What Is Cyberpunk? An Introduction to the Sci-Fi Genre Dann Albright May 10, 2016 7 minutes
Despite being a popular genre across different types of media, the definition of “cyberpunk” can be a bit nebulous and tough to pin down, especially given its constantly evolving nature. But the world of cyberpunk is a great place to hang out, especially if you know what you’re getting yourself into. Here’s a crash course in cyberpunk to help you jump right in.
a gritty Future
As
a sub-genre of science fiction, cyberpunk focuses on a high-tech future full of androids, transhumanist body modification, virtual reality, and ubiquitous Internet connection. The line between cyberspace and “real” space is often blurred, with many people spending a large portion of their lives in virtual spaces, further blending the electronic and the physical.How Technology May Be Influencing Human Evolution How Technology May Be Influencing Human EvolutionThere’s not a single aspect of the human experience that hasn’t been touched by technology, including our very bodies. This might sound to some like a technological utopia, but cyberpunk works spend much of their time exploring the darker, grittier side of high-tech society. Governments have fallen out of power, or have been disbanded altogether, replaced by megacorporations that rule in the name of greed and profit, giving little thought to morality, public safety, or the average person in society. Capitalism, corruption, and conspiracies are dominant themes surrounding these shadowy megacorporations; they’re run by the elite and the hyper-wealthy, corporocrats hellbent on gaining more power and money. They have carved up most of the world into business-owned territories, and enforce their will with private military organizations.
The establishment of this corporatocracy has made political borders meaningless, and the inhabitants of the planet, in many cases, no longer recognize racial or geographical differences. In reflecting on John Shirley’s Freezone, Henry Jenkins describes the cyberpunk world as one full of “warring corporations, of multi-cultural chaos and constant advertising messages,” a description that sums up the economically driven, borderless, technologically saturated world of so many cyberpunk works.
High-Tech Low-Life
The
protagonists of cyberpunk works are often described as “high-tech low-lifes.” Put simply, cyberpunk lets us see into the lives of the people living on the outside edges of the high-tech society that has been established. Who are these people? Hackers, drug dealers, rebels, ravers, transhumanists, and other outsiders are common, and often share space with various types of miscreants who have either chosen or been forced to live on the edges of respectable society. Sometimes they’re dedicated to helping take down the system that keeps them on the outside, sometimes they have been pushed into the role, and sometimes they’re just apathetic.
No matter how they feel about the system that has turned them into outcasts, these characters are very often pitted against the interests of the megacorporations. Whether they discover evidence of a conspiracy or another chink in the armor of these organizations, find that the megacorps stand between them and what they want, or are wrongly accused of misdeeds, protagonists almost always end up facing off against the world’s elite. Interestingly, it’s not uncommon to see a kind of begrudging cooperation between the two spheres of society. Even though the megacorporations seek to shut down rebels and cultural insurgents, they’re also aware that these people are necessary to keep cash flowing, solve problems, and gain insight into the lower classes. It all makes for an interesting tension.
evolving themes
the
greedy megacorporations, gritty megacities, rebellious hackers, and futuristic technological advancements all come together to make cyberpunk a fascinating and disturbingly prescient genre, one that’s able to extend current unease around data collection, corporate power, the DIY transhuman ethic, and existential questioning into something darker and more worrisome. One of the most interesting things about the cyberpunk genre is that it has changed dramatically since its inception to take on new technological issues that have come up as our society has embraced newer technologies. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, for example, saw characters spending time in the Metaverse, a virtual reality environment that spanned an entire virtual planet, where they could meet, talk, race motorcycles, exchange information, and do just about anything else you can do in real life. Snow Crash was released in 1992, long before Second Life, other virtual worlds, and the popularization of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, all of which echo
Another recent development is the explosion of cybercrime, which is no longer limited to science fiction. Mass surveillance, personal privacy and liberty, wetware, and other themes that were presaged by early cyberpunk novels are now at the core of our own technological angst and wonderment.
Today’s cyberpunk focuses on things that we’re worried about today, like artificial intelligence, the technological singularity, brain downloading, cloning, technology in law enforcement, and advanced weaponry. Like many other genres, cyberpunk confronts us with the things we fear, but in a futurized, exaggerated, and more terrifying manner, forcing us to look at the world we live in and re-evaluate what’s going
A Media Spanning Genre
certain
works always spring to mind when discussing cyberpunk: Blade Runner, Neuromancer, The Matrix, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Deus Ex, and Watch Dogs span quite a range of dates and media, but they only begin to show the breadth of cyberpunk expression.
