CRUEL BRITANNIA

It was with great interest that we stumbled upon yesterday’s posting on the Observer of Design web-oriented logging unit: a take-down by one Randy Nakamura of the so-called “steampunkery” movement. As with many commentators on the article, we believe that M. Nakamura seems to have missed the point entirely. We don’t, however, share their reasons for this belief.

For those in the don’t-know, steampunkism is a movement in which people with a fair amount of disposable income and jobs that don’t require excessive overtime create a kind of fantasy world that clings to the skirts of the past, a world that hearkens back to the heady early days of H.G. Vernian discovery, when the strangeness of the world was still new. They are Victoriana obsessives who limn a once-possible post-Tesla present that slipped through the fingers of our ancestors. They are dreamers. They are nerds.

Why, M. Nakamura asks, would anyone in their right mind be interested in turning the clock back to the grimmest days of the Industrious Revolution, during which entire families were forced to live inside toxin-spewing factory smokestacks (utilizing a unique bunking system) and class prejudice made it nearly impossible for anyone lacking a peerage to find decent toilet facilities? What romance can be wrung from a time in which provincialism was stuffed into East India crates and marketed to the world as imperialism?

First of all, the world was newer then, and a much larger place – literally, a few hundred extra miles around the equator. But this doesn’t fully explain the steampunkers’ forward-thinking nostalgia. In fact, all begloved fingers point to the stocky profile that loomed above the entire ill-conceived era, who lent her name to all forms of oppression, unchecked environmental degradation, and all-around haughtiness, the Doyenne of Devilry herself: Queen Victoria.

A little-reported phenomenon is that the majority of steampunkists worship HRH as a goddess – a sort of puffy, potato-like, impeccably mannered incarnation of H. Ryder Haggard’s tropical “She.” And like all goddesses, she refuses to remain dead. The fact is, the original claque of steampunkophytes congregated soon before her death and devised a plan. Knowing they would be unable to prevent her death and, with it, the flow of temporal progress, they plotted an eventual return to the world of their times, a world that would be heralded by the resurrection of Victoria herself. This hideous junta was led by William Jennings Darwin, the inventor of DNA. By injecting this new genetic chemical into the dying Queen’s bloodstream, he was able to extract a few parcels of her life-essence, which would be stored in formaldehyde until the technology was available to build a new Queen from these paltry remains.

As the recent wave of quaint, 19th-centuryesque gadgets and paraphernalia attest, those close to the project feel that the future (in the form of the past) is almost upon us. They want their newly revived Queen to see a world that she would recognize, abetted by progress that would make her proud. Whether their mission will prove, in the end, to be a genuine success, or yet another aborted eschaton, remains to be seen. In the meantime, we can admire the aesthetics of their brass-lined baubles and leathery laptops, but let us not fool ourselves: steampunkophiles are not harmless hobbyists, but the exponents of a dangerous cult, and should be approached with appropriate caution.