Fun With Suffixes

[eskemp]

The word "steampunk" niggles at me a little bit. I assume the etymology is such that it's a take on "cyberpunk," but it's an odd derivation. Does it really have punk ideals? Look at Girl Genius, for example; it's clearly of the steampunk genre, but it's not really very punky at all. There's not really the sense of rebellion against authority, the

Comments

[filamena]

I have to wonder if the 'punk' part of steampunk had more to do with writers who were breaking cliches for writing fantasy. The -punk in steampunk might have had to do more with fantasy writers who weren't just writing another Tolken knock off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mi%C3%A9ville That dude comes to mind, for instance.

However, -pulp as a suffix gets my vote. I wonder how hard it is to make something cool on the internet. I wish I could just ask Wil Wheaton.

[eskemp]

Mieville definitely merits the "-punk" descriptor. He's one of the more rebellious young voices fantasy has seen in quite some while, and he's certainly got a social conscience that drives his work. The Bas-Lag stuff is certainly more about what he does with the trappings than the trappings themselves, y'know?

Moorcock would also have been pretty close, as he was definitely rebelling against the shadow of Tolkien (and for that matter, his hatred of A. A. Milne). I don't know that Moorcock offered up anything in the stead of Tolkien's English country values, though - he was really a bold new voice, but at the same time his early Eternal Champion stuff sort of comes across as an angry teenager who's discovered nihilism. That's probably close enough to -punk to merit the descriptor, even though you wouldn't use the suffix to describe the trappings of the setting.

[fiat_knox]

Gothic-pulp?

[eskemp]

Would that be the Jim Butcher stuff? Or are they not quite two-fisted enough?

[xsands]

Butcher definitely has a noir/pulp feel to the action especially towards the end of a storyline where Dresden has to impliment the 'crazy secret plan' to deal with the antagonist that has more raw occult power then him.

language is a river which no man can dam or divert

[nerdwerds]

Is it "punk"?
That depends on your definition of the word "punk" and if you know anything about the punk music scene, putting a definition to that word is about as hard as flying an F-15 through a school cafeteria without blowing off the lunchlady's hairnet.

"Punk" was originally meant to be an anti-establishment term, but it's come to signify other things and I think in the instance of "steampunk" it refers to a style of science fiction literature, most commonly alternate histories and clockwork technology applied within the Victorian age - since this is where it is most often used.
I find it a little exciting that the works of H.G.Wells and Jules Verne and similar authors are suddenly "steampunk" and no longer "science fiction" simply because it is a term for a subgenre of sci-fi works.
Just as "cyberpunk" was adopted to refer to "high tech, low life" literary works, "steampunk" has come to refer to a kind of fantasy tech of the pre- and early Industrial age. Or you could say steampunk is "low tech, high life" ;)

Re: language is a river which no man can dam or divert

[eskemp]

Yeah, there's no getting around the steampunk thing. It's entrenched outside gaming, so it's here to stay, no doubt. I still find it odd, though, because as you note, "punk" does have that anti-establishment sense, and steampunk is so very often "But wouldn't it be cool to have the same establishment, only with clockwork rocket boots?"

[nerdwerds]

What about Captain Nemo?
He's distinctly anti-establishment (he hates all forms of government) and he's a brilliant scientist who builds his own submarine.
If ever there was a steampunk novel, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is it!

I see some people saying similar things "Wouldn't it be cool if we added clockwork robot boots?" but that's confusing the style of steampunk with the literary genre of steampunk.
I just don't think they're the same thing.
The wonders of English, eh! :P

[eskemp]

Heh. Yeah, you can make the point for Nemo, particularly as he got more... sympathetic, in a way, even if he was never directly the protagonist.

Style and literary genre can be separate, yeah. Consider the throbbing veins in William Gibson's temples as he discovered that Shadowrun was calling itself "cyberpunk." Of course, it sort of had some aspirations to discuss serious issues, but really, I think if we'd been calling it "cyberpulp" back then (or some similar bit) to distinguish it, we'd have a precedent for more accurate use of suffixes.

I will probably continue to use "-pulp" privately, at any rate. It more accurately sums up some of my games, and I can always explain it to my players.

[nothri]

Hmmm...I think it would greatly help my understanding of the conversation to know what 'punk' means in context? Steampunk I took to mean fiction with the same themes as cyberpunk, but set in a different time period and for different reasons for the imposition of those themes (rather than ultra high tech, you have an explosion of Jules Verne styled advances in technology that might have been possible if we knew back then what we know today about engineering and so on). I basically assumed anything with 'punk' on the end of it was essentially "cyberpunk" but with a different impotus behind the themes (gothicpunk, I assumed, was using the ideas of gothic horror to build a story with cyberpunk themes without the high tech reasons for those themes). I'll admit I'm a bit less informed about this than I sound- you'll notice I'm not trying to name the themes of cyberpunk that get translated into these other genres. But whenever I saw 'punk' on the end I'd been assuming 'cyberpunk without the cyber'. So...what does 'punk' actually mean?

[eskemp]

Well... that's kind of the question. I don't think steampunk in general has the same themes as cyberpunk, which is why I was challenging the word in the first place. I personally sort of think that "-punk", used as a suffix, does follow the cyberpunk lead, but that it's sort of become something meaningless, or if it does have meaning, it's sort of a "Hey, look, it's different and vibrant and not what you're expecting!" rather than actually reflecting the values and themes that caused people to fuse "cyber" with "punk" in the first place.

Essentially, what got me started on this was that "-punk" doesn't seem to mean "punk," and we could use some more terminology to more accurately identify the components of a given game. Sort of like how chefs can differentiate between a gravy and a roux, you know?

[nothri]

Gotcha. I think its fair to say, that like any genre, sooner or later the "core" of the genre gets left behind in favor of new styles and stories. Gothic Horror gives way to Lovecraftian horror, which gives way....to whatever comes after Lovecraftian horror...anyway, you might have something there. I think the ORIGINAL concept of steampunk was likely more reflective of the idea of a technological revolution warping society (for good or bad) in unexpected ways.

I've always been a little confused by the term for 'gothic punk', to be honest.

[mattboggan]

"What would horrorpulp be? I'm gonna say Hellboy. Yes, there's clear horror, but there's also a love of jamming adventure, quips through gritted teeth, and yes, there's a cyborg gorilla in there, too. Multiple cyborg gorillas, actually. The old World of Darkness would also qualify in its more outrageous moments, n'est-ce pas? "

Je ne sais pas. What would you quote as exemples of this horrorpulp?

Funny, though, that I just came up with a chronicle idea for a Changeling pulp game set in the Années folles in Paris, Berlin and Shangai between 1918 and 1939...

[eskemp]

"Je ne sais pas. What would you quote as exemples of this horrorpulp

[mattboggan]

[eskemp]

"OK. I see your point. So there is nothing wrong with Pulp, right