Vintage Tomorrows

People constantly ask me, what is steampunk?

It's stories and stuff -- movies, pictures, objects.

That draws its inspiration

from the science fiction of the 19th century.

Based around a fantasticated Victoriana.

Looking back to look forward again and say, but what if?

It's not a historical movement; it's an anachronistic movement.

You get the fantasy stuff, and you get the science fiction stuff,

and it comes together, and it's made of awesome!

I would call it the crossroads of technology and romance.

There's adventure, there's excitement.

You break away from the prim and the proper

and the straight and the narrow

and you end up going just a little bit wild.

Things are on fire. Things are gushing steam.

Things are powered by zombies and ether.

I mean, that's exciting.

People ask me why I like steampunk.

I'm like, "It's fun!"

I love it when a kid runs up and goes,

"Oh my god, this is steampunk!"

The Society for Creative Anachronism

never seemed half as creative as this.

People will debate really what steampunk is.

People have different visions of it.

But trying to distill it down to something

that you can tell your mom is kind of difficult.

And I think it's been very hard to explain to people

that, yeah, steampunk is political.

I made the claim in an issue of Steampunk Magazine

that steampunk would save the world.

I'm a little bit into blind optimism.

We're causin' a riot.

When you walk down the street in a top hat and spats,

you are causin' a riot.

You're makin' a statement.

We're writing a book on steampunk.

So we're getting a group of steampunks together,

along with a futurist

and a cultural historian

to talk about the future and to talk about

what steampunk can tell us about the future.

We've got representatives from all around

the different portions of steampunk culture,

so everything from literature

You get to fashion to games to music, You get you name it.

And there's a whimsy to it and there's a play with the past

that I think can tell us a lot about how human beings

think about themselves in relationship to their past

and what that takes them toward their future.

In the work that I do in future casting,

it's looking five, ten, fifteen years out,

and so I'm always searching for different visions of the future,

and that's one of the things that I found really interesting

about steampunk because steampunk gives you

a revisionist history of the past.

It's recrafting the past, and that fascinated me.

We've referred to me as an embedded cultural historian

in a sense, and so in some senses

I am becoming a part of this culture increasingly.

In other senses, I'm studying it.

I have questions.

I have questions I want answered.

I am here so that I can build a better future,

so that we can build better technologies for people,

and I want to learn from these experts

to get to, what is the future that we want?

And that's not easy.

In the end, it isn't just about being fans of steampunk.

It isn't just about thinking steampunk's cool.

I think that we can really learn something important

and I think that tonight we could actually do something

that's quite important to think about

what is the future that we want to live in?

And it might take a little bit of digging,

but I think we can get there.

I want to thank you all before we start.

Cheers. Thank you so much.

So just give a sort of a little overview

of sort of what you see as steampunk

but then, more importantly, how did you come to it?

It just connects with so many different things that I love.

Like everyone else at this table,

I love things that are beautiful and beautifully made.

I love things that are both functional and ornamental

and I love the creativity and the imagination

that go into a lot of the things

that people in the steampunk community do.

Steampunk is an odd recursive coining

that echoes cyberpunk.

Certainly ever since cyberpunk,

there's been a kind of, I would say,

a sort of parlor game among geeks,

which is, you know, X punk, Y punk, anything punk.

It's nostalgic cyberpunk.

That's like super interesting.

It's science fiction unshackled

from all that tedious reality stuff.

It is retro futurism.

It is the science fiction of the future that never happened.

It's full of grand and glorious stylish people

doing beautiful, hand-tooled stuff with technology.

Imagine the Victorians flying to the moon

in a hot air balloon.

People want to get into things which will have history,

that have stories that are unique and personal,

and steampunk is all about that, and you can do it

not only with the clothes that you're wearing

but with the ideas that are in your head.

And people usually get pretty excited about it.

It's a fun thought experiment.

When the Victorians were writing this sort of material,

they were like, "Oh, this is great!

"Let's build a gun big enough

"to shoot a bullet at the moon!" You know?

And it's like, sure,

and you know what it's gonna get there? Paste.

But you don't have to deal with that in steampunk.

It has more of a sense of fun, and people like that.

When it comes to steampunk, the appeal is so much broader.

It's about 50 - 50 men and women, and you see people of all ages.

I found science fiction very early on as a kid

by watching television shows like Star Trek.

The idea of mashing up science fiction and robots

with this Wild West aesthetic just blew my mind.

And I love the rivets

and I love the gears and I love the steel

and I actually get kinda kinky about that stuff.

I grew up reading books like James Gurney's Dinotopia,

which is a fantastic example

of just a beautifully designed world

that embraces science fiction

and embraces the Victorian setting.

The actual movement,

I probably started to pay attention to it around 2004,

and at first I had a very heavy disdain for it

because, um, as I summed it up:

"It was just robots with top hats."

And I think I had already become tired of the tropes

that I would later associate with steampunk.

But then I met like-minded artists and craftspeople

and I realized that the only way

that subculture is going to improve

would be if we participated in it.

We did Burning Man in 2008

and we discovered this whole steampunk thing.

I come upon this Victorian house on wheels

and this entire camp of people

dressed up like they came out of the 1890s,

and it just seemed like a nice transition

from one subculture to another subculture.

My husband was into neo-Victorian things and goth,

and I was a little bit into it.

I was mostly a huge science fiction fan.

So I started wearing steampunk

to general science fiction conventions,

and people would come up and go, "Oh, is that steampunk?

I've heard of this. This is cool!"

Probably since the early '80s,

I've been wearing bowler hats and vests,

and I've been making models of airships and things like that,

but it wasn't until a few years back

that I went to my first con

and they had a big steampunk theme,

and I thought, I like this, you know,

and it's right up my alley, and, oh, look, it's got a name.

We started a comic quite a long time ago now,

and we called it "gaslamp fantasy"

because we felt that we didn't quite fit the mold

of what was out there being called steampunk.

So it was already in full swing

by the time we found out about the whole subculture part of it,

and it was a really cool surprise.

Somebody said to me, "Oh, well, you should really

look into steampunk, 'cause I think you'd really

like the aesthetic."

So I started hunting around on the Internet,

and it was a really wonderful environment to share

and we started talking about what would happen

if this became a subculture, hypothetically?

I actually started Steampunk Magazine

in, essentially, a cultural vacuum.

I was only aware of steampunk in this very periphery way.

And what I found right away was that there was actually already

a small and growing community around steampunk.

To me, the fun part was the punk part.

I like the idea of taking history and just twisting it.

It has a pleasingly counterculture aspect to it,

but it's not the kind of angry, antagonistic

kind of counterculture which you often see

in the original punk movements.

We can do this ourselves.

We don't need this handed down to us.

You know, the government or culture, you know, writ large

has nothing for us.

We can go out and find it ourselves.

You find a lot of artists in the movement:

writers, musicians, makers...

What might bring all of these people together, I think,

is a sense of theatricality and of wanting to live