And video games, of course, are important as well. Metal Gear (especially from Metal Gear Solidonwards), Shadowrun, and Deus Ex all have recognizable cyberpunk themes. Although cyberpunk video games have been around for a long time, it seems like they’re picking up momentum, and will continue to become more popular in the near future as the issues they address become more deeply ingrained in the public consciousness.
The birth of cyberpunk is difficult to pin down, though William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) is often cited as, if not the first cyberpunk novel, one that was very close to the beginning and seminal in its importance. Akira, a popular cyberpunk graphic novel, was first published in Japan in 1982, followed shortly after by Ghost in the Shell in 1989. he fantastic visual imagery of cyberpunk also translates well to movies, with classics like Blade Runner, RoboCop, Total Recall, and Demolition Man drawing strongly on the tropes set out in their precursing novels. Animated films, including adaptations of Akira and Ghost in the Shell, are also important pillars of cyberpunk.
But cyberpunk doesn’t stop there. There’s cyberpunk-influenced music, from Psydoll’s pounding Japanese electronica to Nine Inch Nails’ dystopian rock in Year Zero. My personal favorite cyberpunk album is Deltron 3030, an eponymous release from Del the Funky Homosapien’s futuristic alter-ego (though Fear Factory’s Digimortal is tough to beat).
Cyberpunk visual art is similarly fascinating, with artists creating intricate urban landscapes full of rebels and rockers. A quick look at cyberpunk art on Pinterest or deviantArt reveals the fun, slightly trippy variety of art that can be found around the Internet. Even architecture has been influenced by cyberpunk stylings.
The cyberpunk style has traveled far beyond its origins in science fiction novels, now even encompassing fashion and decoration. And, of course, the cyberpunk philosophy isn’t limited to fictional characters; there are cyberpunk communities where fans and adherents get together online.8 Stunning Cyberpunk Costume Ideas with LEDs 8 Stunning Cyberpunk Costume Ideas with LEDsCombining cyberpunk culture, clothing, and LEDs might sound a bit radical, but people out there, right now, are creating clothing and accessories that will blow your mind.
a lesson and a warning
the
progression of cyberpunk since the 1980s shows us an interesting trend: that yesterday’s science fiction is today’s technological reality. From William Gibson’s Matrix virtual reality system to the androids of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, speculations on the technology of the distant future come to be proven true far faster than we expect. But this lesson also comes with a warning: cyberpunk encourages us to look at what we’re doing today and consider how it may have dire consequences for humanity tomorrow. The tech that we use today to communicate, store data, and do research could be co-opted into something far more sinister tomorrow, and we need to be on the watch for these things happening during our own lifetimes so we can stop them. Are you a fan of cyberpunk? What are your favorite xamples of the genre?
An exploration of the anti-consumerism music that died the way it lived. BY SCOTT BEAUCHAMP AUG 18, 2016 1.7k
Writing about vaporwave in 2016 is almost impossible. Neophytes often seem baffled by the genre, assuming they’ve heard of it at all. Meanwhile, fans insist that vaporwave is dead. How do you write about music that most people have never heard of and that fans claim doesn’t exist any more? Or just as important: why? I think the continued relevance of the genre is explained in the history of vaporwave itself. Vaporwave arose in reaction to huge economic and social forces that are still very much a part of our lives: globalization, runaway consumerism, and manufactured nostalgia chief among them. here is no other kind of music that explicitly concerns itself with these aspects of our zeitgeist. And if vaporwave still maters, it’s because those things do also.
If you’ve never heard of vaporwave, the slowdown, remixed, and appropriative music genre defined at least in part by an obsession with ‘80s and ‘90s consumer culture—the first genre to be born and live its life entirely on the Internet— that’s certainly OK. In fact, it’s sort of the point. Vaporwave, itself a kind of musical parody of pop consciousness, never strived for mass appeal. It doesn’t need our validation. That’s true for any artifact of counterculture: mass acceptance would weaken its claim to authenticity. Forcing it into a form fit for mass appeal would dilute its identity. For an historical example, think of the music critic Lester Bangs’ quote about how the ‘60s died as soon as it was OK to have long hair in the Midwest.
