Aesthetic

So I’ve just read a steampunk novel, and now I’m going to get all grumpy on its ass.

The book had nearly everything you might expect to find in a steampunk novel.  Zeppelins.  Goggles.  Weird pseudo-Vernian inventions.  Intrepid explorers.

It ha practically everything on the steampunk checklist except the one thing steampunk actually needs: a steampunk aesthetic.

Steampunk isn’t just a collection of tropes.  It’s an aesthetic movement, and if the writer is not some kind of aesthete, the writer is simply going to miss all that.

Steampunk is a form that has transcended its literary origins, and involves the contrast between a realistically-depicted past with bright, gorgeously evoked imaginative weirdness.  A key visualization of this aethetioc might be found in Powers’ Anubis Gates, in which the poet Coleridge, zonked on opium, wanders through a London underworld inhabited by “experiments” disfigured and altered by vivisection, and perceives it as a kind revelation of the workings of his own poetrical imagination.

I don’t write steampunk, but I know the real thing when I see it, and  compare to that scene, what I read was just a faded xerox of a xerox of a xerox.

I want to kick the author in the butt, and tell him to go read some damn Walter Pater or something.

If you’re not an aesthete, don’t write steampunk.  Just don’t.  Because you’re wasting everybody’s time.