Zarpaulus

Writer of sci-fi and horror

Underemployed biologist and creator of the Para-Imperium setting. Currently writing the webcomic "Joanna: Ghost Hunter."


Scampir
@Scampir

Everybody wants to talk about the technology of steampunk but never what fuel is needed to run it. It's coal btw. Might as well call that shit coal-fantasy.


Scampir
@Scampir

many people are replying to this post and stepping into the rake. You are missing the point if you are only focusing on how the technology works. I think you should think about how the facets of coal extraction and pollution are not explored in this branch of sci-fi and ask why. It doesn't matter if the coal-analogue is something else. If it's fuel, then how is it collected and delivered? Who is involved in that process? How is it organized?


JcDent
@JcDent

I want to write a story about corsaits and blimps and adventurers in top hats that doesn't concern itself with colonialism at all, you're fucking mental if you think I'll spare a thought for logistics


Scampir
@Scampir

not logistics per se, more the impacts of massive coal-burning steam engine, the pollution it causes, and the history of how it killed the miners. You want to write a fun blimp adventure then hey, fly at'er. But my critique stands as how steampunk as a narrative body and aesthetic isn't engaging with all of it's source material by imagining a clean industrial revolution.


REP-Resent
@REP-Resent

I think people should take a gander at Bioshock Infinite again, no not to laugh at it (I mean, yes, that too) but specifically to contemplate its whole "Quantum Bubble" mechanism as a jargon tablecloth to cover Magitech. Despite having ostensibly an infinite form of energy and reality bending capabilities, the plot priorities of Bioshock Infinite not only fail to explore the ramifications of such technologies, but it builds up a substantial and ultimately incidental lore basis that frankly didn't have to be there. Wildball elements like the Luteces exist to provide a reason for the plot to be possible, but are otherwise scarcely employed as more than visual gags and vague authorial hints of something greater that never arrives.


Industry is why we are here. I mean that in the very literal sense, nothing online happens without mass scale industry, the international exploitation of labor and resources motivated by capital, and if you glance carefully you'll be quick to note how much of our very rationale for existing is linked to production of goods and services. In its most fundamental form, imagine the Feudal Peasant whose children are born with a startling amount of emphasis on their use as extra laboring hands. Large scale crops don't merely feed the people working the land, they feed the establishment which is constructed from force, arbitrary hierarchy, division of labor, and critically ideological justification.

What is it about the use of a Dirigible that makes it better than a large boat? Some steampunk-adjacent high fantasy settings answer this question by having the world be one of floating islands and infinitely blue skies, others pose the question as an alternative technology of industrial applications advancing along another axis of development because Charles Darwin chose not to go to the Galapagos aboard The Beagle to document peculiar animals and introduce to the Royal Society the prototyped scientific concept of Evolution. Settings like Arcanum blend its industry and traditional Tokien-like fiction together, telling a story of trains that make Wizards sit in the caboose, top hats that can deflect bullets with electrical fields, and yet also dark cults worshipping ancient evils in the shadow of industrialized civilizations that practice 'acceptable' versions of slavery.

To gingerly rub lemon juice and salt into this particular industrial papercut, we are facing a climate crisis which has only escalated over the last 200 years, in which the exponential curve of human populations and carbon-emitting machinery are critically relevant to our continued survival and industry. A mass extinction, quite literally the end times as the fields run fallow in unseasonal drought in some places, while others flood biblically as-if the gods of old abruptly realized small-town Nebraska was the root of human evil. There's so much you can put into a story about blimps powered by [something] and the simple question of 'what is this technology and its ramifications' is not just a side product of your story unless you are ready to simply not explain anything. Have your blimps and limit the technobabble so-as to focus on swashbuckling and theatrics, or put just a few lines down that quickly establish some basic rules of your technology and how that changes the world.