That’s why signal-boosting vaporwave might seem gauche to some fans and creators. Purveyors of a genre so rarified were almost obligated to bury it alive, to announce its death publicly before its actual time. It seems almost prudent to end the project while the relatively small groups of people passionate about vaporwave are still able to police the borders of the genre’s identity. But the reasons for vaporwave being created in the first place are still very much relevant: cycnicsm about capitalism, sarcastic takes on the unachieved utopias of previous decades, consumerism, escapism, globalization, etc. Vaporwave’s vision isn’t exhausted yet, which keeps it fresh, pertinent, and growing in the form of fractured subgenres like “future funk” and “mall soft”. So vaporwave is dead. Long live vaporwave.
T
o pick any single point in time that a music genre developed is a kind of arbitrary exercise. In the case of vaporwave, do we go back to underground electronic music in Detroit in the ‘80s? The early DIY scene? No Wave? Stockhausen? The dialectic is so large, Lord, and my vessel is so small. Best to keep it simple. So let’s start in 2010 with electronic artist Daniel Lopatin releasing the album Ecco Jams Vo.1 under the pseudonym “Chuck Person.” This album is like the Mayflower of vaporwave, or the foundational stone. Listening to it, you can hear that the title is a play on the word “echo.” It’s an obvious nod to the production on the album, of course, which features slowed down, “chopped and screwed” remixes of pop ‘80s jams. But the echo is also temporal. The album is composed of sounds from the past reemerging. Their pop gloss has been smudged and stretched out into an almost spectral sound.
The effect is that it sounds like the ghosts of shopping trips past are visiting us. As critic Simon Reynolds wrote in Retromania: Pop’s Addiction to its Own Past, these works “relate to cultural memory and the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities, especially those related to consumer technology in the computing and audio-video entertainment area.” Musical difference would later complicate and divide the genre that these tracks inspired, but the preoccupation with technology and consumerism would remain a common thread binding subsequent projects together under the same larger ideological umbrella. James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual is usually paired with Ecco Jams Vol. 1 as a founding document of vaporwave.
Ferraro’s take on vaporwave was slightly shifted from Lopatin’s, emphasizing the upbeat, hopeful, soundtrack to ‘90s consumer capitalism: crisp elevator music, uptempo synth strings, and automated voices. Just check out the song names: “Global Lunch,” “Palm Trees, Wi-Fi and Dream Sushi,” “Condo Pets,” “Starbucks, Dr. Seussism, and While Your Mac Is Sleeping.” It’s retrofuturism, but one that shows us what the joyful promises of early ‘90s Internet culture would feel like completely unmoored from politics and history. In other words, it’s utopian. As Ferraro himself explained in an interview,: “Far Side Virtual” mainly designates a space in society, or a mode of behaving. All of these things operating in synchronicity: like ringtones, flat-screens, theater, cuisine, fashion, sushi. I don’t want to call it “virtual reality,” so I call it “Far Side Virtual.” If you really want to understand “Far Side,” first off listen to [Claude] Debussy, and secondly, go into a frozen yogurt shop. Afterwards, go into an Apple store and just fool around, hang out in there. Afterwards, go to Starbucks and get a gift card. They have a book there on the history of Starbucks—buy this book and go home. If you do all these things you’ll understand what “Far Side Virtual” is—because people kind of live in it already. All of this is right there on the surface of Far Side Virtual. Listen to the entire album, if you can spare the time. Put it on in the background as a soundtrack to work to. It’s crisp, upbeat, and pleasant. The sounds that it’s composed of are recognizable to me, like familiar voices from my past or little nodules of experience from my childhood. I grew up in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, and an upbeat sound collage of voices from a Utopia that couldn’t quite pull itself off aren’t just simply pleasing—they feel like part of my identity. Could it really be that the AOL “You’ve Got Mail” voice is to me what the Madeline was to Proust?
James Ferrero.
The first album to be considered vaporwave proper was Floral Shoppe, released in late 2011 by the graphic artist/producer Ramona Xavier (predominatly known by the stage name Vektroid) but credited to her alias “Macintosh Plus.” The previous albums pointed the way, but Floral Shoppe was it: the lodestone that embodies all the most salient elements of vaporwave. Check out this standout track, “リサフランク 420 //現代のコンピュー,” or “Computing of Lisa Frank 420 / / Contemporary.” The song features a Diana Ross track, “It’s Your Move,” chopped and slowed to an awkwardly relentless zombie shuffle. The track is disassembled and then put back together, brought back from the dead with all of the slickness, the “product” completely sucked out of it. And somehow it sounds even more sensual, and certainly more fragile, than the original.
