I'm compiling a list of motifs for scene dressing to authenticate a narrative's meaning space. I have a few that are instrumental to the story but a bit of brain storming think tank would help.
I have carbide lamps, flashpowder photography, steam-driven water pumps and elevators, for example.
The society's technology is in decline from a comparative contemporary level, somewhat futureward of present-day, to that of a mid Gilded Age U.S. or Victorian Britain. The back slid technological state is the state of the story, caused by exhausted fossil hydrocarbon reserves. The energy economy is based on geothermal installations that survive from the past, what little electricity produced is used for heavy industrial manufacturing: recycled and raw ore metal refining, making calcium carbide for lamp lighting, arc furnaces, and reprocessing wastes for hydrocarbon making of scarce combustible solid, liquid, and gaseous feedstock fuels. Otherwise, draft animal and human power do most of the manual labor and energy generation.
The society is rigidly stratified, along the lines of medieval estates: nobility, clergy, press, commoners (freepersons and bonded persons). Upper level nobility enjoy more luxurious though confidential energy consumption than commoners. Clergy are mostly a class purposed to control commoners' behaviors. Also, the fourth estate, the press, fulfills that function as well. Commoners do thrive and enjoy life though. A degree of lawlessness exists but is mostly about self-serving efforts for social and fiscal upward mobility. Energy theft and illicit intoxicant making, distribution, and consumption are common crimes.
The main dramatic complication of the work centers around a crew of scavengers hunting for hidden artifacts from the previous advanced technological society. These artifacts are inefficiently used in commerce for food vending to the serfs, water purification, autonomous mining systems, small, self-contained hydrogen reformation power generators, other life support systems, like for specialty greenhouse food cultivation for nobilities' diets, and digital record-keeping systems, the sorts of items that a long-term civil disaster shelter might contain. Underground tunnels, mine shafts, utility chases, transport tubes, and aqueducts are involved.
The steampunk motifs overlap with the high tech; for example, a food vending machine that converts organic matter into menu items: Lasagna 16(a)-IL meal, the mobile vending cart is drawn by oxen, the food compiler energized by drudges turning a squirrel cage generator.
The world is a small, dense, oceanless planetesimal with a number of medium to small alkali lakes.
[ November 07, 2013, 03:04 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]
Posted by babooher (Member # 8617) on :
You stand upon a precipice! Since the boundaries of steampunk are fuzzy, you might try going on pinterest or google images and search steampunk furniture, clothing, art, etc.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
quote:Originally posted by babooher: You stand upon a precipice! Since the boundaries of steampunk are fuzzy, you might try going on pinterest or google images and search steampunk furniture, clothing, art, etc.
I have. Also, according to my definition of steampunk, anachrony is a solid basis. I'm also looking at patent medicines as a basis for the intoxicants. Cannabis tinctures, coca syrups, laudunum lozenges, nicotine oils, and lingual meth papers.
The three central characters are a municipal office building housekeeper versed in computer arcana, an artifact maintainer who peddles intoxicants, and a street carbide lamplighter who has a passion for spelunking.
The world is metal rich but a dense lithosphere substrate makes mining hard. So metals and glass substitute for plastics. Like wood for construction and furnishing is scarce so stone buildings and metal furniture is a norm. Insulators are had to come by too, though industrial processes manage a small feedstock output. Much of that is background that isn't going into the story directly, for developing motif objects, like an antiquated plat blueprint copier. Formula compounds for opening rusted shut manways. Conduits made with air gaps for insulating purposes. Cross sections of tunnels are square instead of round, though manhole covers are round. And so on.
The story opens with an attempted copying theft of an ancient underground aqueduct plat from a records and deeds archive.
[ November 07, 2013, 09:06 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]
Posted by Reziac (Member # 9345) on :
I'm wondering where these people came from in the first place, how long they've been here, and what led to it being effectively an abandoned colony (??), all of which would influence their present day.
Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :
One of the things I've understood about steampunk (the science fiction variety, anyway) is that the science is more or less at the Industrial Age level, and not according to what we know now.
For example, space is full of "ether" and Mars most definitely has canals.
Also phlogiston exists and could be used to propel space ships.
For whatever the above may be worth.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
These folks are decendants of a colony planted on the planetesimal. They enjoyed the technology of the past but forgot how most of it works. They do have superstitious beliefs in oddities like the aether of space, how space travel works, and the mechanisms of the celestial sphere.
