Steampunk?

[ElterAgo]

Ok, I've never really gotten into the steampunk thing. I can kinda see the attraction but it just doesn't have that much appeal to me. I would guess because things just don't work like that. I'm too much of an engineer for a lot of what is described.

But a couple of my friends were discussing it and had various (and self contradictory) opinions on how it was supposed to work. So I wanted to find out what it was supposed to be.

So which is it supposed to be?

• Magic and engineering working together for greater effect.
  
• Magic strengthening the materials so they can contain the steam, pressure, and heat can be contained. Magic in the creation of item, but nil in using the item.
  
• Almost no magic involved at all. The effects are almost entirely non-magic in creation and/or use.
  
• Something else entirely?

If it was the first one, I could buy into it. But most people seem to argue that is more like the second or third items. Sorry those just don't work.
I don't care how much you strengthen the steel container. There is a limit to how much energy you can get our of compressed air. And it won't be enough in the handle of your cane to drive a 6" steel spike through a 1/2" of plate armor.
It doesn't matter if you make a 10' mechanical extension for your arm. Your shoulder isn't capable of applying sufficient leverage to sword fight effectively at that distance.

[Laurefindel]

It has to do with suspension of disbelief, the rest is (mostly) irrelevant.

Typical fantasy accept that magic and dragons exist. If you refute that, much of the setting collapses.

In steampunk, you need to accept that steam engines can be LOT more efficient that what we know they can be. Be it purely mad science or a combination of magic and technology, it doesn't matter. If you can can't work with that premise (and I wouldn't hold it against you if you didn't), than steampunk isn't for you.

Same applies to many other settings involving technology. Even if you leave the whole Force thing aside, there's no way we can take Star Wars seriously on a science basis. Steampunk is like that; but in pseudo Victorian Europe.

[Orthos]

Pretty much what Laure said.

Here's a test that I think works well: Google the comic Girl Genius and read it, at least the first couple of chapters (it's quite long, so I don't expect you to read the whole thing for the purposes of this one test). If the basic idea of the setting - that people with the innate "Spark of Genius/Madness" can make technology do things that should otherwise be impossible - is too far-fetched for you to follow, I'd say about 90% of steampunk will rub you the wrong way as well. The last remaining 10% or so would be the "hard science" versions of the genre, if they exist; I've never been hugely fond of hard science, so it's not something I'm highly aware of.

It's also a nice introduction to the genre and the aesthetics that many people like about it.

[LazarX]

ElterAgo wrote:

So I wanted to find out what it was supposed to be.

So which is it supposed to be?

• Magic and engineering working together for greater effect.
  
• Magic strengthening the materials so they can contain the steam, pressure, and heat can be contained. Magic in the creation of item, but nil in using the item.
  
• Almost no magic involved at all. The effects are almost entirely non-magic in creation and/or use.
  
• Something else entirely?

The answer when the genre was invented by William "Neuromancer" Gibson is close to the last. It was basically a subgenre of science fiction with no magic whatsoever.

In the 19th century a man named Charles Babbage envisioned a machine that could replace the computer. In those days a computer was a person who specialized in tabulation and counting. The punch card had already been invented to control automated textile machines in places like Paterson, New Jersey. Babbage proposed a steam driven calculating machine that would fill a building larger than Madison Square Garden. It was never built, although small scale models were successfully demonstrated.

The premise of Gibson's "Difference Engine" was that Babbage's machine was built, and others like it used to create an information network that controlled where you were allowed to travel, authorization being given by punch cards. and appropriately doctored cards could be used to alter your level of access and your stored information.

It became expanded to a genre where modern technological concepts, i.e. mecha were realised with steam driven technology. The genre has begun to loose defintion somewhat with the inclusion of stories such as the "Steam Lantern" episode in Green Lantern's animated series, and the Eberron setting which uses magic in place of steam to get the same effects.

[Laurefindel]

Orthos wrote:

Pretty much what Laure said.

Here's a test that I think works well: Google the comic Girl Genius and read it, at least the first couple of chapters (it's quite long, so I don't expect you to read the whole thing for the purposes of this one test). If the basic idea of the setting - that people with the innate "Spark of Genius/Madness" can make technology do things that should otherwise be impossible - is too far-fetched for you to follow, I'd say about 90% of steampunk will rub you the wrong way as well. The last remaining 10% or so would be the "hard science" versions of the genre, if they exist.

I LOVE!!! Girl Genius. Hands down my favourite webcomic, and one of my top comics/mangas/bandes dessinées ever.

It's setting is a bit appart from SteamPunk however (more Napoleonic/Habsbourg Empire era than the typical steam-age Victorian) and closer to the "sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" trope than the typical "20th-century-technology-but-running-on-steam" / Jules Verne inspired.

[Orthos]

I always took Gibson's work as more cyberpunk and less steampunk, personally. Maybe it's just because the Neuromancer series is the only thing of his I've read, though. If he's done more steampunk stuff, I haven't heard of it.

[Laurefindel]

When was SteamPunk coined as a genre anyways? I heard of Cyberpunk in the late 80's, but I never heard of steampunk or dieselpunk back then (although I remember steampunk-ish art from as long as I can remember).

[Aubrey the Malformed]

ElterAgo wrote:

Ok, I've never really gotten into the steampunk thing. I can kinda see the attraction but it just doesn't have that much appeal to me. I would guess because things just don't work like that. I'm too much of an engineer for a lot of what is described.

But a couple of my friends were discussing it and had various (and self contradictory) opinions on how it was supposed to work. So I wanted to find out what it was supposed to be.

So which is it supposed to be?

• Magic and engineering working together for greater effect.
  
• Magic strengthening the materials so they can contain the steam, pressure, and heat can be contained. Magic in the creation of item, but nil in using the item.
  
• Almost no magic involved at all. The effects are almost entirely non-magic in creation and/or use.
  
• Something else entirely?

If it was the first one, I could buy into it. But most people seem to argue that is more like the second or third items. Sorry those just don't work.
I don't care how much you strengthen the steel container. There is a limit to how much energy you can get our of compressed air. And it won't be enough in the handle of your cane to drive a 6" steel spike through a 1/2" of plate armor.
It doesn't matter if you make a 10' mechanical extension for your arm. Your shoulder isn't capable of applying sufficient leverage to sword fight effectively at that distance.

