As steampunk evolved through the 2000s, its politics and vision of history did, too. In a widely circulated 2010 blog entry, science-fiction author Charles Stross wisecracked that steampunk “is nothing more than what happens when goths discover brown”—a memorable turn of phrase—but also railed against what he called “the totalitarian urge embedded in the steampunk nostalgia trip.” Yet when he wrote, Stross was surely aware that steampunk had been maturing into a subculture with a more explicitly progressive political edge than ever before. Especially since the radical collective Catastrophone Orchestra founded Steampunk Magazine in 2007, steampunk had increasingly accentuated its multicultural, postcolonial, and anticonsumerist dimensions. So although there are certainly some apolitical “fellow travelers,” steampunks are not Victorian equivalents to Civil War reenactors. Instead, it is more accurate—and even definitional—to regard steampunks as reimagining the past and its speculations about possible futures in order to envision a different present and better future from today’s perspective. Even John Clute, the eminent literary critic of speculative fiction who expressed reservations about the genre and its associated subculture, acknowledged these complexities when he wrote that “the link between steampunk and history is a dialectic; it repudiates.”
This subtlety may be lost on historians. Steampunk’s obviously Victorian visual cues superficially evoke the era’s imperialism, racism, and sexism, as well as an arguably naïve fascination with technology. Some historians, then, might also infer in steampunk an innately positivist conception of history. But this would elide the degree to which its most committed practitioners consider it a form of technological disruption and political protest. Questioning “Progress,” especially as subsumed under the supposedly neutral umbrella of science and technology, is precisely what the editors of Steampunk Magazine had in mind when they declared in their inaugural issue that they were “colonizing the past so we can dream the future.” Even Verne and Wells, despite their racist and imperialist trappings, crafted cautionary tales about the hubris of technological mastery. Moreover, criticisms of steampunks’ ostensible positivism also brush over their highly intentional juxtapositions of sartorial “chronotopes”—symbolic representations of time and space used to craft alternate identities in the context of their communities and in disputatious engagement with the world around them.
From pachucos and beatniks to punk rock and goth, 20th-century subcultures offered many opportunities to narrate history from the margins. But in 21st-century hypercapitalism, with the dominance of internet-based global media, such phenomena have become shorter-lived and their trajectories more diffuse. While it is difficult to know whether steampunk has already crested as a subculture, it has certainly demonstrated long-term mutability and persistence. It will probably continue to suggest many questions in various scholarly and political contexts—for literary critics, for feminists, and for postcolonial and queer theorists, among others. But historians should also take steampunk more seriously than they have thus far. If nothing else, it may help them evaluate the late Hayden White’s lament that, under postmodern conditions, “a virtual past is the best we can hope for.”m.