The Mythcreant Podcast 463 – What Makes Steampunk Tick
Choo choo, the steam train is leaving the station! Everyone check your top hats and gears, which will serve as your tickets to this podcast. All abooooooooard! This week, we’re talking about steampunk. What is steampunk? Why is steampunk? Can you even have steampunk without airships? Obviously the answer to that last one is “no,” but we have a whole bunch more to talk about!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is…
Chris: …Chris. And…
Oren: …Oren.
Bunny: And I hope you’re wearing a top hat right now. And if you’re not wearing boots, put them on and stick some gears on them, because we’re going to talk about steampunk today.
Chris: Yeah, the key to steampunk is just gluing gears everywhere? On everything?
Oren: Do the gears need to do anything, or can they just be aesthetic gears?
Bunny: No comment. [Oren laughing] But there do need to be gears.
Chris: We need to pretend that they do something, but they don’t actually have to do anything.
Bunny: Yeah, they can clink and rattle a bit. That could be their purpose. Who needs laces when you can tighten up your shoes with gears?
Oren: Yeah, just put a little coal in the little boiler you’ve got in your heel, and yeah, what could go wrong? [general laughter]
Bunny: Put on your shoe, and it’s a nice panning shot up your leg, and it’s going like, “Shhh…chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk.” And it’s the coolest way to put on your shoe ever. It’s like those shoes that have like a goldfish tank in them, but cooler.
Oren: That is one of the unstated, or sometimes directly stated, conceits of steampunk, is that steam technology is way lighter than it actually is.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s kind of gotta be.
Oren: Here’s a big robot with a giant boiler on its back. That thing would collapse under its own weight. Boilers are heavy. [laughing]
Bunny: [stage whisper] Shut up, Oren. Shut up. Stop talking. [laughter]
Oren: That was the part that I found very funny about The Guns Above which is…it’s arguable whether it’s steampunk or not,because it has airships, but its airships are hyper-realistic in how they’re made, except for the fact that they’re powered by a steam engine. There have been steam-powered airships. It’s not completely made up, but they were very limited and immediately abandoned because steam engines are too heavy to make practical airship engines.
Bunny: Yeah, isn’t that the one where they’re very particular about how they have wicker gondolas hanging underneath the airship.
Oren: They have to save every fraction of weight. A big part of the story is that they can’t bring any extra people on board, and they need to know when anyone moves around, because the ship is that sensitive to weight. Admittedly, I’m not an engineer. I haven’t done the math. Maybe they could save enough weight for a steam engine, but I just feel like it would probably be too heavy.
Bunny: It does sound like having a unicycle, then putting a combustion engine on it. [laughter] So I suppose this does raise the interesting question of what is steampunk? Is it an aesthetic, or are there certain tropes and plot requirements? I think it’s both, but a lot of it is aesthetic. Not gonna lie.
Oren: First, I’ll have you know that it should be steam-punk. I see y’all spelling that as one word.
Chris: Steam-what?
Bunny: Punk!
Chris: No dash. That’s an atrocity.
Oren: Look, when it was first coined, supposedly, in a letter by Kevin Wayne Jeter to Locus magazine in 1987, he spelled it steam-punk.
Bunny: Well, they were also spelled cross-words when they were first invented, so…
Chris: Yeah, a lot of compound words started with dashes.
Oren: The line must be drawn here. This far, no further. [laughter]
Bunny: So you have to say “steam”, and then you have to teeter on the edge of it for a loong time, like you’re Dr. Frankenfurter.
Oren: The etymology is generally accepted to be that it’s an evolution of cyberpunk, which, of course, by then, the term cyberpunk was already in circulation. It’s interesting, because cyberpunk, the “punk” part, comes from the fact that these early foundational works of the genre tended to focus on characters who were on the extreme margins of their cybernetic society. Not universally, but enough that that became what the genre was associated with.
Chris: A lot of them were punks. [laughter]
Oren: Yes, they were punks, and that’s where that term came from. But, steampunk never had that, as far as I can tell? Of course, nowadays steampunk and cyberpunk are both primarily aesthetics. You can have a cyberpunk story that’s about punks, or about rich CEOs, and it’s equally cyberpunk either way, but I do find that interesting as an evolution of the term.
