Steampunk in the News- what the papers say...

[Sludge Van Diesel]

Surrey Convivial made the local papers again

http://www.surreycomet.co.uk/news/13623242.Tea_duelling_hits_New_Malden_pub_for_Steampunk_festival/?ref=mr&lp=8

[Clym Angus]

Oh look! All my chainmaille! JOY! 

[GCCC]

Is there anyone who was in attendance who could tell me more about this piece?


http://bumpandthumper.wix.com/steampunkconvivials#!1964976_10152264744234134_1083874790_n.jpg/zoom/mainPage/image1oyo

[von Corax]

If you mean the tripod in front, that's one of Herr Döktor's pieces. Later today I'll track down the build thread if someone doesn't beat me to it.

[Rockula]

If you mean the tripod in front, that's one of Herr Döktor's pieces. Later today I'll track down the build thread if someone doesn't beat me to it.

And if he means the French piece behind that's the lovely Cecile Dubois (a.k.a. Morbidfrog).
She is also beautifully constructed. 

[GCCC]

If you mean the tripod in front, that's one of Herr Döktor's pieces. Later today I'll track down the build thread if someone doesn't beat me to it.

Thanks!

And if he means the French piece behind that's the lovely Cecile Dubois (a.k.a. Morbidfrog).
She is also beautifully constructed.  

Y'know, I had thought of re-editing that post after I'd hit the button, but then...

[von Corax]

If you mean the tripod in front, that's one of Herr Döktor's pieces. Later today I'll track down the build thread if someone doesn't beat me to it.

Found the thread: Three Legs are better than Two.

[GCCC]

Thanks, again. I have it bookmarked so I can read it later.

[Colonel Hawthorne]

The New Zealand Herald's website today:

http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11621865

Perhaps the paper version tomorrow.  Who can say?

[Colonel Hawthorne]

In which a Guinness World Record is broken.

It was a somewhat stressful process.  Anyone who's tried to organise even one other steampunk will appreciate that herding cats just isn't in it, but try getting 228 of them (including oneself) to pass in a relatively orderly fashion through an assessment and counting process!  But we did it and I can relax, at least until somebody takes it off us and we have to do it all again.

[Colonel Hawthorne]

A nice writeup on Oamaru, the home of New Zealand steampunk, in The Guardian.

[Prof. Cecily]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Well done!

I remain yours,
Prof. Cecily

[von Corax]

From OrilliaMatters.com, a nice write-up on the annual Coldwater (Ontario) Steampunk Festival this past weekend.

[von Corax]

The design web site Modus recently (Oct. 3) posted an article entitled What Ever Happened to Steampunk? featuring excerpts from an interview with Jake von Slatt.

[J. Wilhelm]

The design web site Modus recently (Oct. 3) posted an article entitled What Ever Happened to Steampunk? featuring excerpts from an interview with Jake von Slatt.

All from the perspective of makers and design aficionados. Not one word about Steampunk as a literary genre. Plus Cyberpunk is meant to be a dystopian near future, not merely scientific materialisation.

[rovingjack]

as a steampunk, a cyber punk and a maker, this seems to be less about any of the actual things it preports to be about and more about art and halloween costume themes shifting in the consciousness with the moving fad population.

in 3 years they will be talking about the fall of cyberpunk revival, unaware that it's first population still exists from the 80s, can and has associated with and intermixed with steampunk, and will persist in many ways for decades to come. Not to even discuss the music, philosophy and skills discussed and developed within the movement over the years and constantly growing and evolving.

the article seems focused on the aesthetic and popularity of each of these, and organize them linearly like the old illustration of evolution from monkey to man. Not seeming to ask about the common root of all of them and how they compliment each other.

Makers, Steampunks, and Cyberpunks are ultimately about human relationships and cultural exeriences with regard to technology in general and it'social, political and philisophical implications. Often demonstrating the double edged nature of a tech.

Each of these movements ultimately show cases a set of people who roll up their sleeves and  get up to their elbows in the tech whch inspires the genre. It's not the lawyers, or the grocers stock boy that anyone notes in any of those settings; though those people likely outnumber the actual focus characters that people design as personas, play in games and write books and songs about. The people the genre fiction is about are the ones on the edges of the social masses, who chose to pick up the double edged sword and wield it. they are students and scholars of the machine in which we are all cogs.

Cyberpunk is network, digital and information tech, steampunk is the chemical, combustion and mechanical, and makers very often are the material scientists, electronics  and engineers.

that doesn't come and go with fashion trends. The spotlight moves on, but those groups existed before and will exist after the spotlight found them.

[Kensington Locke]

The design web site Modus recently (Oct. 3) posted an article entitled What Ever Happened to Steampunk? featuring excerpts from an interview with Jake von Slatt.

All from the perspective of makers and design aficionados. Not one word about Steampunk as a literary genre. Plus Cyberpunk is meant to be a dystopian near future, not merely scientific materialisation.

Agreed.  Considering steampunk in particular seems to have risen from literary first.  I know I don't tend to think as much about Steampunk in book form, and I'm a writer.  The garb and making and imagery tend to dominate my thinking on the subject. But that's not the whole picture.

Nor is steampunk itself dead.  I got into it late, after it died.  In a month, I'm going to Steampunk November up by Dallas.  It's in its ninth year.  Growing as always.  Nobody told them Steampunk died.

[Ottens]

I think blaming the iPhone is silly, but I don't think steampunk is doing fine either. In case you missed it, I wrote a story in April titled "Who Killed Steampunk?" in which I speculate on the causes.

Don't miss the follow-up, in which I respond to a number of criticisms the article generated.

[morozow]

I think blaming the iPhone is silly, but I don't think steampunk is doing fine either. In case you missed it, I wrote a story in April titled "Who Killed Steampunk?" in which I speculate on the causes.