Floral Shoppe strikes the delicate balance between being a parody of consumerism and actually really nice music to chill to. It was the just-right balance that nearly all successful vaporwave songs would replicate. But more than just the sound of vaporwave, the aesthetic of vaporwave is embodied on the cover of Floral Shoppe. Take a look at it: the retro computer graphics, the Roman bust, the pixilated city skyline, song titles in Japanese. These things would form the core of a series of visual references vaporwave incorporated into its identity and music. It doesn’t hurt that they also easily doubled as Internet memes. And there are others you might recognize: Arizona Iced Tea, nugs of marijuana, VHS, palm trees, Fuji bottled water.
Like the music, the name is a hybrid Visual jokes, of course—little tiny ghosts of the failed promises of consumerism (were we ever really going to find true happiness in a bottle of iced tea?), its cheapness and vulgarity—that point us towards where the name “vaporwave” itself comes from. Like the music, the name is a hybrid. It’s a combination of the term “vaporware,” a corporate advertising term for products that are advertised for release but are never actually intended to make it to market. Half of the genre’s name comes from an insider term for manipulation of the public’s desires. The second half comes from Marx’s waves of vapor, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
The genre’s name comes from these failed promises, and through its music sort of offers up an alternative history of post-Cold War America. One way it explicitly does that is by appropriating ‘80s and ‘90s commercials. Like in this vid/song pairing from electronic musician Skylar Spence, former known as Saint Pepsi, called “Enjoy Yourself.”
The original ad was not only meant to bolster McDonald’s after 4 p.m. dinner campaign, it also presented a dream landscape of stars, velvety sky, and a city skyline whose very anonymity hints at freedom unmoored from specificity of place and limits of identity. The campaign, which won a Clio Award for advertising, was itself playing off of 1980s Baby Boomer nostalgia for the ‘50s: the sunglasses-wearing Ray Charlse-esque crooner singing Bobby Darin’s song “Mack the Knife” was anything but subtle. And it’s important to remember that Darin’s song was itself an appropriation of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht’s version written for The Three Penny Opera. In this sense, Saint Pepsi’s video—and vaporwave’s appropriation of music originally packaged as a consumer product—is a kind of grassroots reengagement with a culture that’s normally spoonfed to the public by the C-Suites. The video appropriates McDonald’s crescent moon-headed crooner Mac Tonight, an advertisement character used by the company from 1986 to 1989.
It’s a kind of oddball marketing campaign, one that I remember from my own childhood as slightly disturbing, turned into a weird nostalgic inside joke. But it’s a joke that wouldn’t work unless there were also some actual longing it was playing off of.
Although it might mimic the aesthetics of capitalism, the anti-place of the American mall, and the sounds of a tranquil permanent present, it has more in common with punk. lthough it might mimic the aesthetics of capitalism, the anti-place of the American mall, and the sounds of a tranquil permanent present, it has more in common with punk. At this point, it should be clear that vaporwave has obvious antecedents in American music and culture. And although it might mimic the aesthetics of capitalism, the anti-place of the American mall, and the sounds of a tranquil permanent present, it has more in common with punk. It’s political. Its first priority isn’t making the charts; in fact, its identity is bound up in resisting commercial success, in mocking it. It’s really simple to make. In fact, most of it is made at home and released on sites like Bandcamp. And it’s also really, really funny. And like punk, vaporwave has fractured, synthesized, and broken off into new subgenres of music, with different artists emphasizing certain sounds or ideas. Canadian producer Blank Banshee is an example of a direction that vaporwave has moved in, where the trap beat is emphasized and the political edge blunted.
It’s probably more approachable than a lot of music in other vaporwave subgenres (such as my favorite, Mall Soft, which are literally sounds that approximate mall soundtracks), but builds on the basic premise of the genre.. Golden Living Room goes in another musical direction entirely. The album Welcome Home (and you can’t get much more vaporwave than that album cover) was actually performed using real instruments, not just synths and computers. And it’s hauntingly beautiful. It maintains some of the same political preoccupations as earlier vaporwave, but incorporates a much larger matrix of sounds and musical styles to make its point. The fact that it can be played on instruments, and that it draws from so many varied sources, really speaks to the crossover compatibility vaporwave has with things like lo-fi, sound collages, and avant garde music more generally.
