 20,000 troops by the end of the war; used armoured trains to respond to Boer attacks and cut off their retreats and, most controversially, introduced concentration camps to intern Boer families in. The bulk of the 28,000 Boer prisoners-of-war had been sent outside Africa but 26,000 Boer civilians died while interned in the 45 camps in the country, which, by July 1901 held 93,000 Boers. A further 107,000 black Africans were interned in 64 separate camps and casualties are not known but at least 14,000 died. The causes of death of Boers and Africans were malnourishment and diseases such as typhoid, dysentery and measles.
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Steampunk Resources I Have Spotted
Back in January 2008, I did a posting about online steampunk resources. These have grown rapidly since and whilst some have become a little moribund, the content they carry remains interesting and entertaining for anyone interested or simply curious about the steampunk genre. I read recently Michael Moorcock complaining about the state of the genre when reviewing Jebediah Berry's (the author's name in itself would be a great one for a steampunk character) book 'The Manual of Detection' (2009) See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/22/manual-of-detection-jedediah-berry
Moorcock complains that '[t]hese days, you can barely pick up a speculative fantasy without finding a zeppelin or a steam-robot on the cover. Containing few punks and a good many posh ladies and gents, most of these stories are better described as steam operas.' To some extent Moorcock has been thus writing 'steam operas' for many years notably in his 'Nomad of the Time Streams' series (1971, 1974, 1981). I would argue that they never really had any 'punks' anyway and as I have shown in my discussions on steampunk pirates even in the 19th century, the pirates were amoral rather than immoral.
I suppose if your definition of punk is someone who challenges or rejects the norms of 'polite' society they could be seen as punk, but in style they subscribe to elegant dress and are usually hight mannered. As I have noted before, the challenge for steampunk, is whilst it may shake up the technological world of the 19th century it does little to challenge the nature of society. Perhaps we need a steampunk story in which those who make and maintain the machines overthrow the upper classes. To some extent is that to work in a technological world (and steampunk sees technology as even more pervasive than it was in reality) needs discipline even if you are subsequently reckless with the results. A steam-powered airship will crash into something if its pilot is stoned.
Thus, I think Moorcock is expecting too much to see many punks in steampunk. Perhaps the title was wrong and if some other authors rather than the doyens of cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson had been responsible for re-invigorating the genre as they did with 'The Difference Engine' (1990) we would have had a different suffix. I really respect Moorcock as an author and think he is the one who could really inject some punk into the genre if he so feels it is lacking. There is capacity for it. Just look at Sherlock Holmes, as morally ambivalent, with as much difficulty with authority and as much a drug addict as Sid Vicious; you could debate their relative misogynism.
Anyway, whatever Moorcock may feel, steampunk is alive in so many facets, notably in terms of fiction but also in art including sculpture and in clothing, something no doubt I will see again in the flesh when I head to Whitby at the end of October. That sentence just gave me the idea of a steampunk Whitby with huge whale processing machines and men living on the margins in the smoky industrial town (in reality it is a small place with no factories and with a history in whaling but in the steampunk world it may have grown) in casual labour minding the huge machines churning out whale oil and whale bones for corsets. Anyway, I am off track again. What this posting was to be about was a few online steampunk resources I came across that struck me as interesting. I found the first one because it refers to this blog. I recommend all bloggers searching once in a while for reference to your own blog not for some egotistical reason but to make sure your comments are not being abused especially out of their original context.