1st, you are fine with magic, which really isn't at all how things work, but not with steampunk? I'm being facetious, of course - it is too close to your day-to-day experience that you can see the flaws, whereas no one knows how magic works... Because it doesn't.

But I think you misunderstand steampunk. It's not a mechanical concept, it is a setting. Everything else comes from that. Steampunk, in its original guise, is much more like an alternate take on Victoriana. It need not be magical, it can be instead science fiction (you could argue that War of the Worlds would be steampunk if written today), often extrapolating from scientific dicoveries of the era to see "what if" - an example woulf the The Difference Engine by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, which posits a Victorian computer age based on Baggae's engine. So in many ways it's not about magic, it is about science.

It has moved more away from an explicitly Victorian setting with other authors. And example (a good example) would be China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, which has an urban, sort-of industrial setting and Victorian sort of tech but which also has weird monsters and is definitely an alternate setting, not historical Earth. Another example (and a bit more light-hearted) would be the Ketty Jay series by Chris Wooding, which has fantasy elements (alternate world setting, "daemons") but is more explicitly science fiction.

I think these sorts of books have been influential in the creation of "steampunk" campiagn settings (Eberron, Iron Kingdoms, to name a few). Of course, since a lot of these are bolt-ons to systems like D&D, PF and so on they tend to have greater magical elements since these are already inherent in the systems.

[Mythic Evil Lincoln]

ElterAgo wrote:

So which is it supposed to be?

Magic and engineering working together for greater effect.

Magic strengthening the materials so they can contain the steam, pressure, and heat can be contained. Magic in the creation of item, but nil in using the item.

These would both fit more neatly under "Dungeonpunk", which I understand is the label for worlds where magic replaces and emulates modern technology. Eberron is dungeonpunk. Iron Kingdoms, I would say, is also a flavor or dungeonpunk.

ElterAgo wrote:

Almost no magic involved at all. The effects are almost entirely non-magic in creation and/or use.

In theory, steampunk is this. It's about attaining a level of technological sophistication that rivals the modern, but utilizing an obsolete power source. I'm pretty sure that it finds it's origin in books like Sterling/Gibson's The Difference Engine, which itself was inspired by Charles Babbage's work. Basically, the thematic conceit is "What if Babbage's computer actually worked?" -- which is related to your engineering issues: what if the physical limitations of steam as a power source didn't constrain innovation, but allowed it to progress to a more or less modern level?

It's a niche that exploded in popularity somewhat inexplicably. I think people just find the aesthetics of exposed mechanisms from that period to be pleasant.

[LazarX]

Orthos wrote:

I always took Gibson's work as more cyberpunk and less steampunk, personally. Maybe it's just because the Neuromancer series is the only thing of his I've read, though. If he's done more steampunk stuff, I haven't heard of it.

The problem is that you only read Neuromancer. If you read "Difference Engine" the novel that invented the steampunk genre, you'd know what I mean. It's a far different world than cyberpunk.

[Orthos]

Ah, so noted. Might put that on the List then.

[jemstone]

Having been involved in the Steampunk genre since it was still called "High Victoriana" and been playing Space 1889 and Castle Falkenstein since their inception, I can say that perhaps people attributing its creation to Gibson are missing out on Verne, Welles, Burroughs and the rest of the Turn-Of-The-Century writers who were coming out of the dim and dreary 19th Century and into the "Promise" of the 20th with stars in their eyes and the Moon in their sights.

We're talking about novels in which Martians were flung to Earth in enormous bullets and ran about the mighty British Empire in tripods, six-legged harvesters and "soundless flying machines". Novels in which angry ship captains created undersea utopias in submarines patterned after sea monsters. Men willing themselves to red, wind-swept Barsoom and fighting for the love of sapient plant-princesses while other men dug deep, deep into the bowels of Earth to fight the savages of Pellucidar.

Steampunk didn't begin with Gibson in the slightest. It just didn't have a name coined to it that people could latch on to.

But that's all academic.

Personally, I dig Steampunk as what it is: a design aesthetic used to explain why your brass fittings and mahogany paneling can contain and control and conduct more energy than a locomotive, or why the Nautilus' nuclear reactor never melts down or needs to be flushed regularly (check it, the damn thing was nuclear). It is no more, nor less, believable or "out there" than Magitech, Cyberpunk (another genre I love), or plain old mutilated-Tolkein-istic D&D.

Digression 1:

I say "design aesthetic" because I think pretty much any culture can and should be involved in the Steampunk genre, not just the co-opting (deliberate, deserved, or not) that's been latched on to by the Steampunk "recreationist" community to basically bury it deep in Victorian England and never let it out. It's more than just slapping gears on a top hat and drinking tea from a hand-built compression engine, but that's an entirely different sent of conversations

Digression 2:

If you're going to talk about the Babbage engine, you need to also talk about Ada Lovelace, the woman that most of Babbage's actual work on the engine should be credited to.

[ElterAgo]

Orthos wrote:

...

Here's a test that I think works well: Google the comic Girl Genius and read it, at least the first couple of chapters ... If the basic idea of the setting - that people with the innate "Spark of Genius/Madness" can make technology do things that should otherwise be impossible - is too far-fetched for you to follow, I'd say about 90% of steampunk will rub you the wrong way as well. ...

Tried it and you're right. I kept thinking that wouldn't work.

.
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Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

...

1st, you are fine with magic, which really isn't at all how things work, but not with steampunk? I'm being facetious, of course - it is too close to your day-to-day experience that you can see the flaws, whereas no one knows how magic works... Because it doesn't. ...

Yeah guess half of my problem would be the people describing it as not magic, it's just technology applied a different way. But it isn't. Almost nothing of what they describe can possibly work.

[Terquem]

I prefer gas-lamp fantasy

[Orthos]

jemstone wrote:

Having been involved in the Steampunk genre since it was still called "High Victoriana" and been playing Space 1889 and Castle Falkenstein since their inception, I can say that perhaps people attributing its creation to Gibson are missing out on Verne, Welles, Burroughs and the rest of the Turn-Of-The-Century writers who were coming out of the dim and dreary 19th Century and into the "Promise" of the 20th with stars in their eyes and the Moon in their sights.

