Silver Goggles

Event of Interest: Anna Chen Presents "Traders" Feb 16

2012-01-31T10:22:00.000-05:00

I had the honour of having British-Chinese comedienne Anne Chen drop in on this here little blawg to plug an upcoming event in Greenwich, UK! It's a Steampunk Opium Wars extravaganza, at the Greenwich National Maritime Museum, where there will be song and poetry about the Opium Wars, and folks playing historical figures from the time period will slug it out in poetry slams over the finer details of waging war to push drugs on an entire people to enslave them in a consumer market for trade benefits.

An official-looking page can be found on the Royal Museums Greenwich site, and the major details are as follows:

Dates: Thursday 16 February

Times: 18.30—22.00

Fee: FREE - but make sure you book ahead of time!!

Location: National Maritime Museum; Sammy Ofer Wing

Audience: Adults; Young people

Event type: Performance & storytelling

So if you're in the vicinity of Greenwich, UK, I highly recommend you go check it out, and please make recordings if possible to share with the rest of us! :O

Link of Interest: A Letter from a Freed Man

2012-01-31T04:51:00.004-05:00

While I'm still in Malaysia and not yet writing new posts, have a link. It's a letter from Jourdan Anderson, a former slave who moved to Ohio after he was emancipated, responding to his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, who wanted Jourdan to come back. Jourdan responded by dictating possibly the best fuck-you letter in the history of fuck-you letters.

A bit of the letter:

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

Go read the whole thing.

Happy Lunar New Year!

2012-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

So this post is scheduled way in advance since I probably am not going to have Internet connectivity at all this day, for reasons of Holidaying With The Nuclear Family. I am probably somewhere in the vicinity of the African continent at the moment (I believe our destination is South Africa), but I thought I would make sure to get some good New Year greetings wishing you all joy and prosperity and other cool stuff like a steampunk Lunar New Year. Good food, new clothes, money!

So, wherever you are, 恭喜發財 to my Chinese readers! I have no idea what dialect ya'll use, so you get the generic Chinese characters to read whatever way you wish; my family says kong hey fatt choi / keong kee huat chye / kong hee wa sai, depending on who we're talking to, but to the rest of you and yours, 新年快乐!

And a special shout-out to Ay-Leen at BeyondVictoriana.com, hope you have a very wonderful Tết! Chúc mừng năm mới!

Interview: Steampowered Globe Editor Maisarah Abu Samah

2012-01-18T03:17:00.000-05:00

A while back, I posted the Table of Contents for the Singaporean steampunk anthology, The Steampowered Globe, and I got to chatting to its editor, Maisarah Abu Samah, about putting it together. And I thought ya'll might find it interesting, especially any of you in Asia (and I know some of you are from Asia), to read a very frank interview from Maisarah about the anthology and spec fic generally.

Tell us a little bit about yourself! How did you get interested in steampunk?

I'm one of the current municipal liaisons for Nanowrimo in Singapore and I try to make people see that people in Singapore do write fiction. Which means, I try to invade literary events or make our presence known online since locally, the only fiction we see published most is ghost stories, erotic ones or erotic ghost stories. That and sad woe is me literature. Which wouldn't be bad (they can be well written) but that is all for the fiction published here.

On the subject of steampunk, I got interested in it conventions. There had always been lolitas dressed up at the cosplay conventions I go to but there wasn't that much people in steampunk fashion. Looking at online pics and shops, I feel like you could make up a back story of a character dressed in what or what kind of situation they'd be in. And past the fashion, there's always been anime like Full Metal Alchemist or books like Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate...

What was your working definition of steampunk for this anthology? What steampunk works / media did you look towards to inform your own vision of steampunk for your anthology?

Pretty much an alternate history of "what would happen if technology advanced way faster than they would in real life for that era" was my definition.

I have a different set of references that don't actually include steampunk works when doing this anthology though, such as historical time travel romances, the Read or Die anime since it had interesting use of technology and was a "modern" alternate history, and the current books that are out this season that even included Terry Prachett's I Shall Wear Midnight. All these stretched my imagination to see what would be possible in steampunk since it would be a genre that would be more saturated in possibilites in technology advancement yet with a culture and timeline that was utterly Victorian or thereabouts anyway.

What is the history of the Happy Smiley Writers Group and Two Trees that led to this collaboration? Who picked the steampunk theme for this anthology?