The first is a blog called Strange Dreams, run by a Dr. Damon Molinarius. There is a main site which covers everything steampunk, especially at present, transport: whttp://drmolinarius.blogspot.com/ For some reason, unbeknown to the author it has become listed as a blog for marketers who want to matter! I know steampunk fans tend to be well off, but it is interesting that marketers see steampunk as the 'future'! There is a sub-blog of the main one which makes regular references to steampunk media in particular written fiction and movies: http://drmolinarius-spartandfiction.blogspot.com/ This is the one which gave my novella, 'The Skyborne Corsair' a mention. Interestingly Molinarius characterises me as 'a somewhat shy individual' who has 'ventured' into steampunk writing. Okay, I have one steampunk novel, one novella and one short story, but a blog running for more than two years with over 550 postings, I hardly feel is 'shy'. Anyway, it was very nice to get a mention:
http://drmolinarius-spartandfiction.blogspot.com/2009_06_14_archive.html
From the same posting on his blog I went to see the Aldersgate Cycle of US writer Natania Barron (another genuine name which would be excellent for a steampunk character). See: http://aldersgatecycle.wordpress.com/author/ She not only has produced a series of novels in a steampunk setting (sensibly using Creative Commons; despite having attended lectures on this, I have been too lazy to get involved with it) her blog has interesting discussion especially on facets of different people in stories, such as on the position of women. She is also a member of the Outer Alliance, which aims to have authors use gay, lesbian and trans-sexual characters in a normalised way in stories. She wrote the Aldersgate Triology: 'The Aldersgate', 'Pilgrim of the Sky' and 'Queen of None' in a single year and is now seeking publication for them. They blend fantasy and steampunk, with a character finding a clockwork world. Clockworkpunk, probably 18th rather than 19th century influenced is an interesting area that I would like to work on in time.
Certainly worth reading is Barron's list of 'gripes' about steampunk writing: http://aldersgatecycle.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/shaking-my-gears-five-steampunk-gripes/ and the contrasts between US and UK steampunk: http://aldersgatecycle.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/american-steampunk-more-whisky-less-tea/ She has also got involved in podcasting her work. Ironically I have made numerous podcasts in my job but never even considered it in my writing.
The third resource I came across soon after I completed 'The Skyborne Corsair' is The Smoking Lounge which has been running since January 2008: http://www.ottens.co.uk/lounge/
In many ways the set-up is like that of Gothic Steam Phantastic which I have mentioned before, though with a US rather than Dutch slant on things. It also covers dieselpunk which I imagine is mid-1950s style technology. There is the usual line in discussion and cultural referencing here. The contributors seem well informed and articulate. Dr. Molinarius is active on here. I probably would be a regular contributor to the The Smoking Lounge if it had not been for the prickly reaction I received when I posted 'The Skyborne Corsair' there. In theory they welcome fiction contributions so I thought a complete novella would go down well. I was very wrong. I was told it should only be submitted a couple of paragraphs at a time to invite comment on. Given that it had 793 paragraphs spread over six chapters, I would still be posting it bit-by-bit now, nine months later. In addition, such a fragmentation of the story would make it difficult for the reader to follow. With such a vigorously petty attitude prevailing, there seemed no point in participating further and I immediately distanced myself from the site. However, others are likely to find it of interest, just make sure if you comment or contribute you tread carefully so as not to provoke the ire of the site moderators.
This is just a sample of a few sites I have come across that you might not have noticed. I am always on the hunt for more, and in particular an active steampunk-focused site where you can contribute and discuss without fear of being patronised.
Moorcock complains that '[t]hese days, you can barely pick up a speculative fantasy without finding a zeppelin or a steam-robot on the cover. Containing few punks and a good many posh ladies and gents, most of these stories are better described as steam operas.' To some extent Moorcock has been thus writing 'steam operas' for many years notably in his 'Nomad of the Time Streams' series (1971, 1974, 1981). I would argue that they never really had any 'punks' anyway and as I have shown in my discussions on steampunk pirates even in the 19th century, the pirates were amoral rather than immoral.
I suppose if your definition of punk is someone who challenges or rejects the norms of 'polite' society they could be seen as punk, but in style they subscribe to elegant dress and are usually hight mannered. As I have noted before, the challenge for steampunk, is whilst it may shake up the technological world of the 19th century it does little to challenge the nature of society. Perhaps we need a steampunk story in which those who make and maintain the machines overthrow the upper classes. To some extent is that to work in a technological world (and steampunk sees technology as even more pervasive than it was in reality) needs discipline even if you are subsequently reckless with the results. A steam-powered airship will crash into something if its pilot is stoned.
Thus, I think Moorcock is expecting too much to see many punks in steampunk. Perhaps the title was wrong and if some other authors rather than the doyens of cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson had been responsible for re-invigorating the genre as they did with 'The Difference Engine' (1990) we would have had a different suffix. I really respect Moorcock as an author and think he is the one who could really inject some punk into the genre if he so feels it is lacking. There is capacity for it. Just look at Sherlock Holmes, as morally ambivalent, with as much difficulty with authority and as much a drug addict as Sid Vicious; you could debate their relative misogynism.
