This new blog article focuses on the decades that passed before the word Steampunk ever appeared in print. There was a time when certain works could have been considered part of the Steampunk universe, but they had the poor timing to appear before 1987. Even K.W. Jeter, who coined the word, openly admits that the thing existed with or without him. On his website, he says:
"Here's the deal: I didn't invent steampunk. But I did happen to invent the word steampunk. "There is a lot of creativity, written and otherwise, and general fun in the fantasy and science-fiction world around the theme of the Victorian era, and if a word I came up with has become the common name for all of that, I'm flattered. But it would continue to exist, with or without that label".
As we have seen in previous chapters, defining the boundaries of Steampunk is no easy task. There is a red line I am personally willing to draw in the sand, though others may disagree. This question comes up fairly often:
Is science fiction from the Victorian era "Steampunk"?
My personal answer to that question is a resounding "no." I am open to being convinced otherwise, but here is my reasoning.
The "scientific romances" (as these stories were called by their contemporaries) written by people like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and others were firmly forward-looking. They were largely written about a near future that the authors thought (or hoped, or feared, depending on the story) was achievable. Steampunk, on the other hand, is more or less backward-looking. We now stand at a technological and intellectual point beyond the era that the genre draws from. Even if a story is set at some point in the future, if the technology dates back to the Industrial Revolution, it is pointing to the past.
Moreover, Steampunk works often use archetypes and tropes created during the Steam Age but employ them to offer a critique of the past or the present. I therefore consider them fundamentally different books from Victorian "classics" through to the 1950s.
That said, Steampunk works frequently draw direct inspiration from Victorian-era fiction. So I would like to take time to explore those works as food for the imagination, along with some of the adaptations that followed their creation.
From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: An Extraordinary Journey
The Steam Age at the Heart of Retrofuturism.
Some of the most beloved works of the Steam Age were adapted for the stage, even during the author's own lifetime. Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, was staged just one year after the novella's first publication. The writer attended the performance, then stormed out in fury.
In the book, he had been careful never to state precisely what the good doctor found so "evil" in himself (and which in turn manifested as Mr. Hyde). In the play, the writers had decided to portray this evil by making Mr. Hyde a compulsive womaniser. Stevenson was appalled that his character's "wickedness" could be reduced to such a trivial vice.
While imprecision works perfectly in written form, it would not have worked on stage at all. Had you asked the playwright, the inability to choose visual cues about the nature of this "evil" would have ruined the play. The truth is that many wonderful books simply do not translate to a visual medium without some concession both to the medium itself and to audience expectations. In other words, books are almost always more "punk" and less sanitised than any adaptation.
Where Jekyll and Hyde is concerned, the more adaptations there are, the more they tend to drift. In the original, the reader does not know the connection between the two men, and the story is told by a third party. In most visual adaptations, there is no narrator other than Jekyll and Hyde themselves, who are most often played by the same actor. This runs entirely counter to the original and fundamentally changes the audience's experience. (Though you would be hard-pressed today to find anyone who is not already familiar with Stevenson's story). Between the pressures of the particular medium and the pressure to do something new, stories change with each new adaptation.
Steampunk Universes, Endlessly Revisited
Although this may seem paradoxical coming from me, it is precisely why I place the many adaptations of 19th-century classics more firmly in the Steampunk canon rather than as genuinely Steampunk works. Note that I say "more firmly," which means they do not necessarily fit well at all, but because they are adaptations, there is a potential for drift that has distorted the author's original vision. Furthermore, some would be more at home in one of the other sub-genres of the genre, such as teslapunk, clockworkpunk or dieselpunk... so you may disagree with the examples I have provided. In any case, these are some of the earliest film adaptations of works written during the Steam Age, and they deserve to be noted as sources of inspiration for those who were destined to carry the Steampunk label later on.
Alice in Wonderland
The book was first published by Lewis Carroll in 1865 and was first screened as an 8-minute film in 1903. It stays close to the story but, as a silent film, lacks the charm and resonance of Carroll's extraordinary language.
The 1931 adaptation gave the story a literal "voice," though American amateur actors apparently struggled to reproduce British accents. Throughout the 1930s, several stage plays, puppet shows and other types of adaptations emerged as "Alice fever" swept the English-speaking world.
Two decades later, Disney Studios gave it their best shot, this time in animation. It was their 13th animated feature film. Disney had originally begun working on an animated adaptation in the 1930s but had abandoned the project. The idea was revived in the 1940s and came to fruition in 1951. This film is considered one of the finest ever made by that studio, and is often celebrated as one of the best adaptations of Alice in Wonderland ever produced.
You are probably familiar with the film, but what most people do not know is that Walt Disney had already produced, in the early 1920s, a series of short films paying homage to the story, known as the "Alice Comedies."
Around the World in Eighty Days (1919 and 1956)
I was surprised to learn that this Jules Verne story was one of the first to be adapted for film. I had assumed that with so many different locations, the shoot would have been very costly and time-consuming. The original story was written in 1873, and the first adaptation came out of Germany in 1919. Despite the world wars, Germany was a major force in cinema during the first half of the 20th century. This version is a parody of the original story and was originally to be called "A Journey Around the World" due to a copyright dispute with the Verne estate.
