The Wikipedia page on the Queen who lent her name to steam-punk begins:
"Queen Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901)," it says on her Wikipedia page, "was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India." The entry continues (I've skipped all the bits about her relations in the royal family): "Her reign of 63 years and seven months, which is longer than that of any other British monarch and the longest of any female monarch in history, is known as the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire."
If we have to boil the Victorians down to their essence, we are left with two ideas: think big technologically and be super pervy.
"Queen Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901)," it says on her Wikipedia page, "was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India." The entry continues (I've skipped all the bits about her relations in the royal family): "Her reign of 63 years and seven months, which is longer than that of any other British monarch and the longest of any female monarch in history, is known as the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire."
If we have to boil the Victorians down to their essence, we are left with two ideas: think big technologically and be super pervy.
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The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
by G.W. Dahlquist
(Viking/Penguin: London, 2006).
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Indians are true but partial heirs to this intellectual tradition. Queen Victoria was the first British monarch to rule South Asia directly. The impact of her administrators, especially, Thomas Babington Macaulay (who did not administrate on her behalf but was no doubt a typical Victorian elder statesman) and James Fitzjames Stephen has been indelible. The fiasco of the rebellion of 1857 resulted in the East India Company's authority to govern the territory of its conquest nullified by the British parliament but nevertheless, Empire was an age where many old certainties were sublimated away. A certain spirit animated it, an age where even convicts punished for gruesome crimes could wash up on foreign shores, amass huge fortunes and buy pardon back home. All you needed to do was think on an industrial scale.
Indians continue
to utilise several laws put into place experimentally by the Victorians, like
Pakistan, Burma and others in South and South East Asia, to provide some
semblance of order to the chaos of their invasion. Reflecting the impulse for
sexual perversion, the Indian Penal Code of 1862 (still in use) makes any
sexual activity other than in the missionary position for procreation within
the four-walls of a marriage a crime. The provision remains firmly in place and
enjoys wide popularity and legitimacy. Tinkering to provide the LGBTI community
a modicum of civil rights by questioning the rationality behind such restricted
interpretation in the Delhi High Court brought loud protests from older men
that India was importing foreign values into her native Victorian society. The
hypocrisy in such attitudes evinces itself in myriad ways
but mostly in innovative and horrific methods of committing violence
against women.
However, as I've
pointed out earlier in Goliath's Slingshot: Atari v. Sports Soo, Indians have
kept only one half of the Victorian ideals and discarded the other: the
fascination for large-scale technology. It is curious to note that two biggest
'scams' that are today loudly moaned and protested about have to do with
telecommunications and coal allocation for power plants that would generate
electricity through steam powered turbines.
Depending on story
attributes, we may classify science fiction for general readers in a few broad
categories: classical, steampunk, cyberpunk, British whimsical and other.
[There should always been an Other in a classification scheme- an old
anthropologist's joke that I just made up].
By classical, we mean
Issac Asimov, Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke and to some extent the works
that preceded them, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.
Contemporary literary science fiction, more or
less, falls into the other remaining categories. Both cyberpunk and steampunk
are visions of dystopia (in academic circles, called 'post-modern') one set in
the future and the other in the past. The term 'steampunk' is now actually
misleading. It is not necessary that the power source for fantastic machinery
depicted in the story be superheated water. The term is akin to a Parsi
surname- descriptive of an origin that does not cover contemporary
circumstances. Steampunk is a parallel past, an arc of heavy industrialisation,
often gone wrong and depicted by characters scuttling in the shadows of the
towers of the elite. It is also a form of sub-culture, comparable to hipsters
or yuppies, where people sometimes dress up or even go about their daily lives
imagining they were born 150 years ago. There continues to be something inexplicably
wonderful about the visual aesthetics of the naked parts of well functioning
clock-work.
G.W. Dahlquist, author of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters trilogy, first earned notoriety as a conspiracy theorist who devoted considerable energy to denying the moon landings. An article entitled 'The End of Publishing' claims that Dahlquist was paid close to a $2 million advance and his publishers couldn't come close to recouping their investment (along with Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and two others). Even so, there are a few distinct things that are very good about this book.