I get that steampunk is often situated in developing industrial age advancements. The situation I'm working from is a technological regression of the society puts in into an industial age situation that is its equilibrium state.
Picture an advanced colony planted on a gas giant's moon, the gas giant orbiting its primary in the golden zone, the moon orbiting the gas giant. The colony forgot, mostly, except for a few anxious in-the-know individuals no one pays any mind to, that it was once a colony to begin with, say about ten thousand years after the colony was planted.
Posted by LDWriter2 (Member # 9148) on :
I just happen to be doing a short story-or not so short-series with streampunk on an alternative Earth.
I didn't see this mentioned but I could have missed it: Airships.
And clockwork devices: birds, automons (I probably misspelled that last one but I can't find the correct spelling, but they are like robots), desks that fold out(This last one really existed), or anything you can think of from tiny to giant.
There is a "Steampunk Bible" by Jeff Vandermeer that lists a bunch of steampunk devices and clothes. Yeah, clothes your heroes-especially female-can't dress normal either.
Posted by Merlion-Emrys (Member # 7912) on :
The word you are looking for is automatons.
Also, you will certainly need goggles.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
Clockwork is golden, wind up devices that perform tasks or whimsies. Automatons I can see as fixed devices that work similarly. I'm familiar with all sorts of period writing desks. Goggles are golden too.
As far as clothing, the setting's time takes place over a few days of a special festival time of the long night. The central characters dress in well-worn canvas coveralls for their exploits, their class uniforms, actually.
They do come across others overdressed by contemporary standards. Each has a uniform attire that expresses social status, class, vocation, financial status, etc., with individualized expressions. Uniform attire for workplace and public activities was a common convention of the Gilded Age. Perhaps the characters might have to engage in a subterfuge, crossing class boundaries by changing into attire outside their station!? Undergarments are also an intriguing possibility. Arsenic and Old Lace skeletons-in-the-basement undergarments perhaps, scratchy linen or wool underdrawers and longjohns otherwise.
Posted by Pyre Dynasty (Member # 1947) on :
Work leather is important to the steampunk aesthetic. It's like glam/goth but brown and rough. The reason for this is fire is also important. I'd call it the primary element of steampunk.
Flywheel is a word I find often in steampunk settings.
I've also encountered an obsession with flight. Hot air balloons, personal wings with flapping mechanisms far more common than gliders.
Posted by tesknota (Member # 10041) on :
Building on what Pyre said, I want to add zeppelins. I had a conversation with someone a few months ago about what constitutes steampunk, and we decided to agree to disagree on every point except for zeppelins.
Aside from that, women's clothing more often than not contains frills. In addition, women cannot go wrong with a proper parasol.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
Leather, airships, and parasols. Gotcha. Comparatively low atmospheric pressure and density offset by comparatively low gravity might make airships doable, more like lighter than normal kites bouyed by floatation cells maybe. Such a world would have scarce helium and hydrogen reserves though. High winds would make small lift body airships possible.
Leather is an intriguing material and I'd considered its place in the culture as more regressive into late pre-industrial material uses. Buckets, traces, hinges, belts for attire and mills, clothing reinforcing, hats and visors, work aprons, chaps, and long wearing outerwear, and so on. Leather presupposes a pastoral culture, which I see as problematic for this setting since industrial leather processing would require a large feedstock and open plains grain production that this world might not support.
Parasols of the Gilded age were made from whale baleen for ribs. An oceanless world would not have whales, though suitable matter could be made by the compiler machine artfiacts, same with leather and helium and hydrogen. So not just food compilers but ones tasked to make other materials for everyday or luxury items. Database cartridges with particular inventories of matter matrices could be a thriving trade: open market, gray market, or even black market. That type of compiler variety might be a little too close to Star Trek's replicators. Overreliance on the compilers, though, is an underlying cause of the society's technological regression.
Posted by MattLeo (Member # 9331) on :
Don't forget the spunky heroine who defies gender conventions (it's a *man's* world -- I mean Empire) while looking fetching in a corset and white shirtwaist, and who miraculously manages to avoid sharing a cell with Mrs. Pankhurst.
For me the essence of steampunk, the very heart of the genre is the scope for titanic *individual* genius. In a steampunk universe, gentlemen inventors need only a stock of brass, a ready supply of chemical feedstock, and a quiet place to work (a country estate laboratory is ideal) to create super-science inventions.
The hero is not necessarily an inventor or full-time scientist himself, but he's likely to be a dabbler, or to possess esoteric knowledge of some sort or another.