Anyway, whatever Moorcock may feel, steampunk is alive in so many facets, notably in terms of fiction but also in art including sculpture and in clothing, something no doubt I will see again in the flesh when I head to Whitby at the end of October. That sentence just gave me the idea of a steampunk Whitby with huge whale processing machines and men living on the margins in the smoky industrial town (in reality it is a small place with no factories and with a history in whaling but in the steampunk world it may have grown) in casual labour minding the huge machines churning out whale oil and whale bones for corsets. Anyway, I am off track again. What this posting was to be about was a few online steampunk resources I came across that struck me as interesting. I found the first one because it refers to this blog. I recommend all bloggers searching once in a while for reference to your own blog not for some egotistical reason but to make sure your comments are not being abused especially out of their original context.
The first is a blog called Strange Dreams, run by a Dr. Damon Molinarius. There is a main site which covers everything steampunk, especially at present, transport: whttp://drmolinarius.blogspot.com/ For some reason, unbeknown to the author it has become listed as a blog for marketers who want to matter! I know steampunk fans tend to be well off, but it is interesting that marketers see steampunk as the 'future'! There is a sub-blog of the main one which makes regular references to steampunk media in particular written fiction and movies: http://drmolinarius-spartandfiction.blogspot.com/ This is the one which gave my novella, 'The Skyborne Corsair' a mention. Interestingly Molinarius characterises me as 'a somewhat shy individual' who has 'ventured' into steampunk writing. Okay, I have one steampunk novel, one novella and one short story, but a blog running for more than two years with over 550 postings, I hardly feel is 'shy'. Anyway, it was very nice to get a mention:
http://drmolinarius-spartandfiction.blogspot.com/2009_06_14_archive.html
From the same posting on his blog I went to see the Aldersgate Cycle of US writer Natania Barron (another genuine name which would be excellent for a steampunk character). See: http://aldersgatecycle.wordpress.com/author/ She not only has produced a series of novels in a steampunk setting (sensibly using Creative Commons; despite having attended lectures on this, I have been too lazy to get involved with it) her blog has interesting discussion especially on facets of different people in stories, such as on the position of women. She is also a member of the Outer Alliance, which aims to have authors use gay, lesbian and trans-sexual characters in a normalised way in stories. She wrote the Aldersgate Triology: 'The Aldersgate', 'Pilgrim of the Sky' and 'Queen of None' in a single year and is now seeking publication for them. They blend fantasy and steampunk, with a character finding a clockwork world. Clockworkpunk, probably 18th rather than 19th century influenced is an interesting area that I would like to work on in time.
Certainly worth reading is Barron's list of 'gripes' about steampunk writing: http://aldersgatecycle.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/shaking-my-gears-five-steampunk-gripes/ and the contrasts between US and UK steampunk: http://aldersgatecycle.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/american-steampunk-more-whisky-less-tea/ She has also got involved in podcasting her work. Ironically I have made numerous podcasts in my job but never even considered it in my writing.
The third resource I came across soon after I completed 'The Skyborne Corsair' is The Smoking Lounge which has been running since January 2008: http://www.ottens.co.uk/lounge/
In many ways the set-up is like that of Gothic Steam Phantastic which I have mentioned before, though with a US rather than Dutch slant on things. It also covers dieselpunk which I imagine is mid-1950s style technology. There is the usual line in discussion and cultural referencing here. The contributors seem well informed and articulate. Dr. Molinarius is active on here. I probably would be a regular contributor to the The Smoking Lounge if it had not been for the prickly reaction I received when I posted 'The Skyborne Corsair' there. In theory they welcome fiction contributions so I thought a complete novella would go down well. I was very wrong. I was told it should only be submitted a couple of paragraphs at a time to invite comment on. Given that it had 793 paragraphs spread over six chapters, I would still be posting it bit-by-bit now, nine months later. In addition, such a fragmentation of the story would make it difficult for the reader to follow. With such a vigorously petty attitude prevailing, there seemed no point in participating further and I immediately distanced myself from the site. However, others are likely to find it of interest, just make sure if you comment or contribute you tread carefully so as not to provoke the ire of the site moderators.