News of vaporwave’s death has been a long time coming. Some say the genre peaked in 2013. People were discussing it on Reddit last year. And maybe the most obvious nail in the genre’s coffin was when MTV and Tumblr incorporated vaporwave tropes into the visual aspects of its rebranding last summer. But giant companies weren’t the only ones to appropriate the vaporwave aesthetic. Drake’s video for “Hotline Bling,” with its minimalist neon pastels and visual echoes of 80’s lounge, was accused by some of being a sort of “tribute to vaporwave.” And Tom Barnes at Mic called the cover of Kanye West’s latest album “brutally simple vapor wave aesthetic.” Outside of the music world altogether, this month saw the surfacing of a robotic Donald Trump destroying the world “in an absurd vaporwave video.” For a genre that has been declared dead for years, vaporwave continues to remain relevant enough to maintain a presence in our collective imaginations, even if many people aren’t necessarily aware of the genre itself. Things can matter to us and remain relevant without our knowing it.
To call a genre “dead” can mean two things: either the genre has outlived its usefulness as a product on the market (i.e. a change in style), or that it no longer has any relevance to our lives. The first can’t be true because vaporwave never was economically “successful.” The second can’t be true because we’re still haunted by the ghost utopias of a failed consumer paradise. Vaporwave continues to provide us with a necessary expression of our moment in American history, a wry take on our economic and cultural decline. When people call vaporwave “dead”, it might be more useful to think of the pronouncement as an appropriation of the language of marketing itself, of a planned or synthetic obsolescence, employed before the act of “selling out” in order to protect the integrity of the genre. Vaporwave is dead because it’s not a product in the way that hip hop, pop, or country music have become. It was never for sale that way, so in a sense it was always “dead.” Long live vaporwave.
Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds By RUTH LA FERLAMAY 8, 2008 MEET Showtime,” said Giovanni James, a musician, magician and inventor of sorts, introducing his prized dove, who occupies a spacious cage in Mr. James’s apartment in Midtown Manhattan. Showtime is integral to Mr. James’s magic act and to his décor, a sepia-tone universe straight out of the gaslight era. The lead singer of a neovaudevillian performance troupe called the James Gang, Mr. James has assembled his universe from oddly assorted props and castoffs: a gramophone with a crank and velvet turntable, an old wooden icebox and a wardrobe rack made from brass pipes that were ballet bars in a previous incarnation. Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass. Even his clothing — an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman’s waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery — is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.
It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.
To some, “steampunk” is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance,” said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys. That definition is loose enough to accommodate a stew of influences, including the streamlined retro-futurism of Flash Gordon and Japanese animation with its goggle-wearing hackers, the postapocalyptic scavenger style of “Mad Max,” and vaudeville, burlesque and the structured gentility of the Victorian age. In aggregate, steampunk is a trend that is rapidly outgrowing niche status. “There seems to be this sort of perfect storm of interest in steampunk right now,” Mr. von Slatt said. “If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a year and a half ago.” (At this writing, Google cites 1.9 million references.)
“Part of the reason it seems so popular is the very difficulty of pinning down what it is,” Mr. von Slatt added. “That’s a marketer’s dream.” Devotees of the culture read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as more recent speculative fiction by William Gibson, James P. Blaylock and Paul Di Filippo, the author of “The Steampunk Trilogy,” the historical science fiction novellas that lent the culture its name. They watch films like “The City of Lost Children” (with costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier), “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy satirizing the modern industrial age; and they listen to melodeons and Gypsy strings mixed with industrial goth. They build lumbering contraptions like the steampunk treehouse, a rusted-out 40-foot sculpture assembled last year at the Burning Man festival in Nevada and unveiled last month at the Coachella music festival in Southern California.
They trawl eBay for saw-tooth cogs and watch parts to dress up their Macs and headsets, then show off their inventions to kindred spirits on the Web. And, in keeping with the make-it-yourself ethos of punk, they assemble their own fashions, an adventurous pastiche of neo-Victorian, Edwardian and military style accented with sometimes crudely mechanized accouterments like brass goggles and wings made from pulleys, harnesses and clockwork pendants, to say nothing of the odd ray gun dangling at the hip. Steampunk style is corseted, built on a scaffolding of bustles, crinolines and parasols and high-arced sleeves not unlike those favored by the movement’s designer idols: Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and, yes, even Ralph Lauren. Quaint to some eyes, or outright bizarre, steampunk fashion is compelling all the same. It is that rarity, a phenomenon with the potential to capture a wider audience, offering a genteel and disciplined alternative to both the slack look of hip-hop and the menacing spirit of goth.