We're talking about novels in which Martians were flung to Earth in enormous bullets and ran about the mighty British Empire in tripods, six-legged harvesters and "soundless flying machines". Novels in which angry ship captains created undersea utopias in submarines patterned after sea monsters. Men willing themselves to red, wind-swept Barsoom and fighting for the love of sapient plant-princesses while other men dug deep, deep into the bowels of Earth to fight the savages of Pellucidar.

Steampunk didn't begin with Gibson in the slightest. It just didn't have a name coined to it that people could latch on to.

Can I get recommendations for The List? =)

[jemstone]

Orthos wrote:

Can I get recommendations for The List? =)

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea

A Journey To The Center Of The Earth
The War Of The Worlds
First Men In The Moon
Any of the "John Carter Of Mars"/"Barsoom" books (though those are more akin to Howard's "Conan" than what is typically viewed as Steampunk (and reek of Great White Hero syndrome), they do deal with things such as culture-clashes, strange technology utilizing steam, light, and radiation)
Any of the "Pellucidar" series (for the exploration and technology, see above for some of their problems)

[thejeff]

ElterAgo wrote:

Orthos wrote:

...

Here's a test that I think works well: Google the comic Girl Genius and read it, at least the first couple of chapters ... If the basic idea of the setting - that people with the innate "Spark of Genius/Madness" can make technology do things that should otherwise be impossible - is too far-fetched for you to follow, I'd say about 90% of steampunk will rub you the wrong way as well. ...

Tried it and you're right. I kept thinking that wouldn't work.

.
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Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

...

1st, you are fine with magic, which really isn't at all how things work, but not with steampunk? I'm being facetious, of course - it is too close to your day-to-day experience that you can see the flaws, whereas no one knows how magic works... Because it doesn't. ...

Yeah guess half of my problem would be the people describing it as not magic, it's just technology applied a different way. But it isn't. Almost nothing of what they describe can possibly work.

Just like most of regular science fiction. Except the relatively small genre of near-future, hard SF.

Cyberpunk is nonsense. Basically anything with aliens and certainly anything with FTL.
It's just that it's easier to suspend disbelief when the author's postulating either unspecified future-tech or physics you haven't studied than when it's more basic engineering.

Just accept that in most steampunk settings, the laws of physics don't work quite like they do in our world. Or that the scientists of that setting are tapping into some magic-equivalent to make their stuff work. Which is pretty clearly the Girl Genius approach - they certainly don't intend you to think you could actually build any of those things and have them work. They even call it "Gas Lamp Fantasy".

[LazarX]

jemstone wrote:

Having been involved in the Steampunk genre since it was still called "High Victoriana" and been playing Space 1889 and Castle Falkenstein since their inception, I can say that perhaps people attributing its creation to Gibson are missing out on Verne, Welles, Burroughs and the rest of the Turn-Of-The-Century writers who were coming out of the dim and dreary 19th Century and into the "Promise" of the 20th with stars in their eyes and the Moon in their sights.

We're talking about novels in which Martians were flung to Earth in enormous bullets and ran about the mighty British Empire in tripods, six-legged harvesters and "soundless flying machines". Novels in which angry ship captains created undersea utopias in submarines patterned after sea monsters. Men willing themselves to red, wind-swept Barsoom and fighting for the love of sapient plant-princesses while other men dug deep, deep into the bowels of Earth to fight the savages of Pellucidar.

Steampunk didn't begin with Gibson in the slightest. It just didn't have a name coined to it that people could latch on to.

What you're referring to is pulp adventure fiction. What differentiates Difference Engine is that it shares practically nothing with these other novels other than the setting itself. Cyberpunk in it's purist form is about the manipulation of society with information and information itself as something to steal and manipulate. Cyberpunk in literature does not have the emphasis on guns and flashy hardware prosthetics that Cyberpunk games do. The original expression of SteamPunk in "Difference Engine" is essentially Cybperpunk without transistors. It's a vastly different expression than Victorian pulp fiction which is where I'd classify the works you cite.

In short "Difference Engine" is steam punk. "Wild Wild West" is Victorian pulp adventure fiction. It's quite possible for a story to include elements of both.

[thejeff]

LazarX wrote:

jemstone wrote:

Having been involved in the Steampunk genre since it was still called "High Victoriana" and been playing Space 1889 and Castle Falkenstein since their inception, I can say that perhaps people attributing its creation to Gibson are missing out on Verne, Welles, Burroughs and the rest of the Turn-Of-The-Century writers who were coming out of the dim and dreary 19th Century and into the "Promise" of the 20th with stars in their eyes and the Moon in their sights.

We're talking about novels in which Martians were flung to Earth in enormous bullets and ran about the mighty British Empire in tripods, six-legged harvesters and "soundless flying machines". Novels in which angry ship captains created undersea utopias in submarines patterned after sea monsters. Men willing themselves to red, wind-swept Barsoom and fighting for the love of sapient plant-princesses while other men dug deep, deep into the bowels of Earth to fight the savages of Pellucidar.

Steampunk didn't begin with Gibson in the slightest. It just didn't have a name coined to it that people could latch on to.

What you're referring to is pulp adventure fiction. What differentiates Difference Engine is that it shares practically nothing with these other novels other than the setting itself. Cyberpunk in it's purist form is about the manipulation of society with information and information itself as something to steal and manipulate. Cyberpunk in literature does not have the emphasis on guns and flashy hardware prosthetics that Cyberpunk games do. The original expression of SteamPunk in "Difference Engine" is essentially Cybperpunk without transistors. It's a vastly different expression than Victorian pulp fiction which is where I'd classify the works you cite.

In short "Difference Engine" is steam punk. "Wild Wild West" is Victorian pulp adventure fiction. It's quite possible for a story to include elements of both.

While the term was coined for Difference Engine, it doesn't limit the genre quite that much. Modern steampunk is more about the trappings, the retro-tech, than it's about analytical engines and the manipulation of society with information.

If you stuck with that, there would really only be a few works of steampunk and we'd need another name for the rest.:)

[LazarX]

thejeff wrote:

While the term was coined for Difference Engine, it doesn't limit the genre quite that much. Modern steampunk is more about the trappings, the retro-tech, than it's about analytical engines and the manipulation of society with information.

If you stuck with that, there would really only be a few works of steampunk and we'd need another name for the rest.:).