This is just a sample of a few sites I have come across that you might not have noticed. I am always on the hunt for more, and in particular an active steampunk-focused site where you can contribute and discuss without fear of being patronised.
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Jess Nevins's Steampunk Generations
When writing about the Frank Reade steampunk stories of the 19th century recently I mentioned a writer Jess Nevins (a man) who has some excellent webpages about steampunk sources. He wrote the 'Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana' (2005) the bulk of which seems to be online. He is an academic at Sam Houston State University and he is a leading annotator of steampunk works and has also collaborated with Alan Moore. He is incredibly knowledgeable about 'Edisonades' comic-book stories written for young people in the 19th century, including the Frank Reade stories, which focus on using steampunk inventions on the frontier of the American West and once that had been conquered fully by the end of the 19th century how this strand moved into modern science fiction. He rightly teases out the difference between the strand for young readers and that focused more at adults such as from Verne and Wells, whilst recognising a great deal of crossover between the two especially in terms of technology.
To some degree, though Nevins highlights the difference between the youthful and adult strands and shows the heavy American focus of the former, this does tend to lead him to overlook the difference in culture between Europe and the USA. It was apparent in the 19th century and is apparent today in contemporary movies. The USA has an enduring enthusiasm and a belief in technology. Even in post-apocalyptic scenarios there is a far more positive slant, the sense that it will be like the World after the Flood and a better society will rise from the ashes, whereas in Europe to coin a phrase: 'we're doomed' was more the slant. This may be because of the experience of warfare in the last two centuries. Even in the USA's worst war, the American Civil War, you could always escape by fleeing West or into the wilderness, as seen at the end of Ang Lee's wonderful 'Ride with the Devil' (1999). In Europe you had to live among the ruins and try to put back together what had been there before, from the Napoleonic Wars, the First and Second World Wars have all ravaged Europe with the latest technology. I believe we are still conscious of that difference and unsurprisingly it is reflected in popular culture. Hence the work of Verne and Wells is more uncertain and more morally ambivalent than was the case with American equivalents.
This was one reason why the Cyberpunk stories of the 1980s had such an impact. William Gibson who is seen as the father of the genre is a very 'clunky' writer you can see his plots moving slowly into place. However, he had a good technological imagination, though even there you could argue he grew out of the foundations laid by Walter Jon Williams. What shook up the USA in particular is that Gibson dared show that technology and large corporations could be bad at a time when 'greed is good' was the slogan. He seemed a heretic, a revolutionary even. Of course, to some degree he was only reflecting the experience of the bulk of the USA's population in the world of the 1980s, not benefiting at all from the fast economy and instead living in decaying urban settings. Gibson was not a writer of social problems, but he was awake enough to know that they were not going to improve even with new shiny technology. To some degree 'The Difference Engine' (1990) written by Gibson and Bruce Sterling (a far stronger novelist of many genres) marked the end of Cyberpunk as a fad. It showed that technology had caused problems no matter what the century.
Anyway, the reason why I decided to come back to Nevins is because I was recently given 'Steampunk' ed. by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (2008) a collection of steampunk authors. Nevins has an essay in the front of the anthology, which covers much of what he has written about the Edisonades. However, he then puts forward a perspective which I have more problems with and am going to focus on in this posting. He sees two 'generations' of steampunk writing. The first beginning in the 1960s, notably with 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' by Ronald W. Clark (1967) which is about the development of an atomic bomb in the 1850s. He then sees 'The Warlord of the Air' by Michael Moorcock (1971) as the next key milestone in the post-1914 steampunk genre. He sees the ending of the 'first generation' of steampunk coming with 'The Difference Engine' in 1990, which most people consider to be the start of the steampunk genre of the late 20th century. Nevins's complaint is that the 'second generation' of steampunk fiction has lost the critical, self-reflective edge of the first generation and as such is falling back into the overly positive, even bigoted Edisonade genre. To see such a sharp division, to me, is heavily flawed and I will explain why. In addition, I will argue why his so-called second generation of steampunk is not as poor in its viewpoints as he makes out.