There is no doubt that the publishers, Penguin, made a huge effort to push the boat out on this one. The novel is supplemented, after its end in my paperback copy, by gorgeous art-work and material which is frankly easier to enjoy than the novel itself. Dahlquist's prose is difficult to come to grips with and there is really so much creeping around in the dark, following people in corridors and falling through trap-doors that you can wait through to get to the action. The novel was initially serialised, and is presented through the viewpoint of three protagonists alternately: Miss Temple described inside the jacket as, 'a feisty young woman with corkscrew curls who wishes only to learn why her fiance Roger broke off their engagement', Cardinal Chang, a semi-blind street thug and assassin in a red coat with a burning conscience to match (based, it would appear, on Dahlquist himself) and Dr. Svenson, a chain smoking low-level functionary and medical attendant to an old European royal family. Maybe it doesn't grind this way in serialisation.
G.W. Dahlquist, author of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters trilogy, first earned notoriety as a conspiracy theorist who devoted considerable energy to denying the moon landings. An article entitled 'The End of Publishing' claims that Dahlquist was paid close to a $2 million advance and his publishers couldn't come close to recouping their investment (along with Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and two others). Even so, there are a few distinct things that are very good about this book.
There is no doubt that the publishers, Penguin, made a huge effort to push the boat out on this one. The novel is supplemented, after its end in my paperback copy, by gorgeous art-work and material which is frankly easier to enjoy than the novel itself. Dahlquist's prose is difficult to come to grips with and there is really so much creeping around in the dark, following people in corridors and falling through trap-doors that you can wait through to get to the action. The novel was initially serialised, and is presented through the viewpoint of three protagonists alternately: Miss Temple described inside the jacket as, 'a feisty young woman with corkscrew curls who wishes only to learn why her fiance Roger broke off their engagement', Cardinal Chang, a semi-blind street thug and assassin in a red coat with a burning conscience to match (based, it would appear, on Dahlquist himself) and Dr. Svenson, a chain smoking low-level functionary and medical attendant to an old European royal family. Maybe it doesn't grind this way in serialisation.
Sticking through it, especially before bedtime
as I did, became quite a little thrill. Dreams are an important theme in the
work and there is a dream-like quality the narrative takes on once your brain
adapts to the prose. Soon you look forward to going back to Dahlquist's London
and Mackelburg every night.
The hardest thing to nail down is villains.
Dahlquist, the former conspiracy theorist, presents an excellent conspiracy by
characters drawn from Europe's various power classes, all sharply etched and
memorable, a beautiful but thoroughly ruthless Italian contessa, a rakish
industrialist, a small bald deputy Prime Minister and a hulking scientist in a
fur coat. He's faithful to most tropes of steampunk, lots of descriptions about
mechanical manufacturing processes and a little salacious titillation
throw in gratuitously for his once sheltered female protagonist by
privation and violation (maybe I'm the one being a Victorian here). The best
part of the book is how Dahlquist has been able to scale up the action and the
technology, building to a proper conclusion. I expected the novel to, ahem,
lose steam towards the end but it didn't. What more can you ask of a work that
exemplifies the best traditions of innovation and less admirable aspects of
pretension that this genre embodies?
--
Cyberpunk: Think Gibson's Neuromancer, China
Meiville (who mixes cyber and steam) , Ghost in the Shell, Bladerunner and the Matrix.
[Hat tip to a friend Rohit De, who pointed out the error of classifying Meiville in the above category. Writers like him describe themselves as the "New Weird" and draw a lineage to H.P. Lovecraft. You could say they blend the scale and entropy of punk with the creepy-crawliness of Lovecraft and Poe].
British whimsical: Dr. Who, Douglas Adams
and Jasper Fforde.
Other: Satyajit Ray's Professor Shonku, Hollywood films based on the mono-myth, Shekar Kapur's magnum opus- Mr.
India, Doraemon, Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, Enditharan (or whatever)
and so on.
--
Further reading:
The other parts of this trilogy, The Dark Volume and the
Chemickal Marriage.
Lytton Strachey’s Emminent Victorians (1918): God knows why I read it but his portrayal
of Florence Nightingale is quite interesting.
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