Which I've already supplied. :)

[jemstone]

LazarX, I respectfully disagree with your blanket dismissal of all of the sources I cited simply because of what I'm seeing (and I could be wrong) as a matter of semantics and hair-splitting. An enormous nuclear powered submarine envisioned decades before the actual sighting, much less splitting, of the atom certainly counts as steampunk - especially since the Nautilus was described as using heat and radiation to generate steam to power its engines and its systems.

Don't get me wrong, I am an absolute Gibson fanboy (one who still wonders why he hasn't yet disassociated himself from the episodes of the X-files that he wrote... I suppose he had to eat?) and I will defend him to this day against people who say Stephenson is "clearly" better.

I simply suggest to you that the genre existed, and continues to exist, under a number of styles, writers, and yes, even other genres, well before Gibson coined the term, and that that term does not necessarily neatly fit into a readily defined box.

All of that being said, there is nothing to prevent the "pulp adventure genre" (which, again, I do not think Welles or Verne should fall into, though I'll give you that on Howard and Burroughs), from also falling in to the Steampunk genre as "Defined."

The wonderful thing about genres, as they say, is that genres are mutable things.

I'm writing a novel that is noir detective, but also cyberpunk, pulp adventure, and transhumanist genres. Which does it belong to? All of them? One of them? None? Only The Shadow knows. ;)

You and I don't have to agree on the full definition of Steampunk (in fact it makes things more interesting for the genre as a whole if there IS disagreement on it!), but I think perhaps blanketly dismissing the vast and incredibly influential works of Those Who Came Before (Verne especially) is not quite Cricket.

-Edit to Add-

Going on the "information as commodity/weapon/tool for change" tip that is prevalent throughout the Cyberpunk genre, and applying it to Steampunk, then YES, I can see your point, LazarX. I'm sorry that slipped my notice. Please accept my apologies.

However (and there is always a however), I do think the genre as it stands has moved well beyond that - Girl Genius, for instance, is nothing like Difference Engine, nor are any other of the Steampunk novels, web comics, games, or the like that are currently available. Almost everything I see in the genre these days has bounded out well away from Difference Engine and gone whole hog on "This is my Ether Cycle and it is powered by a small steam reactor the size of my head. How? SCIENCE!"

Which, when you get down to it, is more Verne than Gibson, any day.

Does that make more sense for what I'm getting at now? I hope so. And again, I'm sorry I missed your point about information vis-a-vis Cyberpunk-without-transistors.

[Artemis Moonstar]

Dotting for Steampunk material. Been wanting to read some of the genre, but have been a little too lazy to really look too much into it. With this thread, I can now hit the local library with a list of authors and/or books.

Plus as I understood it, Steampunk as a setting was more about "SCIENCE!" powered by steam, with strange, ill-defined but seemingly believable modifications to steam engines and so forth. Everything else outside of that is variation.

.... *Wanders off to continue scribbling about his multi-punk setting.*

[Nitro-13]

I always liked the show Castle's explanation of Steampunk,describing it as “a subculture that embraces the simplicity and romance of the past and at the same time couples it with the hope and promise and sheer supercoolness of futuristic design.

Hope that helps!

[Laurefindel]

ElterAgo wrote:

Yeah guess half of my problem would be the people describing it as not magic, it's just technology applied a different way. But it isn't. Almost nothing of what they describe can possibly work.

As noted above, Steampunk isn't that more far-fetched than many other sci-fi settings (like Star Wars, even without the Force).

Even if we remove the "but, dragons!" element of fantasy RPGs, humans can typically do/withstand things that we know don't work, or would kill us outright. Having machines doing/withstanding things that we know don't work isn't a big leap.

Steampunks doesn't make more or less sense than any other fantasy/sci-fi settings; that ALL break down at the slightest application of logic.

[Terquem]

Hold on, are you saying that even if I did travel at the speed of light it would take 4 years to reach the nearest star, and it doesn't have any inhabitable planets?

[Artemis Moonstar]

@ElterAgo: So.... You're fine with magic, but not scifi then.

Because Sci-Fi isn't magic. It's, vast majority of it (Star Trek, Battlestar from what I heard, etc), simply technology. The reason they "work logically" is because 1) it takes place in the future, and 2) new elements, physics, and so forth are typically introduced to hand-waive the illogic.

If you're fine with sci-fi, then you should be fine with basic Steam Punk. After all, what is so unbelievable about someone having a spark of genius and figuring out something new with science?

Science and physics are not static. They are always changing, always finding that which is new. If it was not, we would not have gravity, relativity, much of the table of elements, and so on.

What is so hard about believing that there are advances in old technologies that have not been discovered? New rules of physics, or quantum physics, that someone might have even, oh I don't know, accidentally stumbled upon?

Or, you know. Insert hand-waive minovsky-particle to say "this thing acts like so, so it works".

You must hate modern day spy movies, MacGuyver, and any film concerning aliens or advanced tech....

[Pan]

Terquem wrote:

Hold on, are you saying that even if I did travel at the speed of light it would take 4 years to reach the nearest star, and it doesn't have any inhabitable planets?

4.5 actually. Probably not habitable no.

[ElterAgo]

Laurefindel wrote:

ElterAgo wrote:

Yeah guess half of my problem would be the people describing it as not magic, it's just technology applied a different way. But it isn't. Almost nothing of what they describe can possibly work.

As noted above, Steampunk isn't that more far-fetched than many other sci-fi settings (like Star Wars, even without the Force).

Even if we remove the "but, dragons!" element of fantasy RPGs, humans can typically do/withstand things that we know don't work, or would kill us outright. Having machines doing/withstanding things that we know don't work isn't a big leap.

Steampunks doesn't make more or less sense than any other fantasy/sci-fi settings; that ALL break down at the slightest application of logic.

I agree that Star Wars doesn't really fit the label science fiction. It simply does NOT follow the logical conclusions of it's own science rules. But I don't want to get into that debate here.

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[ElterAgo]

Artemis Moonstar wrote:

@ElterAgo: So.... You're fine with magic, but not scifi then.

Because Sci-Fi isn't magic. It's, vast majority of it (Star Trek, Battlestar from what I heard, etc), simply technology. The reason they "work logically" is because 1) it takes place in the future, and 2) new elements, physics, and so forth are typically introduced to hand-waive the illogic.

If you're fine with sci-fi, then you should be fine with basic Steam Punk. After all, what is so unbelievable about someone having a spark of genius and figuring out something new with science?