Two books do not make a genre and to some degree it is wrong to see Clark's and Moorcock's books as being part of an ongoing evolution. Both men wrote for their own reasons. Clark's novel is very much of the age of nuclear war. Many of the issues he tackled about the use of nuclear weapons and the danger of radiation were as current to 1960s readers as climate change is to us today. People find 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' staid and that is because Clark wrote it in the style of Victorian accounts of conquering empire. He is a good pastiche of that style, which I imagine Clark had read. It shows that as a superpower the British would have faced similar challenges to the USA and USSR were at the time with their nuclear weapons. The testing of the bomb causes biological damage and the bomb cannot be used effectively either against a great power, Russia or against African tribespeople. The novel may have steampunk wrappings but it is a 1960s novel written in a style that Clark and many of his original readers would have been very familiar with.
Michael Moorcock is a force unto himself. He has written scores of novels over a career now stretching over 50 years. He has a vast over-arching view of his 'multiverse' and so many of his different characters appear in different novels as if all woven together in a spider's web. Counter-factual has always been a large element of Moorcock's writing, in some books, just a page outlines some particular twist in history. However, Moorcock is also custodian of a great deal of the history of imaginative fiction. This is shown very clearly by his two anthologies of Victorian/Edwardian 'science fiction': 'Before Armageddon' (1975) and 'England Invaded' (1977) and his non-fiction analysis of the genres, 'Wizardry and Wild Romance' (1987; reissued 2004).
In addition, in his novels Moorcock is unapologetic about his fascination for other writers' work. In 'The Warlord of the Air' and its sequels, the hero is Oswald Bastable, a character from E. Nesbit's 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers' (1898) and its two sequels. By doing this Moorcock established a pattern of using other people's fictional characters in his steampunk novels, something taken to the maximum in Alan Moore's 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. Of other Moorcock novels, 'Gloriana' (1978) is a homage to Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queen' (1590). He has been very influenced by the work of Mervyn Peake (like David Bowie) especially the Gormenghast triology and you can see that in so many of his lonely anti-hero characters, let alone the architecture they walk through. As I have noted before, once MCG supplied the missing piece for me, 'The Warlord of the Air' (and the two other books of the triology, 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981)) are heavily influenced by the work of George Griffith. Of course, interestingly, 'The Land Leviathan' envisages an invasion of the USA by a vast tank, which seems to turn the Reade stories on its head.
As with Clark, we have to think about what times Moorcock was writing in. He was at the cutting edge of science fiction and fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s and in many stories, especially the Jerry Cornelius series, there is a great deal about the influence of drugs and hallucination, topics which are of less interest to writers today than then. This was an era when society and its assumptions were being challenged and Moorcock was not alone in doing this through science fiction writing. He edited 'New Worlds', 1964-71 and 1976-96, and its anthologies, and if you read the 1960s/70s collections today, the obsessions seem as quaint to a modern reader as those of the 1890s. However, at the time they were radical and challenging, even the phrase 'New Worlds' summed up a sense of potential. Moorcock like liberal-left writers of the time, of course, looked at the established system and sought to invert it. He created Elric, an anaemic, amoral, fantasy anti-hero as an antidote to the muscle bound Conan stories. Probably his most famous novel is 'Behold the Man' (1967), still a really fascinating, excellently crafted story that suggests that 'Jesus' was actually a Jewish time traveller from our times who stepped into the sandals of the son of Joseph the carpenter who was mentally subnormal. Moorcock went after every established bastion. He did not discard it, he just encouraged his readers to think about the assumptions they were making.
The thing that marks Moorcock out from his contemporaries in science fiction writing of the time, and funnily is what has led him to endure and be rediscovered, is his almost childlike love of the early imaginative writing. Moorcock started his career editing magazines carrying Tarzan and Sexton Blake stories. As is shown in the excerpt from 'The Warlord of the Air' which is included in 'Steampunk', he loved the vastness, the excitement of what the technology could do, the elegance of airships. He refers in this novel not only to 'The Outlaws of the Air' but also to 'The War in the Air' by H.G. Wells, most notably in the Fei-chi flying motorcycles which also appear in Wells' novel used by Chinese pilots in their attack on the USA. These are featured in the first novel of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' too. Of course Moorcock shows how technology can be used by the revolutionaries as well as by the authorities. Moorcock is taking from a particular strand which was uncommon even when it was produced. In his career Moorcock has been like Griffith, taking imaginative fiction and putting it to the use of socio-political commentary.