But the version you have probably seen comes from Disney in 1956. While this adaptation is not meant to be comic, the screenwriters did take liberties. The most obvious is the addition of a stop in Spain and Phileas Fogg's arrival by hot-air balloon. Although this scene does not appear in the original text, it may be a nod to another Verne classic, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863). To make room for it, they dropped a (fairly long) section about the Mormons. Passepartout would have had to sit still and listen, but I doubt the audiences minded!
The Mysterious Island (1929, 1941 and 1951)
The first film to tackle this Jules Verne tale in 1929 shared the name but bore little resemblance to the book. In many ways, it was more of a prequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, except that the captain (called "Dakkar" here rather than Nemo) dies at the end of the story, as in the book. This version was thought to be lost until a copy was discovered and preserved in Prague in 2013.
The 1941 film was made in Russia and follows the original text much more closely. Ten years later, Columbia Pictures produced the first English-language adaptation, but could not resist throwing in a little extra mayhem along the way. In addition to the pirates and natural phenomena threatening the shipwrecked heroes, aliens from Mercury also inhabit the island. They were able to incorporate this additional plot because it was a serial with a total runtime of over 250 minutes.
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: A Journey into the Unknown
Treasure Island (1934 and 1950)
Here is another Stevenson work that proved popular on the big screen. The lack of obvious steam is offset by the "shipwreck" theme. Several Steam Age authors wrote tales about poor souls lost and washed ashore on some mysterious land. Personally, I would like to see Steampunk explore this territory more, but authors seem to feel more comfortable in urban settings.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
This is one of the most — if not the most — popular film adaptations of Jules Verne's work. Yet it departs significantly from the original in terms of technology. Rather than relying on a chemical reaction to generate electricity, Nemo's Nautilus is powered by a nuclear reactor. This choice likely reflects the era's enthusiasm for a new technology rather than any dissatisfaction with Verne's science. The film also makes the encounter with the giant squid a far more dramatic event than it is in the text. This film is undoubtedly a turning point in the visual aesthetic of Jules Verne as seen by the general public. One could argue that the Steampunk visual identity gradually takes shape and reshapes our perception of the original work.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
In Jules Verne's 1864 novel, an eccentric uncle and nephew follow centuries-old directions to find a tunnel that leads to the center of the Earth. This adaptation adds murder and conspiracy to what is essentially a travel narrative. Rival factions attempt to prove the claims' validity and are willing to kill to do so.
The Early Novels Are Retroactively Called Steampunk
Ronald C. Clark devoted most of his writing career to non-fiction. His favorite subjects were mountaineering and biographies of historical figures such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. However, in 1967, he published a book that many consider the first Steampunk novel. Queen Victoria's Bomb is an alternative history in which the British develop the atomic bomb during the Crimean War.
A few years later, Michael Moorcock gave the world the first installment of his "The Nomad of Time" series. Time travel, of the kind found in the work of H.G. Wells, is the central theme of the series. However, it also contains other essential Steampunk elements, such as airships. In the first book, we meet an Edwardian-era soldier stationed in India. He travels to a parallel universe where the First World War never took place. The second book originally carried the subtitle "a romanticised scientific novel," in homage to its predecessors. This book deals even more openly with Britain's imperialist history.
Between Moorcock's second and third installment (The Steel Tsar), K.W. Jeter published his sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, titled Morlock Night in 1979. Since Jeter and his peers experienced the era both before and after the word Steampunk appeared, I have placed references to their books here. It is worth noting, however, that time travel itself seems to be an important gateway for these explorations of the industrial era and the implications of the actions taken during that period.
The Case of Western-Punk or Cattle-Punk
Much like Victorian fantasy — sometimes also called Gaslamp — can be seen as an ancestor of Steampunk, the Wild West infused with retrofuturism is likewise a genre that intertwines elements to create something new. For many members of the baby boom generation, and even earlier, childhood was shaped by romantic visions of the pioneer era as embodied by figures like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Sam Elliott.
These big-screen dramas fell out of favor in the 1970s, but on television, writers began playing with the format as early as 1964 with Wild, Wild West. Although the series has a cowboy setting, the name is actually a wordplay on the lead character, James West. With the help of his partner and their gadget-filled wagon, they spy on behalf of Ulysses S. Grant. The series blends the western genre with the spy thriller — think James Bond — which was popular at the time. It ran for four seasons between 1964 and 1969. Additionally, 1980 saw the production of TV movies Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild Wild West Revisited. We won't talk about the Will Smith film here...
The decline of the cowboy drama and its place in recent memory also paved the way for Mel Brooks's hit film Blazing Saddles, released in 1974. It was a landmark moment in film history, not only for the commentary on racial intolerance buried beneath the jokes, but also because it was the first time anyone had "deconstructed" the cowboy myth on screen. (Incidentally, Brooks also released Young Frankenstein the same year, which is of course a parody of Mary Shelley's gothic scientific novel, The Modern Prometheus, also known as Frankenstein.) Weird West is also a genre in its own right, so I will not attempt to go into too much depth here. However, it is worth mentioning as a cousin of both Steampunk and Cattlepunk.
Thank you for reading, and see you soon for another article on the fabulous universe of Steampunk!