There have been a fair number of essays from people who believe that because we enjoy playing with the tropes of Victorian British culture, language, clothing, and technology - we must therefore also buy into everything that accompanied it. This would include colonialism, classism, etc. I personally subscribe to the idea that if we are imagining the 'what-if' aspects of steampunk, we can also imagine that as technology progressed that many people got over their inherent snobbism and allowed some sort of meritocracy to flourish - especially in the specialized fields like temporal physics and theoretical what-have-you. It's all fantasy, folks!
Charles Stross wrote a rather vehement and I thought ill-informed piece on how steampunkers only emulate the highest classes of society and if we were "real steampunks" we would want to dwell more on the dirt, filth, poverty, alienation, etc, that were present in the era we draw our inspriation from. Well, first off - there are a lot of people who do enjoy exploring those tropes within the context of steampunk.
But there is also an aspect of steampunk that focuses on the "maker" aesthetic - the idea that objects should be beautiful as well as functional. In many ways this is seen as a reaction to our current "black plastic box" technology - no one really understands exactly how it works, and when it stops working you just buy another one.
But personally, for me, I enjoy steampunk as fantasy and escapism. People don't go to the renaissance faires to see human waste running along the street, beggars with suppurating sores or missing limbs, get food poisoning, or smell people who didn't bathe or wash most of their clothing very often. I don't read/watch/play steampunk to focus on how messed-up Victorian society really was - I want to focus on what it could have become.
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Charles Stross wrote a rather vehement and I thought ill-informed piece on how steampunkers only emulate the highest classes of society and if we were "real steampunks" we would want to dwell more on the dirt, filth, poverty, alienation, etc, that were present in the era we draw our inspriation from. Well, first off - there are a lot of people who do enjoy exploring those tropes within the context of steampunk.
But there is also an aspect of steampunk that focuses on the "maker" aesthetic - the idea that objects should be beautiful as well as functional. In many ways this is seen as a reaction to our current "black plastic box" technology - no one really understands exactly how it works, and when it stops working you just buy another one.
But personally, for me, I enjoy steampunk as fantasy and escapism. People don't go to the renaissance faires to see human waste running along the street, beggars with suppurating sores or missing limbs, get food poisoning, or smell people who didn't bathe or wash most of their clothing very often. I don't read/watch/play steampunk to focus on how messed-up Victorian society really was - I want to focus on what it could have become.