I happen to know a number of real-world inventors with plenty of patents to their names, and they're geniuses, sure, but they're minor players in vast intellectual property generating enterprises. Research today is overwhelmingly done by research *institutions*. The steampunk inventor is John Henry to the modern research institution's steam hammer.
I used to think that the reason for the Victorian milieu in steampunk is that it is the last era in which a world-beating super-science inventor would be credible. An arms control commission could, I reasoned, easily run a modern Captain Nemo to earth by following his supply chains. Then I realized that there *is* a story franchise that is in essence modern steampunk: the IRON MAN movies. Tony Stark is a 21st C Captain Nemo or Robur the Conqueror. Even the way the Iron Man suits are visually portrayed in the movies has a powerful steampunk vibe to it. The movies have a fascination with push-rods, toggles, screws and levers. The comic books, if I understand correctly, have gone toward a more post-mechanical, biological mimicry vibe. Which makes sense because the clockwork-y mechanisms of the movie suits is actually more retro than futuristic.
Update: tell me this isn't steampunk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjuVMf8Sf2Y It even goes "clickety-clack" and "clang" for Pete's sake. Pay particular attention to that Foley work. It includes whining gears, sproinging springs, clock-winding and hammer-on-anvil sounds. Hmmm. Something to think about. What does steampunk technology sound like? Or smell like?
[ November 10, 2013, 11:08 AM: Message edited by: MattLeo ]
Posted by MattLeo (Member # 9331) on :
Oh, and I should mention I have a special entry on my pet peeve list for the steampunk genre.
If you are going to show clockworks being made, learn a little about the process. My biggest pet peeve in this area is when the author shows the clock maker casting fine brass gears. Fine clockwork gears can't be cast in brass for two reasons. First, it'd be almost impossible to get a good cast due to the fine detail on a small gear. The brass wouldn't flow reliably into the tiny tooth shapes. Second is that cast brass is too soft for reliable gears; the teeth have to be work hardened by cutting.
Does it matter to a story that gears are broached, gashed and hobbed rather than cast? Well, it's very unlikely to matter to the story, but by that same reasoning you don't have to show the gears being made at all. I think that if you *do* show a process, it should as a minimum not be debunked by five minutes on Wikipedia or YouTube.
That's a good rule for any fantasy or sci-fi technology. You should contain the counter-factual magic stuff in a black box and never show the contents of that box to the reader. The stuff you *do* show ought to be absolutely credible.
You will of course run afoul of unresolvable differences of opinion, for example about the precise hand-to-hand combat techniques used by armored knights. Often this means you're over-elaborating, in my opinion. But once you've dredged an image out of your imagination and onto the page, I believe you at least ought to go back and ask yourself whether that image would convince *you* if you were in a critical mood.
[ November 10, 2013, 11:03 AM: Message edited by: MattLeo ]
Posted by Reziac (Member # 9345) on :
Steampunk in Everyday Life:
http://www.datamancer.net/ (unfortunately he seems to have removed the pages for a lot of the older projects, but the computer mods, I think capture the spirit)
Posted by Reziac (Member # 9345) on :
Here's a question that's seldom addressed:
Why brass?
Why not steel, which is so much more durable?
Iron-poor planet, perhaps?
Posted by MattLeo (Member # 9331) on :
quote:Originally posted by Reziac: Steampunk in Everyday Life:
http://www.datamancer.net/ (unfortunately he seems to have removed the pages for a lot of the older projects, but the computer mods, I think capture the spirit)
I like the world-map laptop lid, but the skeleton case back is an example of what I'm talking about. The gears are just spread out across the surface for display. Two-dimensional. They don't look like they do anything. Any decoration you show the reader (or viewer) ought to appear to do something, or should clearly be just decoration.
Posted by MattLeo (Member # 9331) on :
quote:Originally posted by Reziac: Here's a question that's seldom addressed:
Why brass?
Why not steel, which is so much more durable?
Iron-poor planet, perhaps?
Well, chiefly brass is much easier to machine than steel. You'd work the brass with a hard steel tool, which would be much quicker than working even mild steel. Imagine rough cutting a hundred teeth in a fine gear; using brass ups your productivity by a factor of two at least, and the finished product is hard enough to do the job. That's engineering; better than it has to be translates to wasted time and effort. And brass is somewhat less corrosion prone -- stainless steel hadn't been invented yet. Also brass is non-magnetic.
