I think there are two things about it. The first one is that's it's 20th Century. Sometimes steampunk depresses me a little, because those people in their shiny goggles and lovely clothes and expressions of wonderment are going to have to get to the 20th Century eventually, with its WWI, and its International Style architecture. The 70s happen.... I'm not a fan of alternate history, so there's no help for it.
Still, I find WWI fascinating, and not just because of the aviators. Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series is a really cool fictionalization/steam/dieselpunkification of it. It has a bunch of the bad stuff in it, but it still retains a sense of worth-whileness and optimism and honor that most WWI stories don't manage. It was a human endeavor, fought with new machines and on a huge scale (although, honestly, hasn't anyone ever heard of the Seven-Years-War? That was really the first World War). Poetry came out of WWI.
Then there were the 20s and 30s. The golden age of aviation, an amazing era of exploration and prosperity (well, the 20s) and just a pretty cool time in general, unless you lived in the Weimar Republic... Strangely, there's not a lot of diesel punk in this era (Talespin and Rocketeer being notable exceptions, although the Rocketeer edges into WWII)
Freaking WWII. Now, I also, find WWII terribly interesting, but overdone. The History Channel, back when they showed history programs, knew of no other wars, and neither do game designers. Or diesel punk fans. My other problem with diesel punk is the fans. They are far more nitpicky than your typical steampunk, going on and on about this and that uniform and tank and gun and whatever. That's all well and good (I will geek out about military hardware all day long) but they ought to be nice about it, like steampunks. Where a steampunk will say "Ooh! What's that? That's awesome! Did you make it up? It's REAL? To wikipedia!" a diesel punk will be more like "They didn't have that yet."
That's the whole point of whatever punk! You cram cool shiny things together and try to figure out how they would work. It's supposed to be fun.
With some very well-done exceptions (most of which are not WWII settings), it seems like a lot of diesel punk is just WWII with more metal, a darker setting O_O and less human spirit. Where steampunk magnifies the heroic and creative person in an era that stood a chance of overshadowing people, diesel punk grinds and mechanizes the individual, rather than telling their stories.
It's all this:
and none of this.
No climbing Pointe du Hoc, no Audie Murphy, no Battle of Britain. Just CG models of extra big tanks, guys in gas masks, and hot SS dominatrices. Now, I know the SS had the snazziest uniforms in the war, and we all know how I feel about jodhpurs, but come on! Poetry came out of WWII too, but I'll save that for later.
Here's the example of nitpicking that prompted this post, a comment on my Talespin AMV, which I had described offhandedly as "baby's first steampunk". The comment was this (caps in the original):
Talespin is DIESEL PUNK as its defined using 30s era equivalent technology, clothing, and terminology. Most notable are Internal Combustion engines and Vacuum tube based electronic technology.Sure, technically that's true. But who cares? Apparently I do, since I was annoyed enough to write a whole post about it. Anyway, "baby's first diesel punk" doesn't sound as good, and is not as understandable to most people. Maybe that's why diesel punk fans have a chip on their shoulder. They want to get out from under a genre that is all mushy and vague and anything-goes.
While we're over analyzing a cartoon, I might point out that Don Karnage's airship is like the one in Master of the World, which is Jules Verne. At 0:18 in the video you can see the steam engines on the side propellers, and they never specify what powers the upward-pointing rotors. I always figured it was either a later edition he added using piston engines, or else they run off the steam engines too, either using an electric turbine, or a simple belt drive. In the show, the Iron Vulture doesn't even make a typical airship noise (droning propellers) but rather the chugging of a steam engine. Many of his crew also wear older clothes - top hats, for example. He's a bit of a throwback in the setting of the story. The awesome level of detail Disney put into the show means you actually can tell how the tech works, and the pirates, at least, are still a little steampunk.
Is that the point of my video? No. the point is that Talespin is awesome, and Abney Park is awesome.
Maybe Mr. Diesel Punk nitpicker should Google-search when the Internal Combustion Engine was invented. Here's a hint: the year before the US Civil War. Or in other words, about 30 years before the era involved in most steampunk.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, vacuum-tube electronics were first pioneered by Edison, although (Tesla could've called this one) he didn't understand the underlying physics. The first vacuum-tubes were used in radio in 1906, which is well inside the steampunk purview.
I basically do rocketpunk, except not deliberately invoking nostalgia for the Heinlein era the way it does. (It's sad that hard SF had to re-invent itself as a nostalgiapunk subgenre; most of the people who say otherwise will usually demonstrate, in a paragraph or two, that they're not qualified to have an opinion).
While I like the Googie/Populuxe aesthetic that usually gets called Raygun Gothic, the pulp dreck most people associate with the term makes Firefly look like a show for grownups. However, the iPod/Pad and other Apple products are basically a modernization of that aesthetic, without descending into kitsch, that I think writers would do well to keep in mind when designing future technology.