I first encountered steampunk through Bryan Talbot’s seminal comic series The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. It appeals to me in the same way as the adventures of Indiana Jones, or the Biggles books I read as a child: it’s all good clean, escapist fun. But is it science fiction, or is it a retreat from the future? Is it symptomatic of a general loss of nerve among science fiction writers, as they turn away from a difficult and challenging future?

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that concerns itself with tales set in real or imagined worlds where steam remains the dominant power, as opposed to oil or nuclear power. Many of the tales take place in swashbuckling alternative versions of the Victorian era. There are certain tropes associated with the genre, such as steam-powered zeppelins, Victorian fashions, valves, cogs, and characters wearing brass goggles; and this steampunk aesthetic has crossed over from the pages of books and magazines into Neo-Victorian fashion, role-playing, film, and music.

In my recent post on The Role of Science Fiction, I argued that science fiction was an essential tool for helping us to understand the future:

“This is my job as a science fiction writer: to speculate and imagine, and tell stories. The future is truly an undiscovered country. Futurology and philosophy can give us a map of the terrain. But if we want to know what it’s going to feel like to live and work and love there, one of the best tools we have is science fiction.”

The near future has its challenges: climate change, terrorism, ubiquitous surveillance; and we have become disillusioned with cheap and easy space flight. The world has caught up with the science fiction stories of the 1980s and 1990s. We are all hooked into cyberspace, and it’s simultaneously weirder and more mundane than anyone could have predicted.  Today, we face a situation where the advance of technology is so swift, and the dangers of war and climate change so terrible, that we have no idea what will happen in the next 20 to 50 years, let alone the next 100 or 1000. But that doesn’t mean we should give up writing stories set in the future.

Science fiction is more important now than it has ever been.

Sure, times are challenging and it’s tough to make predictions about the near-future geo-political and economic landscape – but the role of SF is so much wider than that. For me, purposes of science fiction are to entertain; to say something about the human condition, about what it means to be alive, here and now; and to present possible and plausible futures, and show us what it will be like to live in them. There is no other literature that can even begin to do all that.

In the 1980s, the world stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust. But science fiction writers kept on writing. They didn’t turn away from the future, they looked ahead. And we must do likewise. We must hold a mirror up to the world and show positive solutions as well as illustrating the dangers. Just because the pace of change has made prediction difficult, we shouldn’t shirk from the task. If we want the genre to remain relevant and dynamic, we shouldn’t retreat into pure escapism.

Written during the gloom of the Cold War, books such as Neuromancer and Snow Crash helped shape the world we have today, serving to inspire the architects of the Internet. Where are the books that will inspire the teenagers of today? A little steampunk now and then can be fun, but not at the expense of maintaining our grip on the cutting edge. We need to face the future, look it in the eye, and write stories that will inspire the next generation as they face the challenges we describe.

I’m not attacking steampunk as a genre; I like the gadgets and the clothing, I enjoy the old-fashioned values and swashbuckling romps. I just want to make sure we don’t lose ourselves in its seductive escapism. If it comes down to a choice between brass goggles or slick carbon spex with an inbuilt augmented reality overlay, I know which I’d rather have.

Tags: Future • science fiction • Steampunk