Steampunk: from cosplay drawing (full file part.1)

Let's start first on the origin and the definition of one of the most recent but also most mysterious popular genres where we < /Span> Cross a fantasized version of Paris or London in the midst of an industrial revolution, but also the imaginary jules Verne Flying cars made of copper fed steam.

Put your Pocket watches and let's go together on a trip to this fantastic universe!

steampunk can be defined as Victorian science fiction, in reference to the reign of Queen Victoria of England which is part of the vein of retro-futurism. originally, in the early 80s, this genre led in the form of an almost Oulipian literary game.

Oulipo is a group founded in the middle of the 20th century with literary and mathematicians who reflected their discipline by the prism of difficulty, namely how the constraints their Paradoxically improved and release their creativity. Among the members of the OULIPO, there are very well -known people like Raymond Queneau , (which wrote "Disappearance", a book in which he forbidden to use the letter E) or even more recently Marc Levy who wrote all his history with an apartment in New York and a ghost included.

This little literary game is imagined by three friends science fiction: Tim Powers , James Blaylock and < A href = "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/k._w._Jeter" Target = "_ Blank" title = "K.w throw" Rel = "Noopener Noreferrer"> K.w throw . The latter wanted to share a common project: invent a new genre and make fun of too serious cyberpunk .

cyberpunk is then a very fashionable genre at that time, itself based on a very technological and very urban imagination; With the leading figure the American writer William Gibson , who launched the movement in the early 1980s in a fairly close perspective: "anticipation". It was a question of exploring the drifts of the hyper-industrialized world which is looming on the horizon with computer science, virtual worlds, matrices, increased humanity or even tentacular megalopolises.

But then, what about punk ? The suffix " punk " at the time then evoked a certain political vision, a form of social criticism which carried the whole genre. We can find him today in series like the excellent "Black Mirror", even if from a literary point of view, the genre Cyberpunk has almost disappeared today.

We can note however in another register the highly anticipated video game Cyberpunk 2077 .

our three young authors (Tim Powers, James Blaylock and K.W throw) in a parodic and playful spirit, wanted to come back to the wonder of the first hours of the Science fiction: that of the time when we still believed in the modern myth of progress, a myth widely started by horrors the Second World War. They therefore invented steampunk by replacing the very modern "cyber" who referred to the virtual world, by "steam", which means vapor and therefore immediately refers us to the first industrial revolution of the 1880s.

cyberpunk was a pessimistic genre that had precisely dropped scientific wonder, the taste for very entertaining adventure stories specific to the punk spirit of the beginning of XXth century.

However, in the early 80s, the film "Star Wars" and all the productions of the Duo Spielberg / Lucas will relaunch this spirit and the steampunk is part this time From the point of view of literature in this line of a return to "senso fender": this famous wonder dear at the beginning of the 20th century which had not yet known these two terrible world wars.

Sometimes attached to science fiction, sometimes fantasy, gender steampunk is more generally related to the current of retro-futurism: that is to say because of imagining The future from the past or a much more advanced modified past than ours. We are then in a mode close to uchronie where a small element of changed in the sense our History can change the whole race and where the author imagines the social consequences of these bifurcations (and if the Russians had won the Cold War, and if the dinosaurs had not turned off etc ...)

Fans of the series "Sliders" will recognize this kind of tests. It is in the case of steampunk and retro-futurism in the broad sense of taking a section of history and imagining not new revolutions and new innovations, but to push technologies and social functioning of the moment to Their paroxysm, either by remaining at that time, or by going so far today or later.

So, in the retro-futurism genre, we can cite for example the excellent series of video games "Fallout", which plays with humor on this lag related to showing a future blocked in 1960s, or the "Bioshock" game which, in the same vein, belongs to another under the kind which is generally called the Punk diesel.

For the genre steampunk , the goal is to imagine a future as it was thought at the time of the first industrial revolution: This is the steam engine invented by James Watt. (Yes, the word watts comes from there…).

It can also be to imagine a late 19th century with technology on steam machines with its complex cogs and copper riveted which allow a very important and almost magical advance for the time .

often steampunk stages a very urban landscape, Victorian London or Paris of construction La Tour Eiffel, but also sometimes other places like the West American in the series anticipating the steampunk in the American West, as in the series "The Mysteries of the West".

