Yesterday’s post brought SteamPunk magazine with it, which explains me turning up bleary-eyed an hour late to work this morning. It’s a new no-budget zine, pdfs for free download or you get a handsome printed copy on recycled paper for US$3 plus shipping.
The good
It’s very handsome. The design and typography is great, mixing up faux-Victorian and grunge to great effect (check out the Moorcock interview and the following two-page spread, for the sort of contrast I mean). The more I look at the front cover (which illustrates one of the stories) the more I love it — especially the punk kid with clockwork tattoos.
There’s a good mix of content too — first issues of two serials, two short stories, interviews (as well as Moorcock, musicians Thomas Truax and Darcy James Argue and the band Abney Park), a DIY how-to for electrolyte etching (reprinted from SteampunkWorkshop), a sort-of DIY how-to for a flame-powered –musical– organ (”The Pyrophone, or, Thermo-Acoustic Flaming Organ of Doom“), a historical piece on anarchist regicide, an excerpt (on Ostrich-hunting) from “Earth Sea and Sky” (pub. 1887) and a couple of pieces of self-conscious “What is this thing called SteamPunk” overanalysis.
The story by J.T. Hand is especially lovely (The Baron: A Short Fancy of Airships, Smog, and Questionable Friendship). It’s very short, you could just about read it online. (Go on, I’ll wait. Wasn’t that great? Ok, where was I? Ah yes.) The Abney Park interview is also fun, possibly because the band “at the time, unfortunately, were the worse for drink.”
The bad
The biggest let-down, content-wise, is the self-analysis. I suppose it’s expected, since this is a “Movement”, but it’s pretty hard to take the rhetoric seriously. “We stand with the traitors of the past as we hatch impossible treasons against our present.” Okaaaay…
Sadly, the budget also shows (it should: they don’t have one), particularly in the photo reproductions and some of the illustrations. Apart from Hand’s, none of the short fiction pieces struck me as especially interesting — in fact they seemed almost formulaic.
This is my biggest worry for the zine: is SteamPunk really big enough to support them? Or will they be forced to either go outside the sub-genre (in which case why bother?) or print one after another a line of samey grunge-Victorian knockoffs? If SteamPunk is really the “aesthetic technological movement” they’re asking us to accept then its literature should be wild and free. By golly, I think I might write something myself.
The bottom line
It’s a first issue, and it’s a bit patchy, but I’ll be watching the next with interest. I don’t honestly believe there is (yet) a SteamPunk community, but one might just form around a zine like this. Speaking of which: the deadline for the next issue is April 15, and they’re real keen for all sorts of submissions.
(Below the bottom line)
The group who handled the publishing, strangers in a tangled wilderness, is seriously worth checking out. They’re anarchist zine-writers and musicians, as far as I can figure out. Lots of cool stuff — check out “said the pot to the kettle: feminist theory for anarchist men“, which “explores feminist thought as un-dogmatically as possible and encourages anarchist men to stop being such jerks” (yes, there’s more to it than the comic — a lot more). And lots of music, free, including some accordion. I recommend “Oil and Hell in the Sky”.
2 Comments
I don’t know if there is such a thing as a steampunk community, but there is a lot of people keen on the idea. This is witnessed in things like the amount of art and boingboing news about it, along with the amount of anime that centres around similar themes. One of the anime genres is ‘giant robots’, and some of these are in a faux-victorian-with-different-tech setting (my favourite is Metropolis - apparently based on the world in the movie which I have yet to see; a big name one to reach ‘the west’ is Steamboy, which is fun, if a bit weirdly-moralistic (”I do this for the science!”)).
I don’t know if this is enough to sustain a magazine, but I’d like to think so.
My impression is that the BoingBoing coverage is a bit skewed; you’d think there was a major unicorn community if you used them as a social barometer. That’s part of the worry, actually: that this is a net meme that will quickly run its course and die. (I don’t see a “Giant Squid” magazine anytime soon, do you?)
The anime connection is an interesting one. My personal aesthetic feel for steampunk is unlikely to match an anime series, regardless of its setting, but maybe that’s just me.
Actually part of the appeal of the zine is its emphasis on the “punk” side of steampunk, which I think does have the potential to go beyond the Giant-Squid-style “cool for a blog post but not much more” netsationalism. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for!