So, Nevins complains that the 'punk' has gone out of steampunk. I would argue it had already gone by the time of 'The Difference Engine'. There is nothing radical in there, nothing challenging society, it is about the dangers of addiction to gambling and hope in new technologies. The reason why there might be no 'punk' in contemporary steampunk is that there is no punk in contemporary society. As I have noted recently, even with the global economy collapsing and environmental change, revolutionaries or even simple protestors are pretty thin on the ground. There are probably authors out there challenging society in their writing but they are unlikely to get any further than their blog pages, certainly not into print. I would suggest Nevins is looking in the wrong place for challenging literature these days, he is more likely to find it in the form of electronic zamzidat work.
Another more fruitful area for more radical writing is in graphic novels. This has probably been the case since the advent of 'Watchmen' (1986/7) though to some degree that reflected 1970s sensibilities. I can see why Nevins works with Moore, because the latter is probably the only 'punk' in popular culture, with the 'V for Vendetta' series (1982-8) and in aspects of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' especially the second series recasting 'The War of the Worlds' but also addressing biological warfare and genetic engineering.
Nevins seems to expect all people writing in a genre to challenge the status quo and that never happens. It is not going to happen in historical drama, detective novels, romance, whatever genre you pick, except with a handful of authors. He seems disappointed that steampunk, somehow has not set itself up as a revolutionary genre, and yet what genre is revolutionary especially in the highly culturally conservative times we have been living in since the mid-1970s? Yet, look at a writer such as Stephen Baxter, and say, his 1993 novel 'Anti-Ice' which references Clark's work, especially with the element in the Crimea, but is probably of the more excited, enthusiastic steampunk pattern that Nevins condemns. It might not tackle things the way Clark did, but neither does it subscribe to the racism and western domination theories that 19th century writers did, it could not in our times. There will always be people at the cutting edge of writing and of particular genres, but following on behind them are more mainstream writers who sustain the genre and make a living out of it. Many readers want to relax with a novel, not constantly be challenged. Novels do inform and challenge but they are also entertainment, and that latter type is much more appealing to publishers.
There have been no generations of steampunk, just different writers at different phases of their careers going in and out of a particular genre. The only generations I see are 1860s-1910s and 1960s-now and even then this might be stretching both periods a little. Two novels does not make a genre as I say, because there are always writers who step outside the currents in writing and Moorcock has always sought to do that whilst simultaneously grounding himself in work he loves. Nevins, I advise, to stop whining about the missing 'punk' especially when the society this work is appearing in, totally lacks such critiques itself. Look for good quality writing and accept, as with all fiction, it reflects the context from which it comes.
To some degree, though Nevins highlights the difference between the youthful and adult strands and shows the heavy American focus of the former, this does tend to lead him to overlook the difference in culture between Europe and the USA. It was apparent in the 19th century and is apparent today in contemporary movies. The USA has an enduring enthusiasm and a belief in technology. Even in post-apocalyptic scenarios there is a far more positive slant, the sense that it will be like the World after the Flood and a better society will rise from the ashes, whereas in Europe to coin a phrase: 'we're doomed' was more the slant. This may be because of the experience of warfare in the last two centuries. Even in the USA's worst war, the American Civil War, you could always escape by fleeing West or into the wilderness, as seen at the end of Ang Lee's wonderful 'Ride with the Devil' (1999). In Europe you had to live among the ruins and try to put back together what had been there before, from the Napoleonic Wars, the First and Second World Wars have all ravaged Europe with the latest technology. I believe we are still conscious of that difference and unsurprisingly it is reflected in popular culture. Hence the work of Verne and Wells is more uncertain and more morally ambivalent than was the case with American equivalents.
This was one reason why the Cyberpunk stories of the 1980s had such an impact. William Gibson who is seen as the father of the genre is a very 'clunky' writer you can see his plots moving slowly into place. However, he had a good technological imagination, though even there you could argue he grew out of the foundations laid by Walter Jon Williams. What shook up the USA in particular is that Gibson dared show that technology and large corporations could be bad at a time when 'greed is good' was the slogan. He seemed a heretic, a revolutionary even. Of course, to some degree he was only reflecting the experience of the bulk of the USA's population in the world of the 1980s, not benefiting at all from the fast economy and instead living in decaying urban settings. Gibson was not a writer of social problems, but he was awake enough to know that they were not going to improve even with new shiny technology. To some degree 'The Difference Engine' (1990) written by Gibson and Bruce Sterling (a far stronger novelist of many genres) marked the end of Cyberpunk as a fad. It showed that technology had caused problems no matter what the century.