Chris: I do think cyberpunk has a bigger legacy of having certain types of plots, but those plots still aren’t essential for it to be cyberpunk. Steampunk, you can argue some plots are common, like exploration plots are popular in steampunk, but it’s clear that the aesthetic is the most important thing.
Bunny: Yeah, and there are certain character archetypes that, you know, some genres don’t have so particularly specific character archetypes. Steampunk definitely has the mad scientist, with lots of wacky inventions and vials bubbling in their labs, and steam hissing out of the corner, and stuff like that.
Oren: And of course, like most genres, steampunk is a collection of associated traits, rather than any single hard-defined group of them. We tend to associate steampunk with Victorian. We tend to associate Victorian fashion and all that. But there’s a lot of very famous steampunk that isn’t Victorian, at all. A lot of Miyazaki movies, for example, we would consider those steampunk, but they don’t have Victorian aesthetics at all. In that case, it’s the steam tech that is the glue that holds them together.
Bunny: That’s probably really Howl, though, right? What other one is there?
Oren: The other ones are Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Bunny: Castle in the Sky seems pretty sci-fi to me, but I guess some of it’s got that brown…
Oren: I mean, the place where they explore is not steampunk. That’s alien robot tech. But the place where they come from is steampunk. The airship pirates have a steampunk ship and Air Destroyer Goliath, the big old government ship that rolls in, that’s very steampunk.
Chris: If Howl’s Moving Castle isn’t Victorian, is there a specific period that it’s supposed to be? It doesn’t look that far from Victorian to me.
Bunny: Howl’s Moving Castle was playing in the background at some point over the summer, and I was doing other things. So I was walking in and out, and watching it when I was in the room. And to me, it seemed kind of World War I, but I could be completely wrong about that.
Oren: I think World War I is roughly accurate. I don’t think it has a specific time period, but if you look at the way they’re dressed, they’re in “old-timey dress”, as far as I can tell. But I wouldn’t categorize anything they’re wearing as specifically Victorian. But granted, I’m not a fashion expert. Maybe a fashion expert would look at it and be like, “Ah, that’s actually completely Victorian. You just don’t know anything about Victorian fashion, you”.
Chris: Maybe they’re just not fancy enough. But you don’t see a lot of corsets, for instance, in Howl’s Moving Castle.
Bunny: There are people with top hats, though.
Oren: There are top hats. And some of the aesthetic of steampunk is just the aesthetic of engineering. If you work around machines, you’re going to expect to see things like goggles, and leather safety equipment, and big gloves, stuff like that. Most of the Miyazaki movies have those, because it would be weird if someone was working in this big steam-powered engine room and was wearing a light sundress. That would just be odd. [laughter]
Chris: So, Oren, can you describe the difference between steampunk and dieselpunk?
Bunny: Oh, I’ve got three more of those, but go ahead.
Oren: Does it go steam, or does it go gasoline, or oil or whatever? They’re very similar. Very often you have stories where they overlap. I think Bunny had some specifics that I thought were interesting.
Bunny: Yeah, so it’s really hard to tell how these intersect. As I was looking around trying to research these–so there’s dieselpunk, which is steampunk, but internal combustion engines, or electricity. So, I don’t know a lot of dieselpunk stories. I think it’s probably less common than steampunk, or at least less well-known. But I would categorize it as kind of grimier, and more 1920s, just from what I’ve seen. And then there’s the two that are closest to steampunk, and I can’t tell what the difference is. One of which is clockpunk, and the other of which is gaslamp fantasy, which is not punk, but it is…
Chris: The only story I know that’s been called gaslamp fantasy is Girl Genius, in which the creators of this comic like to call it gaslamp fantasy. I felt like that was just another name for steampunk.
Oren: Did they make that up? Is that where that term comes from? Because I used to work at Privateer Press, and the people in charge insisted we call it “full metal fantasy”.
Bunny: What?
Oren: Which was just the most absurd…
Chris: [laughing] Full metal fantasy?
Oren: Full metal fantasy.
Bunny: That’s terrible.
Chris: Is that named after Fullmetal Alchemist?
Oren: No, it’s named after nothing.
Bunny: They’re trying to be special…
Oren: As far as I could tell, it was named after branding desires. [laughter] I could be wrong. My deep suspicion–they never told me this, so this is just me guessing–but my deep suspicion was that someone did some market research and found out that steampunk is not popular with the target audience of 18 to 35 year old white male gamers that they were trying to reach. [laughter] And so they were like, we gotta call it something else, guys. But, I don’t know that. I’m not saying that’s actually where it came from. It was just so weird to be told we had to call it “full metal fantasy” when we were talking to customers.
Bunny: No, that’s so bulky. A lot of these are very much splitting hairs. I think gas lamp fantasy… I’ve heard two things called that by now. I think it’s just that there are explicitly magical elements. But Girl Genius doesn’t acknowledge that it’s magic. I mean, it is magic.
Chris: In Girl Genius, you have some people who have the Spark. And that Spark basically makes them wild and chaotic inventors who make contraptions that can do impossible things. But steampunk generally has contraptions that scientifically couldn’t actually do those things. That’s the fantastical element. Girl Genius is only different in that there’s this sort of inborn Spark aspect to it that is much like inborn magic in a lot of stories. But other than that, it just seems like wild or low realism steampunk.
Oren: TV Tropes is claiming that this was specifically coined to describe Girl Genius by its creators. And supposedly, their reasoning is that they were trying to avoid confusion with another comic that was actually called steampunk. And because they wanted to emphasize that this wasn’t any kind of setting where the word “punk” would apply because their characters aren’t punks.
Chris: Yeah, you look at Girl Genius and you’re like, that is a steampunk comic. [Oren laughs] I guess I can’t blame them, since apparently I made up “light stories”.
Bunny: They’re not light stories, they’re “sunshine fantasies”. It’s not a light story unless it comes from the light story region of France. [laughter]
Chris: Otherwise, it’s a sparkling fantasy.
Bunny: Yes, exactly. So, that’s gaslamp fantasy, which I guess is very niche in that it only refers to Girl Genius.
Chris: It’s steampunk. Let’s just be honest, it’s steampunk.
Bunny: It is steampunk. It just is steampunk. Sorry, guys. But then there’s clockpunk, which I’m having trouble squaring because a lot of steampunk also involves clocks, and clocks have gears. But I think the main point there is that it’s not powered by steam? Like, you need to wind it with keys.
Chris: I feel like that’s steampunk without the steam, and people are like, “Hey, this doesn’t really fit.”
Bunny: But it’s like a very similar aesthetic.
Oren: Yeah, it’s similar to dieselpunk in that they’re very similar. And you could easily have a story that is both. But eventually, if you really lean on the clockwork elements and don’t have any steam at all, eventually someone might start to think maybe this needs another name.
Bunny: Yeah, I just feel like I haven’t seen a story that’s pulled that differential enough to merit it.
Chris: I think this is people trying to make genres less chaotic. But I just think genres are inherently chaotic and you should just embrace the chaos. “Steampunk” can refer to a story that has neither steam nor punks.
Bunny: Yeah, punk is just kind of a tack-on by this point.
Chris: I think if we were to go with the meaning of “punk” in genre names, I definitely think it’s an indicator of the aesthetics being important. Similar to “core”, though. [laughing]
Bunny: Oh, no, not the punk versus core again.
Chris: Aren’t they the same thing at this point?
Oren: Technically, we all have to call it “steamcore” now. [laughter]
Chris: Cottagepunk.
Bunny: Maybe you need to call it “lightcore”. No, no, no, that sounds dirty. Never mind.
Chris: [laughing] Oh, no.
Bunny: But yeah, there’s a reason my notes have a whole section which is just like, “What are these other punks? I don’t know.”
Oren: Yeah, similar to, but legally distinct from.
Bunny: Yeah, exactly. The one other one is cattlepunk, which is a weird way to put it, because they might not have cattle. It’s just Wild West steampunk. And apparently, again, according to TV Tropes, this genre, not by that name, but it predates steampunk. I couldn’t really figure out more details on that. But if that’s true, it’s interesting. I’m actually in the middle of my own genre confusion writing a story that’s set in something like the American Southwest and features steampunk-ish technology, but it also does not have cattle. So what do I do?
Chris: Maybe it’s a weird Western.
Bunny: Maybe it is a weird Western.
Chris: So, I was looking up some steampunk stories for this. There’s a lot of things that are, “Is it steampunk?” An example, for instance, is Wild Wild West, which is a Western, but with steampunk technology in it, that people would often call “a weird Western”. But it’s also, I think, appropriate to call it steampunk–unless it’s diesel punk. Does it have steam? Every time, I have to check, “Does this have steam, or gasoline?”
Bunny: I feel like the thing with steam is that steampunk is not so much about steam, as it is about gears.
Chris: Mm hmm. It’s true.
Bunny: It should be gear punk.
Oren: Look, are you telling me that a nuclear submarine isn’t steampunk? [laughter] Because that is a steam-powered vessel right there. The steam is produced by nuclear fission. You don’t tell me that’s not steampunk.
Bunny: Oren, that is radioisotope punk. [general laughter]
Chris: But yeah, if you want, you can call it a weird Western, I guess, or just call it steampunk. It’s fine.
Bunny: It’s not steam powered. It’s powered by an energy source I made up. So I don’t–I guess it’s “made-up punk”, “made-up energy punk”.
Oren: That’s a good one. You should copyright that while there’s still time.
Bunny: “Cattle made-up energy punk”.
Chris: [laughing] Trademark.
Bunny: Copyright trademark.
Oren: Do not steal.
Bunny: [laughing] That’ll sell.
Chris: Okay. So here’s some questions about, “Are these stories steampunk?” [laughing] Because these are things that I saw online listed under steampunk. The Dark Materials trilogy.
Oren: Little bit. It’s a little steampunk, because it’s got airships.
Chris: Isn’t it mostly just a fantasy that’s kind of Victorian-ish era?
Oren: It’s also pretty light on fantasy for most of the book. It’s like alternate history that’s…a little bit magical? Like there’s the daemons. I’m not calling them demons. Quiet you. [laughter] The daemons that they have are the most magical thing about the book for quite a long time. And they don’t actually play a huge role in the story, as weird as that seems. It seems like a setting where everyone has a magic animal following them around would be different. But it’s not. But they use another word for electricity. I noticed that when I reread it recently. I forget what it is. But instead of saying electric, they say something else. They say “galvanic”, or something. Which I think is just a synonym, but not one that is in common usage. And they have a lot of airships. So that feels a little…
Chris: [interjecting] Really? I just didn’t remember the airships. But again, I didn’t finish the series, so…
Oren: Because the good guys don’t have them. They’re bad guys.
Chris: [laughing] Only the bad guys have airships.
Bunny: Way to ruin your airships.
Oren: Well, because it’s a travel story. Right? It’s hard to do a travel story when your main characters can fly. Not impossible. Avatar exists, but…
Chris: And there’s like a couple magic gadgets in it. But altogether it’s not very big on gadgets, which is what I would expect in steampunk. In general.
Oren: I get why it is classified as that. I would not classify it that way. I think if someone is looking for a steampunk story and they picked up The Golden Compass, they would probably be disappointed, like this is probably not what they were looking for.
Bunny: Yeah, I feel like it needs to have some focus on gadgets to be properly steampunk, and those gadgets should have gears in them, I’m just saying.
Oren: It does have the actual golden compass, which does have some gears, so that’s some gearpunk.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s one thing.
Oren: Yeah, but it’s pretty important. It’s pretty central to the story.
Bunny: It’s also not a compass, Oren.
Oren: Yeah, it’s an alethiometer, I’ll have you know.
Bunny: The golden alethiometer.
Chris: Okay, how about Carnival Row?
Oren: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Chris: [surprised] It is? But okay, so it’s fantasy Victorian. Where is the steampunk part in there?
Oren: There’s also airships in Carnival Row.
Chris: So if we have any Victorian setting and you add airships, then it’s steampunk. I just, I feel like the airships aren’t enough.
Oren: The airships are doing a lot of the lifting, you could say. [general laughter]
Chris: I feel like maybe there’s a divide between the pro-airship camp and the neutral airship camp. [laughing]
Oren: You see more of the steampunk elements in the war flashbacks. Not just the airships, but there’s at least somewhat more advanced tech. But not much.
Chris: I just feel like if the story doesn’t have any kind of gadgetry, it doesn’t feel like it qualifies as steampunk to me. It’s just Victorian fantasy.
Bunny: I think this is more gaslamp fantasy than Girl Genius. If we were to slap a label on something as gaslamp fantasy, it would be this.
Oren: When I first heard the term “gaslamp fantasy”, I thought that meant like a fantasy story in a place that had gas lighting. And so I assumed it was for stories that are vaguely historic, but that don’t have the high tech to qualify them to be steampunk. So that’s what I thought that term was, and then I found out it was for Girl Genius. And it’s like, that’s the opposite of what I thought that was.
Chris: This is our new hot take. Like, Carnival Row is gaslamp fantasy. Girl Genius is steampunk. [laughter]
Bunny: I gotta say, these Carnival Row snapshots that they put on the internet are not very good.
Oren: Well, it’s not very good. So that’s truth in advertising. [general laughter]
Bunny: Apparently there’s also people who have horns for eyebrows. Okay.
Oren: Yeah, that’s just some good clean Tiefling fun.
Bunny: [laughing] Fair.
Chris: Okay, how about Mortal Engines?
Oren: Oh, yeah. That one’s the most steampunk.
Bunny: Does it run on steam?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That one is so odd. Because it’s post-apocalyptic. And they have computers in it. So it has, like, more modern…but I don’t know. I guess it’s not technically Victorian. But it definitely has weird gadgetry and retro-futuristic technology.
Oren: Yeah. And in the movies, it definitely has a very steampunk look. And they actually look pretty Victorian in the movies, too. It’s not Victorian. It’s post-apocalyptic. But apparently there’s like a retro fashion trend going, where after the bombs fell, everyone started dressing like the 1890s. [laughter] So, yeah, that one is more obviously steampunk. Because it has, like, these really advanced technologies that are powered by boiling water somehow. Don’t ask how they do it. It’s just a thing, okay.
Chris: Disney’s Atlantis is another one that is commonly–I think that one’s hard because all the pics you look at are just in the Atlantis part. But it’s got the whole, “we make contraptions so that we can go explore,” your traditional Victorian explorer’s outfits, and everything like that.
Oren: Yeah, it’s got some elements of it, I would say. It’s got some elements of steampunk. I don’t know if I would call it a steampunk story, if it were up to me. But I can see why people call it that. So that is one of the appeals of steampunk, is that you can create some pretty advanced tech to do some pretty high speculative stuff, like have giant robots, or replace limbs with robo arms, and stuff like that, without having to get into the emergent qualities of that technology. If you were using, say, obviously advanced stuff like cyberpunk or more sci-fi, or if you were using magic–you don’t have as many implications. So it has a value for that as well.
Chris: I do think that maybe one of the reasons why aesthetics is so important is because if aesthetics weren’t important, there would be less reason not to have a futuristic sci-fi setting instead. Because usually when we have fantastical technology, we’ve got that white and chrome minimalist futuristic look, which can be fun.
Bunny: Look, steampunk is not allowed to be sleek. Get your chrome out of here, heathen.
Chris: So if you’re not going to do that, then it’s because you want these other aesthetics that are associated with the historical period instead, and therefore the emphasis is on them. So that might be one reason.
Oren: I mean, there is the Victorian aspect of it. People like Victorian fashion, or at least riffing on Victorian fashion.
Bunny: It’s often pretty Gothic, I will say.
Oren: That’s true. Various historical fashion trends, people like those a lot. And so that can have a really cool aesthetic to it. Steampunk dovetails really nicely with spooky stories, because a lot of common traits in steampunk are either spooky on their own, or can be made spooky, because you got stuff like gas masks, very common in steampunk, incredibly spooky. You got vials of various colored liquids, very spooky. Steampunk robots are easy to make spooky, because they’re big and hulking and they move in awkward ways. Again, makes that easier to make that spooky. Not to say that you can’t have spooky, sleek cyberpunk robots, it’s just you have to work a little more at it.
Bunny: I have a question for this very obscure property. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. I just want to know whether you think it’s steampunk. It’s by some guy, it’s called Rising Tide. [laughter]
Oren: Hmmmmmm. I don’t know, sounds like a weirdo.
Bunny: Yeah, I think it’s a little spooky.
Chris: Some weirdo decided to make an expansion for Torchbearer.
Bunny: Very strange.
Oren: Yeah, that was a weird choice.
Bunny: Oh no, maybe it’s another alternate-energy-punk one.
Oren: I mean, it does have, Rising Tide does have a magical material that changes the laws of physics, which is different than coal. It also has coal. But in Deadlands, a popular RPG that uses steampunk horror, they’ve got this stuff called ghost rock, which I didn’t know about until after I’d already published Rising Tide, and someone pointed out that it was basically the same thing.
Bunny: Oh no.
Oren: It’s like, “Oh, all right, great job, me.” [laughter]
Bunny: Ghost rock…
Oren: So yeah, Rising Tide is definitely an example of where I was using the steampunk aesthetics to be on the spooky side.
Bunny: I do like spooky steampunk. Perhaps because Lovecraftian horror was, I guess, from around the time that some of steampunk tries to emulate. He was later, he was 1900s. But maybe that’s why. Lovecraftian steampunk is a thing.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a very popular cross genre. Oh, I should have also mentioned steampunk is really useful, because it’s much easier to get audiences to believe that you’re mixing swords and advanced technology with steampunk. If you’re doing that with cyberpunk, it basically has to be katanas. [laughter]
Bunny: People won’t buy anything else.
Oren: Because audiences will accept mixing machine guns and katanas only. Any other melee weapon and they’ll be like, “No, this is too silly. Why are you doing this?”
Bunny: I can’t bring my club?
Oren: No, no clubs, no spears, no great swords. Get that all out of here. No one would be using those in a world where everyone has easy access to guns. Only katanas specifically. [laughter]
Bunny: It’s also worth mentioning that there’s quite a few stories that just use elements of steampunk. The Paddington movie of all things has this one…
Oren: Really?
Bunny: Yeah. No, there’s just this one–the Geographer’s Guild. This might be Paddington 2, actually. I forget. Which is also good. It’s one of the rare sequels that lives up to, or perhaps exceeds, the original. I like Paddington 2. But they go to the Geographer’s Guild, and it’s all pneumatic lines and stuff like that. It’s very retro. Very Victorian. And I think that kind of qualifies as steampunk. But Paddington is emphatically not a steampunk story.
Oren: Yeah, you can get little elements of that showing up at some point. We’re getting close to the end here. But I should also reference that there are some inherent problems with steampunk, too. They don’t have to be there, but they crop up a lot, similar to any kind of historic genre. But this one gets extra problems, because it’s about the British. And people who write steampunk uncritically tend to get very enamored of Empire, and think that’s really cool. Because Victorian Empire, pretty big deal. So that can be a thing. You can also get people who just are like, “Hey, restrictive gender roles were actually great! Because women could nag their husbands.” So that was a thing. I’ve read steampunk stories like that. It’s unpleasant. I don’t like it.
Bunny: I will say a good subversion of that–although this isn’t like a heavy steampunk–this is a very light steampunk story. But it’s a story called N.K. Jemisin. By N.K. Jemisin.
Oren: It’s a story called N.K. Jemisin? [laughing]
Bunny: Yes. It’s just Self-Titled N.K. Jemisin Steampunk Story. No, it’s called The Effluent Engine, and it’s about the racism of the time. It takes place in New Orleans, and the main character is trying to, I think–it’s been a bit since I read it–trying to get an important technology in Haiti working. To free Haiti from Empiric rule. So that’s good. I like it when they subvert it, or embrace the troublesome history of these things and do something new and good with it. So good on you, N.K. Jemisin. That was a good short story.
Oren: N.K. Jemisin and P. Djèlí Clark should team up. Because he also has books that are similar to that, in a similar time period, with a similar aesthetic. And they could do like a crossover between them. That’d be great. I’d read that.
Bunny: There you go. Name it after both of them.
Oren: Yeah. It could be called N.K. Clark. That’s the title of the story now. [laughter]
Bunny: Oh no. It sounds like we’re shipping them now.
Oren: Eugh. Alright. Moving on.
Bunny: There’s a couple of just the original steampunk writers that I suppose are worth mentioning, like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. They’re kind of like Tolkiens, in that sense. I saw someone refer to, I think, H.G. Wells as the first speculative fiction writer. And I don’t know if that counts. [Oren and Chris “hmm” skeptically in the background] I don’t know if I’d go that far.
Oren: You’d have to define speculative fiction extremely specifically for that to have even a hint of relevance.
Bunny: [laughing] Yeah. But, burrowing into the ground with a big old steampunk drill that you can ride in, as I think happened in Journey to the Center of the Earth. So those big giant mechanical drills go with airships and stuff. Just saying.
Oren: That’s true. Alright. Now that we have successfully established that airships are the true mark of whether something is steampunk or not…
Bunny: Yes. That’s what you should take away from this.
Oren: Yeah. You should probably call it airship punk, to be perfectly honest. I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this podcastpunk, [laughter] please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Bunny: [ironically dramatic voice] We’re such outsiders.
Oren: And, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.