The elaborate mourning dresses, waistcoats, hacking jackets and high-button shoes are goth’s stepchildren, for sure, but the overall look is “not so much eyeliner and fishnets,” said Evelyn Kriete, who sells advertising space for magazines like Steampunk, The Willows and Weird Tales, and who manages Jaborwhalky Productions (jaborwhalky.com), a steampunk Web site. Ms. Kriete and her eccentrically outfitted cohort of teachers, designers, writers and medical students, drew stares last week at a picnic at the Cloisters in Manhattan, but provoked no shudders or discernible hostility. “As a subculture, we are not the spawn of Satan,” Ms. Kriete said. “People smile when they see us. They want to take our picture.” Robert Brown, the lead singer for Abney Park, a goth band that has reinvented itself as steampunk, echoed her sentiments. “Steampunk is not dark and spooky,” he said. “It’s elegant and beautiful.” Even heroic, if you like. The movement may have a postapocalyptic strain, but proponents tend to cast themselves as spirited survivors. Molly Friedrich, an artist and a jewelry designer in Seattle, approaches steampunk, she said, “from a perspective of 1,000 years into the future, after society has crumbled but people have chosen to live in Victorian fashion, wearing scavenged clothes.”
In keeping with her vision, Ms. Friedrich has devised an alternate identity composed of petticoats, old military storm coats, goggles and aviator caps with an Amelia Earhart flair. She takes her emotional cues from scientists and inventors like Nikola Tesla, magicians like Harry Houdini and soulful spies like Mata Hari, each of whom injected a spirit of enterprise, intrigue and discovery into their age. Contemporary fictional parallels in film include the wildly ingenious scientist played by Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man,” who hopes to save the world by retooling himself as a flame-throwing robot made of unwieldy scrap metal parts.
If steampunk has a mission, it is, in part, to restore a sense of wonder to a technology-jaded world. “Today satellite photos make the planet seem so small,” Mr. Brown lamented. “Where is the adventure it that?” In contrast, steampunk, with its airships, test tubes and time machines, is, he said, “sort of a dream , the way we used to daydream.“Sort of a dream , the way we used to daydream. It’s like part of your childhood’s just bursting forward again.” For some of its adherents, steampunk also offers a metaphoric coping device. “It has an intellectual tie to the artists and artisans dealing with a world in turmoil at the time of the industrial revolution,” said Crispen Smith, a Web designer and photographer in Toronto, and a partner in a steampunk fashion business. Now, as in the late 19th century, “we have to find a way to deal with new ethical quandaries,” Mr. Smith said, alluding to issues like cloning, the dissemination of information and intellectual property rights on the Web. Steampunk style is also an expression of a desire to return to ritual and formality. “Steampunk has its tea parties and its time-travelers balls,” said Deborah Castellano, who presides over salonconvention. com, which organizes neo-Victorian conventions. “It offers an element of glamour that some of us would otherwise never experience.” And an enticing marketing hook. The Bombay Company is selling steampunk-style brass home accessories, instruments like astrolabes and sextants. A steampunk fantasy game, Edge of Twilight, will be introduced by Xbox 360 and PlayStation next year. And steampunk fashion, which until now has been a mainstay of craft fairs and destinations like eBay and Etsy, the online market for handmade clothing designs and artifacts, is finding its way into the brick and mortar world. Gypsymoon.com has begun offering its cream and umber petticoats, an Air Pirate ruched tunic and Time Machine bloomers at boutiques. Abney Park is selling swallowtail tuxedos, antiqued flight helmets and airship pirate T-shirts, like those it wears on stage, at abneypark.com and at concerts across the country.
Mr. James, who performs with his troupe at the Box, the music-hall hideaway on the Lower East Side, has just leased space for a steampunk shop in NoLIta. He plans to offer brass Rubik’s cubes, riding boots, early-20th-century-style motorbikes, handmade leather mailbags and brass or wooden iPhone cases, all under the label TJG Engineering. There will, of course, be a clothing line with vintage and new looks modeled on Mr. James’s own neo-Edwardian sartorial signature. “I’m so sick of baggy pants hanging off your bottom,” he said. “This is more refined. It goes back to a time when people had some dignity. “It’s a new day.”
THE END