Anyway, the reason why I decided to come back to Nevins is because I was recently given 'Steampunk' ed. by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (2008) a collection of steampunk authors. Nevins has an essay in the front of the anthology, which covers much of what he has written about the Edisonades. However, he then puts forward a perspective which I have more problems with and am going to focus on in this posting. He sees two 'generations' of steampunk writing. The first beginning in the 1960s, notably with 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' by Ronald W. Clark (1967) which is about the development of an atomic bomb in the 1850s. He then sees 'The Warlord of the Air' by Michael Moorcock (1971) as the next key milestone in the post-1914 steampunk genre. He sees the ending of the 'first generation' of steampunk coming with 'The Difference Engine' in 1990, which most people consider to be the start of the steampunk genre of the late 20th century. Nevins's complaint is that the 'second generation' of steampunk fiction has lost the critical, self-reflective edge of the first generation and as such is falling back into the overly positive, even bigoted Edisonade genre. To see such a sharp division, to me, is heavily flawed and I will explain why. In addition, I will argue why his so-called second generation of steampunk is not as poor in its viewpoints as he makes out.
Two books do not make a genre and to some degree it is wrong to see Clark's and Moorcock's books as being part of an ongoing evolution. Both men wrote for their own reasons. Clark's novel is very much of the age of nuclear war. Many of the issues he tackled about the use of nuclear weapons and the danger of radiation were as current to 1960s readers as climate change is to us today. People find 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' staid and that is because Clark wrote it in the style of Victorian accounts of conquering empire. He is a good pastiche of that style, which I imagine Clark had read. It shows that as a superpower the British would have faced similar challenges to the USA and USSR were at the time with their nuclear weapons. The testing of the bomb causes biological damage and the bomb cannot be used effectively either against a great power, Russia or against African tribespeople. The novel may have steampunk wrappings but it is a 1960s novel written in a style that Clark and many of his original readers would have been very familiar with.
Michael Moorcock is a force unto himself. He has written scores of novels over a career now stretching over 50 years. He has a vast over-arching view of his 'multiverse' and so many of his different characters appear in different novels as if all woven together in a spider's web. Counter-factual has always been a large element of Moorcock's writing, in some books, just a page outlines some particular twist in history. However, Moorcock is also custodian of a great deal of the history of imaginative fiction. This is shown very clearly by his two anthologies of Victorian/Edwardian 'science fiction': 'Before Armageddon' (1975) and 'England Invaded' (1977) and his non-fiction analysis of the genres, 'Wizardry and Wild Romance' (1987; reissued 2004).
In addition, in his novels Moorcock is unapologetic about his fascination for other writers' work. In 'The Warlord of the Air' and its sequels, the hero is Oswald Bastable, a character from E. Nesbit's 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers' (1898) and its two sequels. By doing this Moorcock established a pattern of using other people's fictional characters in his steampunk novels, something taken to the maximum in Alan Moore's 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. Of other Moorcock novels, 'Gloriana' (1978) is a homage to Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queen' (1590). He has been very influenced by the work of Mervyn Peake (like David Bowie) especially the Gormenghast triology and you can see that in so many of his lonely anti-hero characters, let alone the architecture they walk through. As I have noted before, once MCG supplied the missing piece for me, 'The Warlord of the Air' (and the two other books of the triology, 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981)) are heavily influenced by the work of George Griffith. Of course, interestingly, 'The Land Leviathan' envisages an invasion of the USA by a vast tank, which seems to turn the Reade stories on its head.
