cryingalonewithfrankenstein:

skull-bearer:

arte-mysia:

shapechangersinwinter:

atomicdomme:

imagine if steampunk was “actually” punk and not just fucked up empire fetishism

#i think about this a lot #steampunk is based on the idea that the world wars never happened and the industrial revolution never stopped #so imagine that the social movements that were born in the aftermath of ww1 and 2 never happened #imagine if steampunk focused on the colonised countries and the secret technologies and hidden gagdets #that the resistance work on; bitter and disillusioned they cut open their hands on whatever metal gears they could sneak off #to build whatever kind of weapons they can cobble together to defend themselves against the white colonisers #imagine if steampunk focused on the disastrous consquences of a white supremacy that cannot be stopped in its tracts #b/c let’s face it; this is a much more likely to turn into a world-wide dystopia than anything cyberpunk gave us #cyberpunk was about the struggle for personhood in a corporate-dominated future but so many stories are white power fantasies #imagine if steampunk was about the struggle for personhood in colonialism disguised as gentility (via stardust-rain)

The Victorian Era was not just a time of rampant colonialism, but of counter colonial movements and social justice.  This was the time that saw the rise of Socialism, women’s suffrage movements as well as the first movements towards racial equality.  Some of this shows up in the history as well as the literature.

This is something that gets buried, and something that fascinates me about this particular era in history.

If we’re rewriting the laws of physics, can’t we rewrite history so that the British Empire never existed and Britain made it’s wealth by selling awesome inventions and it’s cool and multicultural?

I started writing a buncha words about alternate history and then decided to make them their own post, but in essence: Yes. 

Real life Victorian Britain was surprisingly diverse. There’s a veil that disguses the actuality of the day from us, and it’s the reams of writing that British Victorians produced about how they felt the world should be. 

It was a world of unceasing change where strangers from overseas were moving into the “homeland” and life was becoming increasingly global. Third sons who once might have gone to London or the Continent were going to India to make their fortunes. Goods were being imported from across the ocean – by the end of the 19th century, meat was successfully being imported to London from America and Australia. It felt like the world had gotten bigger overnight, and that it was filled with people who shared no common customs with good ol’ Englishmen. Change was happening at what felt like an ever-increasing rate, and the human effects were visible all around. If you ventured into the East End of London, you would see a sea of non-English faces, and you might not hear English spoken all day.

And that was fucking terrifying to many middle-class white Britons. It felt like too much, too soon, and dozens of writers pushed back against the individual issues they were disturbed by. Sometimes this was poverty and the mistreatment of workers in an increasingly mechanized world. Sometimes it was non-white immigrants existing and women moving from at-home cottage-level work to factories. 

If I had to define Victorian Britain in one word, it would be backlash. That intense focus on propriety, privacy, keeping oneself to oneself, all of it grew out of backlash against the rapidity of the industrial revolution going on all around, and to the “looser” moral codes of the 18th century. There was a feeling that things had gone much too far and it was time to refocus on the “traditional” home and traditional English way of life (do I have to tell you that they were inventing these things as they were praising them). And when I say English I mean English. Wales was pretty thoroughly Anglicized, ditto Scotland, and Ireland continually restless and very angry at being under the English thumb.

That’s why all those writers you read are hammering so hard for non-whites to be kept ground down, for women to stay in the home, for men to take up the white man’s burden, for “traditional Englishness” to remain paramount. They were scared of the progress that was actually happening. 

A lot of steampunk writers stop at the surface layer of what writers wanted their time and place to be, and just rewrite every shitty Victorian novel you ever read, but with gears glued on things. Very few look further and realize that there was only a thin scrim of that uptight Victorianism, that its maintainers fought very hard to keep it there, and that there’s every bit as much exciting unrest and rapid change to pick at in Victorian London as there is in any given cyberpunk setting.