Science and physics are not static. They are always changing, always finding that which is new. If it was not, we would not have gravity, relativity, much of the table of elements, and so on.

What is so hard about believing that there are advances in old technologies that have not been discovered? New rules of physics, or quantum physics, that someone might have even, oh I don't know, accidentally stumbled upon?

Or, you know. Insert hand-waive minovsky-particle to say "this thing acts like so, so it works".

You must hate modern day spy movies, MacGuyver, and any film concerning aliens or advanced tech....

I'm fine with magic or sci-fi. But not so much one calling itself the other. The whole point to magic is that it doesn't necessarily follow the rules like conservation of energy. If you are going to call it science or tech you pretty much need to follow those rules. Or change the setting enough that it has different rules that you will follow.

No, I like good sci-fi. I actually like some of the early MacGuyver since most of that stuff would have actually worked. Later episodes, not so much. Some spy movies are great some are lousy. Just like any other genre.

Now I will admit, I don’t think anyone has actually used the term sci-fi when describing steampunk. But they use all the same descriptive words as if it was sci-fi. If it established a set of rules and continued to follow them, I would call it science fiction and it probably wouldn’t bother me too much. But they don’t set new rules, they claim to be using real world rules, they don’t follow the real world rules, say they are following the real world rules, and (I think this what I’m hearing) some few people are so smart that the world does not follow the rules for them and anything they have made but it really does even though it doesn’t. Uhmm... What?

There can and have been advances in old technologies. I can buy a better alloy that will hold air or steam at max compression and not weigh a ton. I can probably buy a really great insulator that will not quickly transmit the heat of all that steam.
However, there are limits. You can’t get more kinetic energy out of a thing than the potential energy it already had. Yes, compressed air or steam is an efficient power source. But you can only compress it so far until it become an incompressible liquid. There is a hard limit.
You could set up a new rule for you setting that steam can be infinitely compressed, but then you should have to follow through on that new rule. Ok your pressure cylinder is now holding much more force. Ok, your materials science with a forge somehow allows you to make a cylinder to hold it.
There is still no way a human arm could operate those valves and tighten those fasteners on a pressurized cylinder. When someone fired the spike the recoil would knock anything the size of human flat on their back. Because we are talking the energy level of pretty decent sized piece of artillery.
The pressure cylinders apparently have the material science to hold nearly infinite pressure, but the armor is weaker than cast iron.

One of them showed a coil spring about the size of a small pocket watch that contained enough energy to slice multiple people in half. But a child accidentally wound it up in a couple of seconds and another set it off.
Ok, you could advance the steel tech to the point where a small coil spring could hold the energy. But a wound spring only contains the energy put into it and potentially releases it faster. No child can supply that level of energy in a few seconds. The energy available to be supplied by that young human is another hard limit.
You could theoretically gear it down until a child could wind it, but then it would take many hours of winding and be much larger than the size of a pocket watch. Gears are another hard limit. It is the ratio of the radii that gives the effect. And if you set it up so that low force is need, then that force needs to applied over a longer time duration to get the same energy level.

Sure you can insert “minovsky-particle” that gives some new rule. But then if you want to say it is tech/science you have to follow that rule. Otherwise it would be fantasy/magic, which they seem to be insisting it is not.

[Orthos]

Quote:

No, I like good sci-fi. *extended discussion about HARD sci-fi snipped*

So basically in your opinion the only "good" Sci-Fi is Hard Sci-Fi, everything else isn't Sci-Fi at all, it's Fantasy.

That's not how most people use that term, so that's causing a fair bit of the confusion.

[Aubrey the Malformed]

What you are talking about is bad science. But that is in no way a sole feature of steampunk. A classic example for me was in The Matrix, where humans were supposedly used as batteries to fuel the evil supercomputer through body heat. That was such garbage. The amount of energy that needed to be expended to feed the humans would be less - much less - than that generated by their body heat. The supercomputer would have been better off, y'know, with a normal battery (and it would still have to charge it). And that certainly affected my interest in the story once this Big Reveal was made in the film.

But I don't think quoting examples of shoddy understanding of some basic physics invalidates the steampunk genre. There's good and bad steampunk. I think you are mistaking crap writing for a feature of the genre. Instead, I suggest you consider reading some of the good stuff (well, better, anyway).

[thejeff]

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

What you are talking about is bad science. But that is in no way a sole feature of steampunk. A classic example for me was in The Matrix, where humans were supposedly used as batteries to fuel the evil supercomputer through body heat. That was such garbage. The amount of energy that needed to be expended to feed the humans would be less - much less - than that generated by their body heat. The supercomputer would have been better off, y'know, with a normal battery (and it would still have to charge it). And that certainly affected my interest in the story once this Big Reveal was made in the film.

But I don't think quoting examples of shoddy understanding of some basic physics invalidates the steampunk genre. There's good and bad steam punk. I think you are mistaking crap writing for a feature of the genre. Instead, i suggest you consider reading some of the good stuff (well, better, anyway).

Or it's steampunk that isn't taking the science seriously. It's using it as backdrop rather than focus, which is fine.

[Aubrey the Malformed]

As thejeff says. Steampunk is a setting (or a series of settings with some shared trappings, which may be more or less fantastic, depending). They will have different basic underlying assumptions about what is and isn't possible - and why. Some will be purely scientific - like The Difference Engine - and some really won't, with the tricky stuff handwaved or even explicitly magical. And some will be well-written, and some not.

[Orthos]

Speaking for myself, I'm pretty much the opposite of you and Aubrey, Elter. I don't care for hard sci-fi. I don't really enjoy fiction that goes out of its way to "get the science right", because I feel it distracts from the story and challenges my suspension of disbelief. I'm a much bigger fan of the softer ends of the sci-fi scale, where there's a little pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo for flavor purposes but the author doesn't step away from the story from time to time, or worse puppet through one of the characters, to explain the number-crunching that makes everything tick.

That doesn't make it any less sci-fi - it's still got the scientific backdrop and lacks the blatantly supernatural effects that are associated with the fantasy genre. It's just far toward the softer end of the hardness scale.

And then there's sci-fantasy, which deliberately blends the two, combining open supernatural/magical properties with technology, either working together a la Magitek or as competing or cooperative forces side-by-side. This is probably closer to where Star Wars fits, along with things like Final Fantasy games.

It probably helps that I'm not scientifically-literate enough to catch when something doesn't make sense. For example, Aubrey's complaint about The Matrix never even phased me.

[Doodlebug Anklebiter]

Old thread from the Books forum

[Krensky]

In addition to Vern and Wells, it's worth hunting down Kipling's Aerial Board of Control stories (which inspired some of Wells work, The Shape of Things to Come particularly). Technically the ABC takes place in the 21st century but it's more than Victorian enough beyond the time and technology.

It's also worth remembering that the Victorian era in England was also the Wild West and Guild Age in the US, which is where Wild, Wild West, Legend, and Brisco County Jr fit in so well. Similarly, it's also the very end of the Edo period and the beginning of the Meiji period and the end of the Qing dynasty in China (a popular period for historical wuxia works, what with the Opium Wars, rebellions, etc).

Cowboys, boxers, and samurai are usually how I wind up selling Steampunk games to a few friends of mine who dislike Victorianism.

[Aubrey the Malformed]

Orthos wrote:

Speaking for myself, I'm pretty much the opposite of you and Aubrey, Elter. I don't care for hard sci-fi. I don't really enjoy fiction that goes out of its way to "get the science right", because I feel it distracts from the story and challenges my suspension of disbelief. I'm a much bigger fan of the softer ends of the sci-fi scale, where there's a little pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo for flavor purposes but the author doesn't step away from the story from time to time, or worse puppet through one of the characters, to explain the number-crunching that makes everything tick.

That doesn't make it any less sci-fi - it's still got the scientific backdrop and lacks the blatantly supernatural effects that are associated with the fantasy genre. It's just far toward the softer end of the hardness scale.

And then there's sci-fantasy, which deliberately blends the two, combining open supernatural/magical properties with technology, either working together a la Magitek or as competing or cooperative forces side-by-side. This is probably closer to where Star Wars fits, along with things like Final Fantasy games.

It probably helps that I'm not scientifically-literate enough to catch when something doesn't make sense. For example, Aubrey's complaint about The Matrix never even phased me.

That's debatable. Star Wars was mentioned above in this context. Star Wars is often classed as techno-fantasy, because although it has the trappings of science fiction it's really unscientific mumo-jumbo. Personally I wouldn't class it as science fiction. Science fiction isn't about people showing off, nor does it require a profound understanding of particle physics. What science fiction does is take some real world scenario and extrapolate it. A good illustration would be Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison (made into the film Soylent Green) which projected fears about overpopulation in the 1970s (when it was written) and extrapolate a what-if. So the "scientific issue" doesn't have to be technological, it can be a social trend (in fact, science fiction is very often just that). But pseudoscience is just that - pseudo, not real. Stuff like Star Wars doesn't address scientific issues - it's just escapist fantasy. Probaly most cinematic science fiction (with a few notable exceptions) is like that.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with liking techno-fantasy, of course. It boils down to taste. A lot of steampunk (to get back to the original subject) is probably techno-fantasy only the techno bit is 19th century. I like plenty of that stuff. And trying to tie everything down into categories is, ultimately, a mug's game. A lot of "hard SF" set in the far future, particulalry written as of now, is fairly techno-fantasy-ish, what with FTL drives, antigravity, instantaneous comminications, and flying across a solar system in a couple of days. Who cares if you enjoy it (and I do)? But when something sticks out (like my Matrix example - and my background is in biological sciences so that's probably why I noticed it) it'll grate some individuals, especially if it is being called "science fiction".

[thejeff]

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

Orthos wrote:

Speaking for myself, I'm pretty much the opposite of you and Aubrey, Elter. I don't care for hard sci-fi. I don't really enjoy fiction that goes out of its way to "get the science right", because I feel it distracts from the story and challenges my suspension of disbelief. I'm a much bigger fan of the softer ends of the sci-fi scale, where there's a little pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo for flavor purposes but the author doesn't step away from the story from time to time, or worse puppet through one of the characters, to explain the number-crunching that makes everything tick.

That doesn't make it any less sci-fi - it's still got the scientific backdrop and lacks the blatantly supernatural effects that are associated with the fantasy genre. It's just far toward the softer end of the hardness scale.

And then there's sci-fantasy, which deliberately blends the two, combining open supernatural/magical properties with technology, either working together a la Magitek or as competing or cooperative forces side-by-side. This is probably closer to where Star Wars fits, along with things like Final Fantasy games.

It probably helps that I'm not scientifically-literate enough to catch when something doesn't make sense. For example, Aubrey's complaint about The Matrix never even phased me.

That's debatable. Star Wars was mentioned above in this context. Star Wars is often classed as techno-fantasy, because although it has the trappings of science fiction it's really unscientific mumo-jumbo. Personally I wouldn't class it as science fiction. Science fiction isn't about people showing off, nor does it require a profound understanding of particle physics. What science fiction does is take some real world scenario and extrapolate it. A good illustration would be Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison (made into the film Soylent Green) which projected fears about overpopulation in the 1970s (when it was written) and extrapolate a what-if. So the "scientific issue" doesn't have to be...

And a lot of stuff (particularly older stuff) that was hard sf when it was published has shifted over to "bad science" by now.

[ElterAgo]

I am very much a technical person. I have a degree in physics and make my living as a mechanical process engineer.

So yes, the bad science does grate on me.

Don't get me wrong, I like magic and fantasy novels, games, and movies. Magic and fantasy is where you say "Hey I don't care what the rules are. Here's what happens in this story." It can be fun and entertaining. I happen to love the Disc World series by Terry Pratchett.

It is when something claims to follow science and doesn't or worse yet set's up a new science just for that setting and immediately fails to follow it, that gets me. Things like that just jump out at me and get in the way of even noticing the story.

The Matrix example and a bunch of stuff in Star Wars are like that. It just got in the way of me enjoying those movies. Star Trek isn't perfect, but it is better. It at least mostly follows the new rules that it created for it's own universe. No, it doesn't match our RL universe. But it does a pretty good job of staying consistent within itself.

The Honor Harrington series of novels by David Weber are very good hard sci-fi. There is very little within it that doesn't appear to follow it's own rules. And even the few things I've noticed are at the level of I'm not quite sure if it's following its own rules. So that's pretty damn good in my opinion. I would recommend the series to nearly anyone. It is one of my favorites.
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thejeff wrote:

And a lot of stuff (particularly older stuff) that was hard sf when it was published has shifted over to "bad science" by now.