The HSWG was formed because we were sick of the depressing stuff published on the local shelves. We were still writing after November when Nanowrimo was on and formed this group to edit our novels. Eventually, we wrote new stories in the meantime.

Two Trees is [co-editor and publisher] Rosemary [Lim]'s company and pretty much we published books to be an in your face, "Look people! It's not a freaking erotic ghost story cooking assessment self help autobiography book! We exist! We write genre fiction!". There are writers here with stories that are entertaining and fun to read but they aren't easily published here because it's not commercially viable.

So far though, our battle in the local scene and encouraging budding writers to write what the heck they want seems to be on the rise but good grief, it took a lot of time and our efforts to show that it is possible to do so. The HSWG is quite unapologetic in writing stubbornly on what stories we want to tell even if there are a lot obstacles for us to get published.

The theme for this anthology was picked by Rosemary since we did science fiction for the previous one and really, no one had done a steampunk anthology or steampunk anything published in Singapore before. Also, steampunk fashion, books etc was catching everywhere but Singapore. I wanted other people to get sucked into the genre so more people could gush over it with me.

Was steampunk known to your writers? How is it seen there: as a passing curiousity, or are there signs of a growing fandom for it? If I asked you to compare the Singaporean steampunk "scene" (as it were) to the subcultures in the UK/US/Canada/Brazil, what would you say?

Apparently not much. We did put up a definition and examples of it when we did the submission call and there were some inquiries of "What is steampunk?" Even then, there were people who just submitted regular science fiction stories. The steampunk scene here is growing though, just really slowly. It's nearly non-existent except that you do get to see people decked out in steampunk gear at cosplay conventions since that is the time when most of the subcultures meet together like J-rock fashion, sweet lolita, etc and tempt other people into checking them out since it looks wonderful.

What made editing this anthology different from editing other anthologies you've done?

Ok. Rosemary is the head honcho for this operation. I'm just an interactive media designer so I know how to do the whole layout for prints and everything but I wanted more experience in editing for fiction. Workshops and lessons don't let me learn everything and it's terribly hard to find a publishing house or agency here that will take in an apparentice or well, it just doesn't exist here! (And I'm still trying to find one online.)

Now, I've helped edit the previous book, Happiness at the End of the World or even other stories but I have never foreseen that by just making an anthology of "steampunk" stories meant that a lot of confusion and incredulous decisions. Firstly, we did receive quite a number of stories. On first reading, it was clear that there are those who just shoved technology or just set their characters in a "steampunk era" without really understanding it so that was out.

It was also clear that there were a lot of new writers who submitted it since some of them did not follow the criteria or instructions we specified on the submission page. We were nice though, we still at least read all their stories and for the rejected ones, we wrote comments on what they could improve on. For some of them, you could tell that they just sent in their stories and hoped for the best that we couldn't see that it was self insert stories with very cliched plots.

We didn't have those problems when we had more "widely known" genres and people sent in more original stories.

We managed to shortlist the stories we liked for the anthology and some of them just needed some editing to polish up. There was one however, that after we did comment on which edits to do or what to fix, the writer backed out when it was ninety percent done! That was a first for me, for someone to back out because they were not confident of their story and it was one of the top rated ones when we did a blind rating system of which stories to put in the anthology with the rest of the four members of the HSWG.

Obviously, we finished it all up and managed to produce this book! Fun fact, it took a long time for our library to give us a CIP number for cataloguing because they had to make a new category just for us. So now if you look under steampunk published in Singapore, ours is the first and hopefully not only title in that listing.

What I learned from this was that we do have a lot of writers but they're not confident of their writing or that they have the potential but not just there yet. Hopefully, time and more experience will help that.

You seem to begin with Victorian England as the basis for steampunk, which isn't surprising since that's how the genre began, whether from the canon 70's novels or with the Victorian Science Fiction movies of the 50's. And from the descriptions so far, the stories neither begin nor end there, possibly because most people didn't have a clue what steampunk is. Which rather sounds refreshing, actually, but are there some overarching themes that were very popular among the submissions, and in these stories?

Technically, I only took the Victorian period as the basis of it! I had been thinking more about what was happening everywhere else during that period. Really old Jackie Chan movies (they screen them on TV here) helped too since some of them were in that era. No, not Shanghai Noon or Around the world in 80 days, the ones that he didn't speak in English.

In submissions we received, a lot of them definitely had spirited females. Whether they were scientists, ladies or gun toting ones, they really liked to go against the society set in the story's universe. Maybe it's because we're such rule abiding citizens here. Most of the stories had the main characters going against the government or higher ups to break rules or tricking them into believing that they are doing the norm for their society.

Did any of your writers tackle actual historical events, or explore alternate histories that have clear links to recorded history? Or did your writers explore clearly different historical trajectories?

Hmmm, none that I know of at least. Maybe refering to real historical people like the Empress of China but no actual historical events. The writers wanted to write their own events for this anthology.

Are you satisfied with your current selection in their fulfillment of your expectations for the genre? What could be done better, how could it have been worse? Would you do this genre again?

I'm not disappointed with it is what I can say! I definitely had no idea what sort of submissions we would get since this is the first time we're receiving any for this genre so I'm quite pleased that we did have some stories that have quality and are pretty different from each other. I have no idea how it could be worse, maybe if we didn't plan, got stubborn in the time line to get the writers to edit their pieces then the book wouldn't come to fruition?

Since Two Trees is Rosemary's, I'm not sure if we'd do steampunk again. Not as an anthology at least. Personally, I would do this genre as a full length novel, which I am anyway. The anthologies that Two Trees publish tend to change genres each time. We want to fill the shelves with different sorts of stories. So slowly but surely, we want to show that writers here don't just write those erotic ghost story cooking assessment books even if we have to do it ourselves.

It seems that much of your woes are tied to the lack of genre fiction in general. If this had been a general speculative fiction anthology, do you think you would have had as much problem? Why / Why not?

I think that if this had been a general spec fic anthology, there might be a whole lot more entries but it might not mean a lot of quality. It would mean us reading a lot of eyebrow raising stories and me trying to write variations of comments of pointing out how said stories aren't original or Mary Sues while sifting out the good ones.

Sticking to steampunk seems to be the best since it did filter out in a sense that people who knew what it was and we could see which stories were going to make it quickly.

Still, I think we'd have a different set of problems if we'd gone through the general spec fic route. In general, budding writers here have no freaking idea how to submit stories anywhere. There's an underlying sense of "I've got great marks in English! My story must be awesome!" for some of them. The structure is all fine and dandy but there's a lack of spark or imagination or that bit that makes it addictive to read a story.

For some others, they've really good stories but they're not confident at all to submit them. The only way I know that they've good stories is when I talk to some of them (especially during Nanowrimo) and good grief, it's hard to get good stories published if none of these writers are brave enough to send it in anywhere.

And while we're on that vein, what is the voice of Singaporean spec fic like? (Out here we get mostly Joyce, who is awesome, but one person does not the whole sum of an island population make, no matter how small the island, or how loved she is.) It sounds small and stifled at the moment; do Singaporeans just not like SFF?

Oh Singaporeans do like SFF, you see them reading it in bookstores and libraries. Discussing it online and all that jazz. The problem is more that over here, if you've published any story, people think it's going to be crap even if they aren't reading the blurb of it. In each bookstore or library, there's this section of Singapore published works. Our books will tend to be in that shelf no matter what genre it is since it's Singapore published.

Now imagine at least ten types of thin paper back ghost story books filling half of these shelves in the section. Self help and autobiography books filling a third of this half. The rest is erotica, true crime stories and a whole bunch of literature texts. Then you have genre fiction like us filling up just one small corner of it. Barely filling it up even.

So while everyone else goes to different sections in the store/library to buy or read books like romance, urban fantasy, science fiction, etc, they tend to ignore the Singapore published section unless they really want to read the ghost stories or get a book for their schoolwork. Thus, people think that everyone here just writes that.

Which leads us to the lack of Singaporean spec fic because there's no publishing house here that would generally accept it since the money makers are said ghost stories and... you get the drift. There will always be readers of spec fic here but they'll read anything, anything that isn't published here.

I hope that we can change that mindset eventually. To show that we don't suck and for them to actually pick up the book before dismissing it entirely.

Ah, the challenges of an infant spec fic scene! All the joys of derivatives and Sturgeon's Law and perfectionist anxiety. Do you think there is, in general, a lack of faith towards local talent, as compared to say, a debut Western author? Why do you think that is?