A good McGuffin or piece of Scifi tech shouldn't just be an inert object in the center of the plot, it should warp the world around itself, bending light and dark and twisting our perceptions in tandem. If the dirigible is to be compelling and a dominant vessel clad in Victorian iconography, contemplate what sorry state the Brass and Copper reserves must be in were so many to be a-flight at once. I'll leave off with a final suggestion to review Firefly and it's hasty conclusion via the movie Serenty, which emphasize things like the ship is literally falling apart constantly to present problems that help drive the plot, scoot the characters around, and make everything have that technical grit without needing a direct explanation of every minor industry involved. Knowing that [Kingdom A] produces Iron and charges out the nose for it because everyone else has drained their Iron mines to make Dirigibles could be REALLY COOL.

Also, again, angry gods and unknowable forces of nature really shine here. I wouldn't want to be dangling from a 'bloon in a basket if I was transporting goods through a Hurricane in hopes of making enough to keep the boiler running. I certainly would be questioning the role of man in the struggle against nature if the Hurricane seemed like an antagonistic force angered by my intrusion into its domain. Also you could put pirates in the Hurricane too and say they have a weather machine, who cares! But the existence of one weather machine implies someone figured out a way to make a machine that influences the weather, and that technology should be damn important to understand lest something terrible happen to my top hat covered in whirring gizmos and oiled machines.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Scampir's post:

I got an author very, very mad at me for writing a near-future adventure story and calling it "steampunk" when everything was atomic-energy fueled

didn't wanna listen to me when I demonstrated that nuclear energy is a very expensive way to BOIL WATER

Sounds like that author needs to read the first story Di Filippo's Steampunk Trilogy (1995), which happens to be the original use of the word "steampunk." Without giving too much away, you are exactly correct.

in reply to @Scampir's post:

I thought it was b/c Steampunk (like most ---punk) tends to focus on urban centers where our main characters are unlikely to be involved in the extraction of fuel.

Also: Mortal Engines is very much about how the fuel gets got, I feel like it can't be the only one

But they will be involved in other consequences: the air in Britain alone was so polluted that the Great Smog of London (fuelled by coal) killed people as late as 1950s.
This is as indirect to steampunk as possible (just domestic heaters, not even any fancy technology) but it still killed a lot of people.

They may not be in the coal mines and it's not really necessary to draw a diagram of how the giant armored zeppelin works, but the steampunk stuff I can find anything good to say about - Difference Engine, Golden Compass etc. - are cool because they're grounded in a society that's clearly kept up by a colossal amount of unglamorous sweat and blood and fire even if it's not always happening in the protagonists' direct line of sight, where the author put some thought into why they chose to base their setting around Europe at such a fever pitch of extraction that it was on the precipice of exploding like a overloaded boiler into omnicidal war after war. The imitators who miss all that to just go "wow, gears on tophats!" are so goddamned boring.

one of my settings is a kind of accidentally steampunk one, where advanced technology is a relatively new concept in a world of magic

technology is in opposition to the established order that uses magic for everything

fuel was really important concept for me, and oil and coal simply do not exist in this world (at least as we know it)

through research on this i learned of real life engines that ran on moss and other alternative fuels

it is a sort of Cambrian explosion time period, so there are a lot of competing fuels

in addition to power sources including hydro and windmills and reflective solar arrays

i have been trying to find anybody talking about this for YEARS. i once called it "coalpunk" and somebody asked me quite incredulously if i "know how steam power is generated." when i talk about coalpunk, i'm talking about the 13-year-old boys who don't get to go to school because they're stucking working in the mines next to 40- or 50-year-olds whose bodies have been sacrificed to those same mines. its poor folk rural and urban alike cursing at the sky as a fantastical steam-powered flying machine they will never even get close to flies by with a payload of rich, clean passengers. its the workers who lose life or limb in the literal gears of progress and end up being tossed out onto the street as a minor annoyance to the owning class. it is a different lens through which to view the same kind of technological fantasy!!!

in reply to @Scampir's post:

Oh, I'm with ya, it's just that steampubk used to be famous for ignoring anything political.

Thinking of it, horrible coal smog is like a ready made background feat. Haven't considered coal myself.

in reply to @REP-Resent's post: