Ladies and gentlemen, I have something to announce. When I came to my senses not long ago, I found myself deep in a heap of cogs, springs and screws, and the air was hot and wet from all the steam around. And I loved it. I have finally found something to answer on music genre preferences questions, same goes for anime and films. I love Steampunk, and this intimate hooting affection has no plans of going away too easily. Wherewith I am thoroughly happy.
Steampunk is an intermedial genre that can be viewed as the opposite of cyberpunk. While cyberpunk revolves around the electricity-driven future, steampunk is the essence of false hopes in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the people believed the power of steam and imagined all kinds of machines powered by it. You could say it’s the sci-fi of those ages, and the cult of the loud and hot machines is weak nowadays, yet it lives through, and maybe it will occupy wider masses somewhen again.
My first ever steampunk experience was Miyazaki’s Laputa, shortafter one of my favourites, Steamboy, and of course Howl’s Moving Castle. But they didn’t get me ‘into’ the genre. What did it was music. Beginning with the self-proclaimed world emperor Dr. Steel, then the narratorish Clockwork Dolls, fast fading into the fabulous Clockwork Quartet, followed by the Vernian Process. Out of these I would like to point your attention to the Clockwork Quartet, which is a relatively new band that needs attention and support, and whilst it is the case for every goddamn band on the Earth’s surface and under, this one totally deserves it.
I am currently compiling a list of all steampunk anime, through which I will go to become one of the so rare steampunk connoisseurs in the anisphere. My help in the compiling are forums, chats, friends and acquaintances and of course databases (which often have the desired tag missing). It seems like there are only a handful of anime series and films inspired by steampunk, but that just makes it easier for me to watch them all. Since the information sources are unconfirmed, I cannot put the list up yet. But I plan on doing so right after I finish my steamy marathon and grow out of the puns I seem to not stop intending.
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Hope you enjoy the few yet awesome titles this small genre has to offer ^_^
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Sweet! I never really got into steampunk through various mediums, but music intrigues.
Massive steam marathon, lol. That sounds intense btw.
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LAST EXILE!!!!!!!!!!
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I have now watched the first episode of this show, and I hate to tell this but I do not agree on the exclamation marks, and even the caps are too exaggerating.
Perhaps it is partly your fault that I expected something great of this anime but instead got some ‘rastuekusairu’. I could write a post on why I was so much disappointed, but I will save up stuff for a post after I finish it, so I’ll list it right here:
1. Emotions. This is not GITS where all main characters are in fact dolls. They are alive, yet still, they open their mouth without moving anything else. Like dolls.
2. Laziness. Way too much blatant CGI there, and when I say blatant, I mean blatant. I know Steamboy was made for 10 years, but look at it, could you even say that was CGI? No. And here it is not only blatant CGI, but poorly-made CGI at that.
3. Through the whole 24 minutes I sat and thought, ‘this must be how the Japanese think Europeans/British are’
I know I’m going to get budget comparison punchlines now. But budget or not, I am disappoint.
I hereby award this debate: Awesome.
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This ain’t a debate (yet).
What Scamp said; Last Exile is one of my favorite shows, steampunk or no.
It’s funny how that turned out, actually. Cyberpunk also ended up being about “false hopes” for the power of technology and mass media. I mean, it’s certainly the case that big business is powerful and the media is everywhere, but we haven’t become dystopian because of it, as the early cyberpunk writers predicted. We even have “post-cyberpunk” now, which deals with the issues of cyberpunk in a less bleak and more recognizable way.
While you have a good point there, I feel like I should say that we didn’t yet reach the time described in most cyberpunk works. The first year that comes to my mind is 2033, but even so, cyberpunk is not described by the age but by the technological progress. That means, we will reach cyberpunk as soon as we will reach the technological features described in cyberpunk works. So we still have it ahead of us.
No, we aren’t quite there yet. I didn’t mean to imply that cyberpunk is “over,” per se. But we’ve become corporate, interconnected, and media-saturated in a way that resembles some stage in the process toward something Gibsonian. What I should have said was that, considering post-cyberpunk writers, there are some who would say that the traditional cyberpunk dystopia is no longer all that likely, that it was a result of something like overestimation (if not false hope, necessarily, given that many cyberpunk settings come off as almost cautionary).
Of course, it’s debatable whether “post-cyberpunk” is an accurate label for what it describes. Maybe what we’re seeing is simply an extension of cyberpunk — or a rolling-back into the nearer-future.
Sadly each conversation finds its end when both sides agree on the subject of their discussion. I agree with you for the most part.
However, many of the predictions of early sci-fi/cyberpunk authors, (especially in literature) indeed came true up until now. If you’ll look into Tokyo with those high glass-buildings, huge monitors transmitting news and ads, you would earlier rather than later think on the world of Blade Runner.
Onto post-cyberpunk, in my view, post-cyberpunk would describe the age after the self-destruction of cyberpunk, which is predicted in so many works (and even in reality, given all the nuclear weapons ready to launch every second). Correct me if I’m wrong, sadly I’m not very familiar with post-cyberpunk.
But that media saturation hasn’t turned us into zombies — well, arguably it hasn’t. Cyberpunk seems to have predicted our current way of life in a pessimistic and simplified way that doesn’t take into account the complexity behind and resultant from media and technology, or so the criticism seems to go.
Well, they call it “post” cyberpunk, but based on what I’ve read it doesn’t seem to take place after what we’d think of as the cyberpunk era. More than anything it’s just less pessimistic cyberpunk with technology closer to what we have now. Literature after the cyberpunk collapse seems to fall more squarely into science fiction “proper,” but maybe I’m wrong; the only example I can think of right now is Dune, with its Butlerian Jihad vs. computers.
Matrix would be another example if I’m not mistaken.
Back to the actual cyberpunk, indeed it is arguably. If people buying the whole Endless Eight DVD set aren’t media zombies, then who is?
The complexity behind utterly depends on the actual work. I have read Isaac Asimov’s books long ago, so maybe something escapes my focus, but I think those sci-fi go under the category you described. But taking the same earlier mentioned Ghost in the Shell you can’t quite say it doesn’t take the complexity behind into account — the film(s) discuss social issues in the new age, and the question of humanity in the world where the only living thing in the body of a human child is his brain.
However, I can’t argue with that all of cyberpunk works give us warnings.
I’m not criticizing “pure” cyberpunk myself, as there really are some great examples of it out there. I’m just trying to encapsulate the argument for post-cyberpunk. I tend to judge things on a case-by-case basis, as you suggest, though I do find genre interesting.
For the record, I was really, genuinely entertained by Endless Eight :p Not that I’m overeager to watch it again some time soon. I’m not really well-versed enough on communications theory yet to talk about the effect of media, but I think the field is pretty moderate right now — that is, we aren’t complete slaves to the media, but we’re affected by it in subtle and indirect ways.
On second thought, I really should’ve started a new comment thread. This column is getting a little cramped…
Thanks for the shout, we’re busy producing a bunch of exciting stuff, just hang onto your hats for a few months…
Follow our shenanigans at
http://www.facebook.com/ClockworkQuartet and http://www.twitter.com/ClockwrkQuartet
Oh, thanks for dropping by! This was rather unexpected, actually.
I’m happy you still show signs of life after your latest blog post was on the 9th of October. (But I didn’t know you had Twitter, so I guess it replaced the blog somehow?)
P.S. You’re only allowed to use the band name as name here because you make such beautiful music; everybody else who’s reading this: the rule’s still there for you!
Heard the word steampunk on mtv many years ago. Now, it faded like flower.
Xandra Hasegawa´s last blog post: How to Screw Up Your Relationship with a Japanese Woman
We will revive it, for sure.
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