As with Clark, we have to think about what times Moorcock was writing in. He was at the cutting edge of science fiction and fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s and in many stories, especially the Jerry Cornelius series, there is a great deal about the influence of drugs and hallucination, topics which are of less interest to writers today than then. This was an era when society and its assumptions were being challenged and Moorcock was not alone in doing this through science fiction writing. He edited 'New Worlds', 1964-71 and 1976-96, and its anthologies, and if you read the 1960s/70s collections today, the obsessions seem as quaint to a modern reader as those of the 1890s. However, at the time they were radical and challenging, even the phrase 'New Worlds' summed up a sense of potential. Moorcock like liberal-left writers of the time, of course, looked at the established system and sought to invert it. He created Elric, an anaemic, amoral, fantasy anti-hero as an antidote to the muscle bound Conan stories. Probably his most famous novel is 'Behold the Man' (1967), still a really fascinating, excellently crafted story that suggests that 'Jesus' was actually a Jewish time traveller from our times who stepped into the sandals of the son of Joseph the carpenter who was mentally subnormal. Moorcock went after every established bastion. He did not discard it, he just encouraged his readers to think about the assumptions they were making.
The thing that marks Moorcock out from his contemporaries in science fiction writing of the time, and funnily is what has led him to endure and be rediscovered, is his almost childlike love of the early imaginative writing. Moorcock started his career editing magazines carrying Tarzan and Sexton Blake stories. As is shown in the excerpt from 'The Warlord of the Air' which is included in 'Steampunk', he loved the vastness, the excitement of what the technology could do, the elegance of airships. He refers in this novel not only to 'The Outlaws of the Air' but also to 'The War in the Air' by H.G. Wells, most notably in the Fei-chi flying motorcycles which also appear in Wells' novel used by Chinese pilots in their attack on the USA. These are featured in the first novel of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' too. Of course Moorcock shows how technology can be used by the revolutionaries as well as by the authorities. Moorcock is taking from a particular strand which was uncommon even when it was produced. In his career Moorcock has been like Griffith, taking imaginative fiction and putting it to the use of socio-political commentary.
So, Nevins complains that the 'punk' has gone out of steampunk. I would argue it had already gone by the time of 'The Difference Engine'. There is nothing radical in there, nothing challenging society, it is about the dangers of addiction to gambling and hope in new technologies. The reason why there might be no 'punk' in contemporary steampunk is that there is no punk in contemporary society. As I have noted recently, even with the global economy collapsing and environmental change, revolutionaries or even simple protestors are pretty thin on the ground. There are probably authors out there challenging society in their writing but they are unlikely to get any further than their blog pages, certainly not into print. I would suggest Nevins is looking in the wrong place for challenging literature these days, he is more likely to find it in the form of electronic zamzidat work.
Another more fruitful area for more radical writing is in graphic novels. This has probably been the case since the advent of 'Watchmen' (1986/7) though to some degree that reflected 1970s sensibilities. I can see why Nevins works with Moore, because the latter is probably the only 'punk' in popular culture, with the 'V for Vendetta' series (1982-8) and in aspects of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' especially the second series recasting 'The War of the Worlds' but also addressing biological warfare and genetic engineering.
Nevins seems to expect all people writing in a genre to challenge the status quo and that never happens. It is not going to happen in historical drama, detective novels, romance, whatever genre you pick, except with a handful of authors. He seems disappointed that steampunk, somehow has not set itself up as a revolutionary genre, and yet what genre is revolutionary especially in the highly culturally conservative times we have been living in since the mid-1970s? Yet, look at a writer such as Stephen Baxter, and say, his 1993 novel 'Anti-Ice' which references Clark's work, especially with the element in the Crimea, but is probably of the more excited, enthusiastic steampunk pattern that Nevins condemns. It might not tackle things the way Clark did, but neither does it subscribe to the racism and western domination theories that 19th century writers did, it could not in our times. There will always be people at the cutting edge of writing and of particular genres, but following on behind them are more mainstream writers who sustain the genre and make a living out of it. Many readers want to relax with a novel, not constantly be challenged. Novels do inform and challenge but they are also entertainment, and that latter type is much more appealing to publishers.
There have been no generations of steampunk, just different writers at different phases of their careers going in and out of a particular genre. The only generations I see are 1860s-1910s and 1960s-now and even then this might be stretching both periods a little. Two novels does not make a genre as I say, because there are always writers who step outside the currents in writing and Moorcock has always sought to do that whilst simultaneously grounding himself in work he loves. Nevins, I advise, to stop whining about the missing 'punk' especially when the society this work is appearing in, totally lacks such critiques itself. Look for good quality writing and accept, as with all fiction, it reflects the context from which it comes.
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