That actually doesn't bother me. Jules Vern had a lot of things wrong in 2000 Leagues Under the Sea. But they didn't understand things like sound transmission, friction, and aerodynamics back then. He did a truly amazing job of predicting future advances and following the rules as he understood them and set them up for his book.

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Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

...

But I don't think quoting examples of shoddy understanding of some basic physics invalidates the steampunk genre. There's good and bad steampunk. I think you are mistaking crap writing for a feature of the genre. Instead, I suggest you consider reading some of the good stuff (well, better, anyway).

I'm open to that. Got a recommendation that you think is in the better stuff list?

[thejeff]

ElterAgo wrote:

I am very much a technical person. I have a degree in physics and make my living as a mechanical process engineer.

So yes, the bad science does grate on me.

Don't get me wrong, I like magic and fantasy novels, games, and movies. Magic and fantasy is where you say "Hey I don't care what the rules are. Here's what happens in this story." It can be fun and entertaining. I happen to love the Disc World series by Terry Pratchett.

It is when something claims to follow science and doesn't or worse yet set's up a new science just for that setting and immediately fails to follow it, that gets me. Things like that just jump out at me and get in the way of even noticing the story.

The Matrix example and a bunch of stuff in Star Wars are like that. It just got in the way of me enjoying those movies. Star Trek isn't perfect, but it is better. It at least mostly follows the new rules that it created for it's own universe. No, it doesn't match our RL universe. But it does a pretty good job of staying consistent within itself.

The Honor Harrington series of novels by David Weber are very good hard sci-fi. There is very little within it that doesn't appear to follow it's own rules. And even the few things I've noticed are at the level of I'm not quite sure if it's following its own rules. So that's pretty damn good in my opinion. I would recommend the series to nearly anyone. It is one of my favorites.

But steampunk has to follow real-world rules instead of its own?

I've read very little steampunk that really pretends to be "hard science, this would all really work".

I'm a computer geek and I can read cyberpunk without spending my whole time going "But it doesn't work like that!!"

[ElterAgo]

thejeff wrote:

...

But steampunk has to follow real-world rules instead of its own?

I've read very little steampunk that really pretends to be "hard science, this would all really work".

I'm a computer geek and I can read cyberpunk without spending my whole time going "But it doesn't work like that!!"

Absolutely not. The little bit that I have been shown as 'This is steampunk" does not follow its own rules.

Also most of the people that I know that are really into steam punk all insists that it does follow real world rules. The only real change is that steam technology is a good bit more efficient. All the rest of it just follows from that.

But it doesn't.

[Caineach]

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

What you are talking about is bad science. But that is in no way a sole feature of steampunk. A classic example for me was in The Matrix, where humans were supposedly used as batteries to fuel the evil supercomputer through body heat. That was such garbage. The amount of energy that needed to be expended to feed the humans would be less - much less - than that generated by their body heat. The supercomputer would have been better off, y'know, with a normal battery (and it would still have to charge it). And that certainly affected my interest in the story once this Big Reveal was made in the film.

But I don't think quoting examples of shoddy understanding of some basic physics invalidates the steampunk genre. There's good and bad steampunk. I think you are mistaking crap writing for a feature of the genre. Instead, I suggest you consider reading some of the good stuff (well, better, anyway).

Original idea was that they were wired together and used as a giant supercomputer, but that got thrown out because most of the audience wouldn't understand it when it came out.

[thejeff]

Caineach wrote:

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

What you are talking about is bad science. But that is in no way a sole feature of steampunk. A classic example for me was in The Matrix, where humans were supposedly used as batteries to fuel the evil supercomputer through body heat. That was such garbage. The amount of energy that needed to be expended to feed the humans would be less - much less - than that generated by their body heat. The supercomputer would have been better off, y'know, with a normal battery (and it would still have to charge it). And that certainly affected my interest in the story once this Big Reveal was made in the film.

But I don't think quoting examples of shoddy understanding of some basic physics invalidates the steampunk genre. There's good and bad steampunk. I think you are mistaking crap writing for a feature of the genre. Instead, I suggest you consider reading some of the good stuff (well, better, anyway).

Original idea was that they were wired together and used as a giant supercomputer, but that got thrown out because most of the audience wouldn't understand it when it came out.

That makes far more sense to me - in a technobabbly kind of way.

Using human brain processing and storage ability still doesn't work, but it's far less blatantly stupid than body heat.

[Orthos]

Quote:

What science fiction does is take some real world scenario and extrapolate it. A good illustration would be Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison (made into the film Soylent Green) which projected fears about overpopulation in the 1970s (when it was written) and extrapolate a what-if. So the "scientific issue" doesn't have to be technological, it can be a social trend (in fact, science fiction is very often just that). But pseudoscience is just that - pseudo, not real. Stuff like Star Wars doesn't address scientific issues - it's just escapist fantasy. Probaly most cinematic science fiction (with a few notable exceptions) is like that.

See, that's not the definition I'm used to seeing used for sci-fi. Maybe I just hang out in the wrong crowds.

What's always defined "sci-fi" for me or anyone I have discussed the subject with is "fiction with modern or futuristic setting". If it has computers and/or robots, it's probably sci-fi, unless there's blatantly magic or other supernatural stuff, in which case it's sci-fantasy. If it lacks that stuff and is just straight up supernatural, it's fantasy. And if it lacks the supernatural, it's historical fiction.

Beyond that is just the sliding scale of hardness. Hard sci-fi is the more realistic, the more complex, and the more rules-intensive; soft sci-fi is the "it's technology, it just works, don't gotta explain jack".

[Aubrey the Malformed]

Caineach wrote:

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

What you are talking about is bad science. But that is in no way a sole feature of steampunk. A classic example for me was in The Matrix, where humans were supposedly used as batteries to fuel the evil supercomputer through body heat. That was such garbage. The amount of energy that needed to be expended to feed the humans would be less - much less - than that generated by their body heat. The supercomputer would have been better off, y'know, with a normal battery (and it would still have to charge it). And that certainly affected my interest in the story once this Big Reveal was made in the film.