Don't miss the follow-up, in which I respond to a number of criticisms the article generated.

Thank you, very informative.

Here are the problems with social extremists.  These are the problems of society in General, aren't they? Do they affect other sub-cultures?

Or steampunk-came under a lot of pressure because of the connection with victorianism and imperialism?

[Ottens]

I think yes to both.

Even knitting communities can't escape politics, so in part it's just the times. Especially in the US and the UK. We see less politics in hobbies here in Europe, which may have something to do with everything that's going on in American and British politics in the last few years. It's hard, under such circumstances, to neatly separate real life from hobby.

Science-fiction in general has long been very white and male, so it was overdue for some correction.

Steampunk in particular obviously has the baggage of the Victorian era. That goes to everything from gender norms (I recommend reading "How Steampunk Should Be Informed by Feminism") to colonialism.

[J. Wilhelm]

Maybe I'm just being too sanguine about it, but I don't think that Steampunk's situation is the apocalypse that so many make it to be.

I keep getting Tweets from I don't know who, bemoaning the liberal political lean of Steampunk venues online. I also keep hearing that Steampunk is dead, and specifically our forum. We have issues with our forum not attracting people like it used to, and some members are panicking about it.

What I'd like to do is remind people that political leanings in Steampunk are not the result of a Steampunk political movement (as much as some people would like it to be). There have been more attempts than I can count by visitors to the forum trying to convert Steampunk into an Anarchist Survivalist genre, an American 2nd Ammendment Right Wing enclave, and a Far Left Marxist Socialist platform. All attempts have failed. If you see a political slant it is just a mirror of the type of people who are attracted to DIY, arts and crafts, bookworms, history aficionados and the like. Just in the same way that LGBQT tends to be more present in the fine arts such as dance, ballet and fashion industries. That doesn't mean that Steampunk is inherently a political affair. We are very much a mirror of society, and I can count on much more than just a few politically conservative Steampunks who are not only valued members of our community, but I count as my personal friends as well - There. I've said it. There was a time when people of all political orientations could coexist without predicting the end of Steampunk.  

For the 1994567th time, Steampunk started as a literary genre, like it or not. Saying that Steampunk is dead, dying, or extinct makes as much sense as saying that never again will you see a Mystery novel because only Agatha Christie novels were true Mystery novels, or that Cyberpunk died after David Peoples and Hampton Fancher's Blade Runner screenplay adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I promise you that Vampire novels and related media will go down and then up, and so on throughout the decades, and never will you be able to fully stamp down the genre. So will Steampunk be here as well 50 years from now, even if no one dresses up as one or makes gilded Nerf guns in 50 years,  and someone will re-discover the genre, and bring it up into a teenage fad again in the future.

[Kensington Locke]

Good article, and some insights in the comments from around the world.

There's always been this weird argument about Punk and "being political" with regards to steampunk.

On the one hand, it derived from an era known for classism, racism and sexism (and colonialism and imperialism, etc)

On the other, steampunk fiction tends to be about characters crossing those boundaries or set in worlds that didn't have them to such extremes.  All the 'isms were noted as bad and the heroes were against them in most cases.

That IS a political statement to some people, though I'd argue that not being mean to people in general and to people unlike oneself is a moral statement.

That inclusive attitude trends to steampunks in real life.  More of us are OK with people of different fictional and real-life backgrounds and preferences than not.  Including people who glued gears on things.

Using the dictionary definition, this is a liberal attitude.  Because that word has meaning in politics, it tends to be forgotten, yet the foundation of what it means exists in both contexts.

The moment some stodgy attendee points at the cross-dressed rainbow gear-pixie and says, "That's not steampunk and must go." many more of us will stand up and say, "well, we let you in, so if we're gonna say who stays or goes, we'd rather have them here than you."

Resisting bigotry didn't used to be politics. It shouldn't be a Punk thing to do either.  The inclusive attitude that let's us steal the cool parts of Victoriana and hang with diverse people is only political because some very specific people got a lot of hate on their plate and they've been chipping away at everything.

[Rockula]

I would say that Steampunk in the U.K. is in rude health and expanding.

That is all.

[MWBailey]

Steampunk in my view is more of a litmus test of the current political cross-section than an actual reflection of the ascendant political fad of the moment. As Admiral Wilhelm pointed out, people keep trying to politicize Brass Goggles in this or that direction, but because we are (apparently) so very diverse, all attempts to polarize us to one direction have failed.

In the past three years, I have heard that Steampunk is dead, buried, and forgotten, or at the very least, in its death throes. That, and that it was put there by it's own "adherents," among other terms, no less than about four times each year, most recently in a dieselpunk group on Facebook. Usually, I just take the old "not my circus, not my monkeys" approach to that kind of thing, but once in a while I feel compelled to ask myself why they're all so keen on our demise...

[J. Wilhelm]

Steampunk in my view is more of a litmus test of the current political cross-section than an actual reflection of the ascendant political fad of the moment. As Admiral Wilhelm pointed out, people keep trying to politicoze Brass Goggles in this or that direction, but because we are (apparently) so very diverse, all attempts to polarize us to one direction have failed.

In the past three years, I have heard that Steampunk is dead, buried, and forgotten, or at the very least, in its death throes. That, and that it was put there by it's own "adherents," among other terms, no less than about four times each year, most recently in a dieselpunk group on Facebook. Usually, I just take the old "not my circus, not my monkeys" approach to that kind of thing, but once in a while I feel compelled to ask myself why they're all so keen on our demise...

Indeed! Why do they keep pushing the point in Diesel forums? I'm also skeptical about the motives. Is it some sort of schadenfreude? Something more sinister?