A typical evocation of the steampunk will then be to imagine a flying car driven by a copper automaton flying over the Eiffel Tower still unfinished. The novels of Jules Verne have a very great inspiration as well as all the imagination of "pulp", these popular fictional magazines at the beginning of the 20th century.

The giant robots operating in steam, fighting crisors with fatal shelves led by frosty gentleman, crazy scientists shouting "It's alive" and women in corset live a london haunted by Jack the ripper in 1888. The recent series Penny Dreadful, Put his name from popular horror publications in England makes this aesthetic atmosphere very well.

It really creates a very special, very visual vision even if born in a literary setting and playing with history with Grand H. It also plays a lot with the visual references this era, which saw the birth A whole popular modern industrial culture. The fact that the creators of this kind who in the 80s chose this Victorian era is therefore linked to the social and technical changes it has known, but also The emergence of a very popular genres fiction.

the two are linked because it is the huge economic and technical boom that allowed the birth of mass media such as radio, modern and later and television printing, therefore new audience for This culture.

the invasions of steampunk suddenly wanted to return to the spirit of the early days of science fiction while including in this spirit a mixture of fictional references specific to more contemporary anticipation .

They have launched the challenge of codifying this new very "meta" genre, that is to say very aware of playing with fictional codes rather than telling a real story.

The particularity of the Steampunk genre is therefore to be a heterogeneous science fiction mixture with great importance given to technological innovation and its futuristic consequences of Urban Fantasy. There are often elements of magic, elements from urban folklore and then the fantastic. We meet occult sciences, spiritualism dear to sir Arthur Conan Doyle . >

The literary success of the three founders will be immense and lead with it a very large movement which will largely exceed them. Ironically, moreover, the most representative writer of the genus Cyberpunk -william Gibson-parodied at his beginnings in the same way co-wrote a Steampunk novel with Bruce Sterling being called " The ". In this novel, a computer was invented in the middle of the 19th century and of course caused enormous upheavals in the society of the time. In short, this genre brings together the fantasy of an era when we still believed in progress while the disillusions of our modernity sometimes grow in a form of nostalgia of this completely idealized golden age.

more than the era itself and a search for historical truth, it is the imaginary and the aesthetics from the popular culture of this era that is largely recycled in a fantasized way , fetishized, even becoming a real culture with its codes and its followers. The very present community on the internet of steampunk therefore owes a lot to the Victorian century of the same man! Re that "Games of Thrones" owes a lot to the Middle Ages. This is what makes steampunk different from older genres such as science fiction and fantasy which will nevertheless be cumulative categories: ie that once we have laid the basics and established a first collective definition accepted, each work which is added to this repertoire changes it a little and redefined it.

The steampunk is much more recent and if it keeps part of this approach, He appropriates works and an era, he offers him a rebirth in a metaxual way. Rather than referring more or less consciously to past works belonging to the genre, it is rather to integrate into the universes of works linked to the era in which we refer. For example, in the masterpiece of alan moore , comic-book steampunk " The extraordinary gentlemen league ", the heroes are none other than Dorian Gray (the character of Oscar Wild), Captain Nemo (from the work of Jules Verne) or Allan Quatermain ( The type adventurer invented by Henri Hagarde). Alan Moore does more than pay tribute to cultural production of the end of the 19th century, he makes her canon, he makes her real in his universe: that is to be meta.

If basically, all fiction is a commentary on the previous fictions, in the case of the steampunk it is part of its DNA. If it is always as supported as in the case of Alan Moore, L 'Integration of fiction and the commentary on the latter are the constant of a genre which arrived much too late to be completely new. Thus we can say that H.G Wells and Jules Verne are the founding writers of science fiction, but we cannot say that they are as founding of the steampunk although it acts of their style and their aesthetics - between others - that The founding authors wanted to reproduce.

It seems almost paradoxical but saying who are the creators of the steampunk would be like saying that fantasy was born at the same time as ancient myths and that the medieval legends. The ancient myths and medieval legends are at the origin of fantasy only because they are made appropriate, digested, transformed, adapted, fantasized, sometimes even betrayed by modern authors like J.R.R Tolkien where Robert Howard.

The steampunk therefore only makes sense because it arrives in the 80s and is part of a return in force of the aesthetics of the first major popular fictions, a specific moment of the 'History which gives a specific form to this return a return. Full of DIY and a mixture of creativity explain why since its creation the steampunk has become more than a literary genre, but a whole creative universe, a subculture where lots of people have seized all around the world.

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