But I don't think quoting examples of shoddy understanding of some basic physics invalidates the steampunk genre. There's good and bad steampunk. I think you are mistaking crap writing for a feature of the genre. Instead, I suggest you consider reading some of the good stuff (well, better, anyway).

Original idea was that they were wired together and used as a giant supercomputer, but that got thrown out because most of the audience wouldn't understand it when it came out.

I was surprised that they didn't go for that at the time - it seemed much more logical. Ah well, nothing like Hollywood for under-estimating the audience.

[Krensky]

Hard science fiction generally focuses on the science and its effect on the characters and is usually very focused on hand waving up as little as possible. Soft science fiction usually focuses on the character's use of technology and the outcomes, although the term can also refer to fiction where the science in question is one of the soft or social sciences. It's worth noting that under that definition cyber and steam punk are more soft than hard since their focus is usually on information theory and communications with some sociology tossed in.

In good writing, regardless of the sort of scifi, said technology is internally consistent and has some acquaintance with plausibility. It also is often shaped by the type of story the author wants to tell, although this is usually a sliding scale. A 'Hard' scifi story is commonly more shaped by the needs of the science and tech and a 'soft' (n the first sense) or space opera type story usually shapes the technology explicitly to tell the story the author wants. Sometimes to the point where it's really just background for an adventure story that happens to take place in outer space.

The Honorverse books, like most military science fiction, are space opera and definitely soft science fiction whichever definition you want to use. The science and technology exists the way it does to let Weber tell a story of Horatio Hornblower / Admiral Nelson in space. The way hyperspace, the impeller drive, everything is directed to emulating the Age of Sail to some degree or another. Not quite as thematically as Drake's RCN series, but that's reasonable as Weber intended to show an evolution of naval technology emulating the evolution from the iron-clad steamship to the modern aircraft carrier group. He, and his co-authors, are very good at keeping notes and consistency, but even there have been mistakes made there, the great resizing comes to mind. The focus though, is on the characters, military science, and (more and more so in the later books) domestic and international politics.

As for where you think it breaks consistency, feel free to bring it up in spoiler or PM and I'll try and explain it. Be sure to mention where you're up to. The only major nail I can think of is Drake's "A Grand Tour" which is pretty much only in the Honorverse because it's in one of the anthologies and honestly feels more like a RCN story.

[Aubrey the Malformed]

Orthos wrote:

Quote:

What science fiction does is take some real world scenario and extrapolate it. A good illustration would be Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison (made into the film Soylent Green) which projected fears about overpopulation in the 1970s (when it was written) and extrapolate a what-if. So the "scientific issue" doesn't have to be technological, it can be a social trend (in fact, science fiction is very often just that). But pseudoscience is just that - pseudo, not real. Stuff like Star Wars doesn't address scientific issues - it's just escapist fantasy. Probaly most cinematic science fiction (with a few notable exceptions) is like that.

See, that's not the definition I'm used to seeing used for sci-fi. Maybe I just hang out in the wrong crowds.

What's always defined "sci-fi" for me or anyone I have discussed the subject with is "fiction with modern or futuristic setting". If it has computers and robots, it's probably sci-fi, unless there's blatantly magic or other supernatural stuff, in which case it's sci-fantasy.

Beyond that is just the sliding scale of hardness. Hard sci-fi is the more realistic, the more complex, and the more rules-intensive; soft sci-fi is the "it's technology, it just works, don't gotta explain jack".

That makes Star Wars science fiction, despite the notable lack of science. These are, to some extent, pseudo-academic distinctions, but I have also read science fiction authors who stated that this was their view. They aren't necessarily agreed by everyone.

A writer (now deceased) called Bob Shaw had quite a neat example to illustrate. A guy is on an asteroid, being hunted by his deadly rival in the vacuum. If the guy catches his rival unawares and shoots him, that doesn't make is science fiction because you could have exactly the same scenario in a western, fantasy, ganster genre. So what makes science fiction distinctive? Let's say he catches his rival, who taunts him at a distance out of range. But our hero realises that, on the asteroid, gravity is low and so he can shoot further. So he takes advantage of that to shoot is rival. The difference - the scientific principle around gravity is critical to the solution to the story. (Bob Shaw also pointed out this wasn't exactly the most compelling story, in and of itself.) Which is why, on this basis, Star Wars is pretty much not science fiction - the scenario would play out pretty much the same in a lot of different genres. 2001, on the other hand, is most definitely science fiction.

[Under A Bleeding Sun]

Steampunks just not for everyone, if you don't like it thats fine. I am revving up to start my Steampunk homebrew and told the players to read the setting before committing. A player who had been with me for 2 campaigns now said he didn't like the setting so dipped. No hard feelings, I knew it wasn't for everyone, though I setting/system swap a lot so am constantly loosing and regaining players. I dig the genre most the time, but even I don't like every variation I've seen. Luckily, its a big world and lots of people can have lots of tastes.

[LazarX]

Artemis Moonstar wrote:

@ElterAgo: So.... You're fine with magic, but not scifi then.

Because Sci-Fi isn't magic. It's, vast majority of it (Star Trek, Battlestar from what I heard, etc), simply technology. The reason they "work logically" is because 1) it takes place in the future, and 2) new elements, physics, and so forth are typically introduced to hand-waive the illogic.

When Sci-Fi blatantly ignores physics as Star Trek, and most of the others frequently do, it becomes magic.

If anyone ever tries to argue that Trek is serious science, I will simply reply with the two words "Heisenberg Compensator", and see if they get the joke.

[thejeff]

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

Orthos wrote:

What's always defined "sci-fi" for me or anyone I have discussed the subject with is "fiction with modern or futuristic setting". If it has computers and robots, it's probably sci-fi, unless there's blatantly magic or other supernatural stuff, in which case it's sci-fantasy.

Beyond that is just the sliding scale of hardness. Hard sci-fi is the more realistic, the more complex, and the more rules-intensive; soft sci-fi is the "it's technology, it just works, don't gotta explain jack".

That makes Star Wars science fiction, despite the notable lack of science. These are, to some extent, pseudo-academic distinctions, but I have also read science fiction authors who stated that this was their view. They aren't necessarily agreed by everyone.

You could argue that the Force is basically magic and that's what pushes it into the science fantasy category.

More generally, the basic problem lies in the distinction between Science fiction as setting and science fiction as genre.