YES, heck yes. It's not even in fiction. It's a Singaporean thing. If it's made here, it mustn't be as awesome as it's made in US/UK/Taiwan/Hong Kong/Indonesia/Japan/etc. A Western author, a new one in the bookshelves have more likelyhood to be picked up than a local one. It's all in the packaging! There must be some reason that the library/bookstore is importing the book all the way from X-country. While local authors are just.. Here. You could bump into them on the street, see them eating at McD's or just being "one of us".

It's a bit like taking things for granted really. Plus, there's a lack of local talent because everyone's more into academics or making money. If you're writer, (even just for fun!) people will still ask why are you writing it. Why aren't you doing something better like your homework or your job. If there's no profit, why do it?

Given your difficulty claiming a local audience, have you turned your sights to international audiences? How do you think The Steampowered Globe will be received internationally? Or at least, in North America / UK, based on what you know of steampunk there?

Hmmm, I think that international audiences will be more intrigued that we exist in the first place. FYI for everyone reading this, Singapore's not part of Malaysia or China and we do speak English. Also we definitely are trying to branch out internationally. The individual writers of the book are also more involved online in submitting or discussing writing there. There's no point in just sticking to a Singaporean audience since we know it's quite limited.

Following from the above question, how would you compare the Steampowered Globe to the current U.S. steampunk anthologies (say, the Steampunk anthologies by the Vandermeers) or novels (Priest, Carriger, Westerfeld)?

Hmmmm, it's different. That sounds obvious but yes. I'm not sure how to describe it but there's this, well. The writers are all Asian and you can tell that there's a different style to it compared to the U.S. steampunk anthologies. It's like comparing manga to comics, both are graphic novels yet they're not similar. It might be obvious to us how the societies or cultures in the stories are like because we're here but maybe it might be different to people in the West since our stories take place all over like in Hong Kong or the straits of Malaya.

Well, wasn't that an interesting interview? Don't forget, you can buy The Steampowered Globe directly from Two Trees.

How Dare We (Also, Trailers!)

2012-01-13T13:59:00.003-05:00

It's difficult to find entertainment that features non-white people in English-language media, you know? BET was created to feature black people specifically, because otherwise, they wouldn't get any lead roles on white-dominant TV (which is pretty much all other US TV).

Last year, I read about Danny Glover's troubles in finding a financier for his upcoming biopic on Toussaint L'ouverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution. Why wouldn't it be funded? I mean, it's a great story: slave uprisings, people taking the French Revolution to its logical end, people coming into their own and realizing they, too, deserve rights, and will fight and die for it. Toussaint L'Ouverture wasn't really part of my consciousness until I read Nora Jemisin's The Effluent Engine, whose protagonist is a daughter of this legendary hero.

Meanwhile, in France, a TV movie of this hero is being made, starring Jimmy Jean-Louis. Jean-Louis is Haitian-born himself, which is also incredibly rare (Glover's vision will star Wesley Snipes), so it's pretty awesome! I found this trailer while googling for "Steampunk Toussaint L'ouverture" (which got me no steampunk results, predictably). Have a trailer, in French with no subtitles:

"Toussaint L'Ouverture" Trailer from Tambay Obenson on Vimeo.

The more we talk about these issues, the clearer it becomes that Hollywood (and many mainstream media producers) simply does not care about non-white stories. There are lots of really great English-language movies which simply fall to the side. Why?

Because they're not about white heroes.

Producers won't finance a movie with no white heroes because they're not sure such a movie will make any money. (Glover finally found a Venezuelan financier.) (But seriously, it shouldn't have taken him that long. And seriously, he shouldn't have received that weak-ass "but it got no white heroes!" malarkey in the first place.) (What kind of reasoning is that.)

George Lucas recently went on the Daily Show to talk about this: it took him 23 years to fund Red Tails, which is, in his words, the "first all-black action movie" to come out of a big name Hollywood producer like himself. And when all he asked was for marketing, Hollywood said no, because they don't know how to market a movie like this.

Red Tails is a movie about the Tuskagee Airmen, a squadron of all-black pilots, who, due to racist discrimination in the U.S. Army, were disallowed from fighting in the front lines. Black people can't fly, can't fight. Black people aren't real American soldiers, amirite? Red Tails shows them being given a chance to prove themselves, and prove themselves they do. And simply because George Lucas repeats what he's been told, over and over, that Hollywood does not know how to market non-white films, he's called racist, and he's whiny, and he's discriminating, and he made an anti-white movie.

