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Rocketpunk manifesto space warfare6/10/2023 ![]() Hollywood gets a bit anxious when machines think for themselves. (Aliens is basically a Steelpunk war movie, the original Alien a Steelpunk horror). The best Steelpunk exosuit to clank out of Hollywood wasn’t even designed for fighting: the Caterpillar P-5000 Power Loader that Ripley repurposed to battle the alien queen in Aliens. Its preference, however, is for the latest weaponised workwear: the battle suits from Edge of Tomorrow, Robocop’s hardwired hardshell or mecha like Pacific Rim’s Jaegers. Steelpunk wears a rich array of fashion, ranging from jumpsuits all the way to catsuits. Robert Downey Jr’s inveterate self-mockery made him a different figure in the movies, and all the more Steelpunky as a result. In the original sixties comic, Stark stood for all that is good and glorious in the military-industrial complex. Perhaps the success of the Iron Man franchise comes down to the fact that Tony Stark’s suit combines both. Battlesuits, war machines and rampaging robots turn up again and again, as do flying cars and jetpacks. The two main themes of Steelpunk that make it into the mainstream are Fight and Flight. Global crop blight? Try Interstellar’s forgotten spaceship. Ice Age coming? You need Snowpiercer’s allegorical supertrain. Start with a nice disaster, add a bit of social disorder and our interconnected technological ecosystems grind to a halt. It’s as much about dirty dystopias as it is high-chrome dreams. And Steelpunk does love a good apocalypse. All that high-octane fun and fury makes it one of the best examples of Steelpunk I can think of. Or better still, take the whole Mad Max mythos. Think Gru’s fume-spewing car in Despicable Me. These days, the fossil-fueled, jet-propelled, rocket-motored, atomic-powered engines of environmental destruction that are the totems of Steelpunk are almost taboo. In hindsight it’s hard to take seriously the technological utopianism of Steelpunk’s formative years. Steelpunk collides with other genres that operate at the margins, like crime, noir and pulp fiction. It should have an underground element, a subversive edge. The punk in Steelpunk shouldn’t just be a suffix denoting science fiction either. That said, these technologies are such powerful agents of change that any Steelpunk story probably needs to explain why they have faded into the background. It doesn’t exclude other techs (info-, nano-, bio-). I think Steelpunk worships at a broader church. Dieselpunk and Decopunk seem to revive the tech-aesthetic of the early twentieth century and Atompunk limits itself to the pre-digital Cold War period. I can see touches of Steelpunk in the first three, but they’re into more specific eras. My hunt for Steelpunk turned up genres I’d never heard of, stuff like Dieselpunk, Decopunk, Atompunk, Elfpunk and Dreampunk. Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations for Steelpunk books or stories? ![]() My subscription to Analog lapsed years ago and I’ve just drifted away. I’ve kind of lost touch with science fiction in print. The problem is, it’s only at the movies that I get anything like a Steelpunk fix. Steelpunk shows how yesterday’s tomorrow gave us today. It focuses on the vision of the future that inspired the era just past and so it illuminates the present. These days it’s more of a fashion statement than a comment on our times. But it’s also partly because I don’t think Steampunk tells us much about our world, especially now that it has morphed from literary genre to lifestyle choice. Steampunk never grabbed me.It’s partly just a matter of taste - the Victorian era doesn’t resonate for me. Think The Right Stuff before it all went wrong. Imagine the Thunderbirds written by William Burroughs. The artefacts of Steelpunk aren’t grown, printed or programmed, they’re built. Steelpunk is about hardware, not software, the real not the virtual, megatech not nanotech. It is to the late 20th century what Steampunk is to the 19th. Steelpunk celebrates the technologies that had their heyday in the last decades of the last millennium. Steelpunk harks back to the heyday of the space race and the jet age, when everything was chrome-plated, needle-nosed, rocket-propelled, atomic-powered and soundtracked by screaming turbines. Steelpunk: Science fiction from the heyday of hardware The sci fi I love is Steelpunk and I’m looking for more of it. ![]() The various genres and subgenres of science fiction are just handy labels to help people to chat about and ferret out the styles and stories they love.
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