That's for actual clockwork. Iron or steel has always been preferred to brass for large coarse gears where the teeth exert large forces. It's also possible to harden the gear teeth while leaving the body of the gear softer and less crack-prone.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
A range of Gilded age social movements are a rich trove of steampunk motifs for milieu development. Suffrage and civil rights, physical science's emergent and reproducible results methods, mass production's impact, enlightenment and evangelical social and spiritual belief systems, exploration and exploitation pushing back terrestrial and celestial boundaries, they were heady times. Fiction subtly helped society and culture come to terms with the changes in physical and cultural space and thought. Golden age physical science fiction emerged as a follow-along in similar veins. Silver age social science fiction fulfilled a similar function.
Combined physical and social science fiction in the Platinum age is richer for the combination, but an unrealized culture gap continued, mostly from centrist monochrome social values. Modernist science fiction hasn't quite yet fulfilled Modernism's range. Postmodern science fiction is few and far between. Where steampunk's literary and folk roles and functions are is I believe in tangible motifs that help culture realize and cope with technology's influences on culture. Ironman is a stand-out example, and all the more relevant and timeless as culture becomes ever more dependent on and indifferent toward understanding digital technology.
A writer's conference workshop I attended asked participants to write a one-page explanation of the internal combustion engine, electrical power, or air conditioning. Responses were imaginative, reading more like superstition beliefs than technical summaries. For that matter, the introductory preface asked participants to consider describing for a group how to draw a circle on a piece of paper that would result in a number of identical depictions. "You've all heard of this exercise before . . ."
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
quote:Originally posted by Reziac: Here's a question that's seldom addressed:
Why brass?
Why not steel, which is so much more durable?
Iron-poor planet, perhaps?
Ask that question of a modern-day explosives expert: because brass cannot be magnetized and doesn't produce sparks when contacting other materials. Heavy-duty, sparkless, and unmagnetizable tools for working around explosives are often made of brass, bronze, or brass-like beryllium-copper alloys. Clockworks and watchworks are difficult enough to make without stray sparks and magnetism, let alone that such mechanisms in mines, around explosives, and so on, are extremely hazardous. Having a magnetized tool or part unpredictably stick to a ferrous metal casing is also hazardous or at least comestically undesirable. Magnetism, static electricty generated by friction on ferrous metals, and sparks also interfere with sensitive electronic components.
Filing ferrous metals produces sparks and slight magnetization, enough magnetization for a tiny ferrous cog to cling to other ferrous parts. Plus magnetized parts interfere with the mechanism's accuracy. A magnetized analog watch stops running. An unmagentized ferrous screwdriver or hammer becomes magnetized with use over time. Fine ferrous metal dusts are in and of themselves hazardous. Iron filings are a key component of thermite. A stray spark could ignite the ferrous fines, if ferrous parts were worked, of a clockwork maker's work station. A warning sign at the entrance to contemporary explosives and flammable gas handling depots says Empty your pockets of all spark-producing items. No ferrous metals. No lighters.
[ November 10, 2013, 12:31 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]
Posted by MattLeo (Member # 9331) on :
quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: A writer's conference workshop I attended asked participants to write a one-page explanation of the internal combustion engine, electrical power, or air conditioning. Responses were imaginative, reading more like superstition beliefs than technical summaries.
Oh, man! I can only imagine.
And by the way which *does* weigh more, a pound of rocks or a pound of feathers?
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
quote:Originally posted by MattLeo: And by the way which *does* weigh more, a pound of rocks or a pound of feathers?
The mass of a material is inversely proportionate to its range of density, friction, boundary flow, electroreactivity potential, elemental molar measure, and ambience coefficients. I have hectares of impassable marshland and passable transportation infrastructure owned by the local municipality for sale. Embrace elaborate obfuscation.
Posted by Reziac (Member # 9345) on :
quote:Originally posted by MattLeo: ...the skeleton case back is an example of what I'm talking about. The gears are just spread out across the surface for display. Two-dimensional. They don't look like they do anything. Any decoration you show the reader (or viewer) ought to appear to do something, or should clearly be just decoration.
He did one recently that had some working gears and stuff... I believe the list price was just under $14,000. Quality hand-work is expensive in these modren times.
[Here insert one of my wails of woe -- look at the workmanship, the sheer artistry of even ordinary stuff from a century or more ago, and you can see the appeal of steampunk -- a world where such workmanship could still exist on an everyday basis.]
Posted by Pyre Dynasty (Member # 1947) on :
I just remembered an important one: Leonardo DeVinchi. His speculative inventions tend to be used often.