In Praise of Steampunk

Last week, a group of steampunk aficionados gathered at a mall in my area to ride a carousel. Mall security didn’t know what to make of them and they were inexplicably asked to leave.

I happen to have seen their earlier gathering at the Seaport Village carousel- I was at there with my family after having taken the kids to talk to Santa nearby. The group was in no way threatening. Their costumes were inventive, varied, and no doubt looked a bit odd to anyone not familiar with steampunk, but they were not aggressive or threatening, and I struggle to understand how the group could have been seen as a risk. In fact, my young daughter was delighted to learn that adults sometimes dress in costumes just because it is fun. I do understand, though, why the group made the security guards look twice.

Not that long ago, I would have been just as puzzled by the group and their almost-familiar dress as the mall guards were. Eventually, I started hearing about steampunk on some of the online sites I frequent, and developed a fuzzy idea of what it is. Recently, I finally read some. I downloaded Lindsay Buroker’s Flash Gold on a whim, and I loved it. The plot in Flash Gold provides a rollicking good time, but beyond that, I loved the familiar but different world in which it took place, not just because it was fun (and it was!) but because it taught me something about what I take for granted in my world. The differences in the steampunk world help me see the real world more clearly, much like traveling to a different country highlights certain aspects of my home country: I see them more clearly for their absence in the new locale. To me, this ability to make me look twice and see the familiar in a different way is one of the best properties of fiction. If a piece of fiction fails to give me at least one new glimmer of insight, I am disappointed, even if it had a diverting story and fine writing.

Any genre can deliver insights- one of the reasons I enjoyed Mark Ernest Pothier’s The First Light of Evening is that it contained several, even though it is on the surface a simple story about a man who starts dating again after a long marriage ends. Steampunk, though, seems almost perfectly positioned to deliver those startling flashes of insight, since the author gets to choose which aspects of our modern world to leave out or transmute in her invented world. I’ve now finished Buroker’s Flash Gold Chronicles series, and will certainly be trying some more steampunk soon- no matter what the mall guards in my city think of it.