Say a word often enough, and it starts to lose its meaning. Let me demonstrate.
Cyberpunk. Steampunk. Clockpunk. Cavepunk. Farmpunk. Dieselpunk. Fairypunk.1
Kinda like that. Seems to me that there are a whole bunch of people out there slapping the word ‘punk’ on any bloody book they can, and the net effect is that the word itself has lost all of its original meaning.
So what’s that meaning? To answer that properly, I think it’s necessary to go back to original use of the word in modern culture — in music.
Punk2 wanted to change the world. It wanted to undermine the prime institutions of authority. For some punk musicians, this message made for run-ins with all sorts of enforcement arms of said authority: the KGB, the CIA, the IRA, MI6, Margaret Thatcher, or whoever. The lyrics, music and imagery were often about the Establishment — ‘big picture’ politics — but the effect on people was personal; a howling cry against inequality and injustice. Punk was about small people making a difference against or at least breaking free from everything Big; about the autonomy of the individual human soul.
The cyberpunk movement in Sci-fi held onto this ideal in a lot of important ways. Someone who wants to change the world? Check. Undermine the prime institutions of authority? Check. Clashes with authority as a result of these desires and actions? Check. Focus ends up on the effect on people? Check. Small people making a difference against or at least breaking free from everything Big? Check. Autonomy of the human soul? Double-plus check.
Where did the ‘cyber’ part come in? Easy: the tech was the element that enabled the little guy to affect the bigger guy. It levels the playing field — makes the whole personal uprising possible. Yes, sometimes you’d get something ostensibly in that genre that was more about the imaginary-tech-porn, but the good stuff? The stuff we still talk about? That was about the people.3
Steampunk? When I look at the stories with that label (except for a very few early claimants) I see ‘steam’. I don’t see punk. The emphasis is on the trappings of the setting; not class struggle, social revolution, or protagonists who are at odds with authority but who lack social power or influence without the leveling effect of the tech.
Good stories? Sure.
But don’t pretend it should be called punk.
In fact, let’s just not use that word without some kind of intent toward accuracy, because right now, it pretty much gets slapped on any story that can’t dodge fast enough — I heard someone refer to The City & The City as steampunk, which tells me that there was absolutely no thought at all going into assigning that label, as that story (first) contains no trappings of a steam setting and (second) may be the very pinnacle of a punk anti-anthem: a two hundred ninety page love-letter to sticking with the establishment and maintaining the status quo.
Punk? Right now, it’s just this thing you tape to the end of another word to make it sound cooler; shorthand for “hip/weird contemporary fantasy”, when that’s actually a pretty good description already.
Faeriepunk? Farmpunk? Dieselpunk? Stop saying that. You just sound silly.
You’re not punk,4 but honestly? That’s okay.
1 — Of those ‘punk’ words I listed, only cyberpunk didn’t end up with a little red squiggly line under it. The spellchecker knows.
2 — Or what we now imagine punk to have been, the same way we imagine the Wild West a certain way
3 — Of course it was. How could it really be otherwise?
4 — And if you find one that is, let me know in the comments.
The thing to remember about steampunk, and all the other -punks that followed after this floodgate was opened, was that it was initially coined as a joke. K W Jeter suggested it in jest to describe a set of stories that, if we want to be brutally honest, don’t even resemble anything that is today called steampunk.
The most charitable interpretation I’ve encountered thus far is that the -punk suffix applies, not to the characters and themes of the work, but in the creation of the work itself. So when you make a steampunk story, you are punking the steam-tech-driven edisonaide. If you made a princesspunk story, you’d be subverting the tropes of princess stories (you’d probably end up with Brave). But even this, at the end of the day, is a retroactive folk-etymology apology.
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All that said, if you want a punky steampunk game, keep your eyes peeled for Renegade Jennys and Boilerplate Jacks, which fits this bill exactly.
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I misread part of this post and thought “the -punk is not being applied in the musical sense, but the Ashton Kutcher sense.”
I am so disconnected the only image I can think of is Ashton Kutcher taking pictures of steampunks.
Josh Roby´s last [type] ..The Vicious Crucible of the Eburnean Tower
Just so. Except it IS fun.
Which drove me to look up the term on Wikipedia, just to see if there were some discussion about alternate terms (there was not).
Interestingly, though, Jeter’s s coinage of “steampunk” is provided.
Interesting points:
(1) I love the term “gonzo-historical”.
(2) Jeter meant the term to apply to people who were *writing* such stories, and so using the term punk as a noun, not an adjective. Which makes me wonder whether he even intended the connection to “cyberpunk” at all.
A nice compact analysis; thanks for that. I think if more people knew that the ‘gaslamp’ (or similar) label was available we might a) not be having this problem and b) find that writers wanting to make sure they’re writing steamPUNK would try harder with the punk part.
Ehh. Punk didn’t want to change the world, punk wanted to flip off the music establishment.
Second wave, ska, oi!, hardcore – they did all the attempts at world changing.
Punk was gone except for some holdouts (Ramones who were pop in ’78) by 1977
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