You’ll recall Thursday’s NY Times article about the fashionable new steampunk aesthetic, which dwelled primarily on the neo-Edwardian clothing with a nodding references to the movement’s literary origins in science fiction and fantasy from the 1980s and ’90s. Now we find out that this article was the paper’s second pass at explicating steampunk, as freelance journalist Richard Morgan (who isn’t the British science fiction writer) uses his own website to publish an article the Times spiked last summer that focuses primarily on the intellectual underpinnings of the movement’s design principles:
“Steampunk is the future as dreamt by the past, and so is like a learned alternative to science fiction… Although technically steampunk has been around since the 1980s, it has flourished in recent years among those who jive with the excitement of the last turn of the century more than the current one. These are not Luddites, but rather ordinary folks nostalgic for a time before every machine was digitally muddled. It is the opposite of the iPhone aesthetic; instead of being sleek, subtle and vaguely magical, steampunk is clunky, candid and obliging.”
So why has this version of the steampunk story been collecting imaginary dust in a metaphorical drawer for nearly a year? The only thing I can think of is that somebody decided “an 1890 Olivetti sidestrike typewriter, a brass gyroscope, swinging magnifying glasses on a stand, and an old accordion-style camera” wasn’t as ‘sexy’ as “petticoats, old military storm coats, goggles and aviator caps with an Amelia Earhart flair.” Among the many differences between the two articles, the one I found most amusing was that the fashion-oriented piece has plenty of quotes from “Jake von Slatt” of The Steampunk Workshop, while Morgan’s tech-centric article supplies the additional detail that von Slatt’s real name is Sean Slattery. This gets even better when you go to the website and realize Slattery’s full steampunk persona is “Hieronymous Isambard von Slatt.” It’s a good thing he’s just a fun-loving anachronistic gearhead, and not a phony memoirist—or else the Times editors would be feeling pretty silly right about now, given their renewed commitment to identity vigilance.