Go to the comments and count the number of hateful ones this trailer gets if you feel up to it. Because this movie points out the anti-black racism of the white supremacist U.S. Army of the time, it is an anti-white movie, which is just as bad as anti-black racism.... yes, let's totally ignore the long history of slavery, Jim Crow, the fact that the Civil Rights era was even lived in the first place, and the fact that black people continue to face discrimination today.

How dare we celebrate these unsung heroes who fought for the very country that made clear that they were not wanted in it. Pointing out this little fact, how anti-white!

If we make a story that is not about white people, it is "reverse racism," and it is "anti-white hatred." Somehow, people can write stories that erase non-white peoples, and that's not racist, that's just "the way art works," that's just how the artists were inspired, and what they produced, and how dare we get offended because we're not in it!

How dare we get offended when Disney's Tangled features floating lanterns, a common cultural way of celebrating various festivals, and not feature non-white people! This despite the fact that the inspiration came from John Lasseter's honeymoon in Tahiti. Our cultural signifiers, our customs, they are really adorable, and well worth adorning white people's lives with. If you google "Tangled lantern" you will find NOTHING about the long cultural history of sky lanterns--people genuinely believe it comes from Tangled itself, a cool original idea.

How dare we get offended when The Last Airbender from Paramount starred only white people, at the expense of non-white people's dignity. How dare we discriminate against white actors so!

How dare we get offended when people point out there's no way black people could have existed in King Arthur's time (hey, Merlin fandom!).

How dare we get offended when Harry Potter fans erase Blaise Zabini's race despite in-text citations that Blaise is, indeed, a dark-skinned boy.

(Shit, is the word "offended" even applicable now? I'm not even offended anymore, just fucking pissed off. Is that better? Will that make you take me more seriously? If I don't have a reaction, maybe I'm not offended, just resigned to the fact that you will always be racist. Is that better, you always being racist and me expecting you to be racist? What kind of standards for "basic decency" are we operating with here, now?)

(FYI, just because I expect it, doesn't mean I accept it.)

How dare we point out that the superstructures we live in within the United States and Canada are white-supremacist when they are such wonderful countries and how dare we ask for role models that we can see ourselves growing up to become. How dare we ask that our histories be explored in our school education system.

How dare we get angry when white people patronizingly try to raise our children without actually knowing the challenges of being a racialized parent in a racist world. It's not like non-white children are ever stolen by the system anyway, then and now.

How dare we talk about our experiences and expect white people to sit back and take the anti-whiteness.

How dare I declare my desire to have as many of ya'll to go watch Red Tails on its opening weekend, Jan 20, to prove that such a movie deserves as wide an audience as possible? How dare I declare my desire to return to Canada Feb 4, and watch this movie over and over again in theatres?

Like this:

Ya'll-- if you are a supporter of this blog, and of all non-white steampunk, or non-white entertainment in general, or even of the idea of racial equality in any abstract manner, totally go check out Red Tails, which opens Jan 20th. Totally prove that an all-black action movie can and will pull in dollars, and that white people won't be alienated by it, but actually enjoy it. Prove that ya'll can handle seeing black men in the lead roles, in which they are not subordinate to white men, or hypersexualized, or demonized, but instead are heroes doing what's right for the country they serve.

I'm gonna be away from the Internet for the next 48 hours. When I come back, I'm reading comments. If I see any racist bullshit going down hating on non-whites, crying "reverse discrimination" or "reverse racism" or anything of the like, I'm deleting it. No mercy. You've been warned. Take your racism elsewhere.

MRP Adventures: Postcolonial Steampunk

2012-01-10T00:07:00.000-05:00

I just thought I would share a paragraph I wrote about why I chose postcolonialism as my theoretical framework with which to tackle steampunk:

Steampunk and postcolonialism can be used together very neatly to challenge dominant ideology and representation trends, no matter what media. The combination may seem incongruous: steampunk at first blush glorifies just about anything postcolonialism critiques. Moreover, postcolonialism is an ambiguous term that cannot be used to describe any single aspect of any decolonization process that have happened or is happening, making the idea of postcolonial steampunk messier than either term on its own. However, postcolonialism implies a temporal aftermath of colonizers leaving the shores of the colonized, which does not reflect many of the various contexts of once-colonized countries, as late capitalism enables a form of neo-colonial domination. In using postcolonialism to identify colonial narratives, it is possible to conflate whole swathes of histories into a single process, a linear history of colonialism, decolonization, and post-colonization when attempting to historicize global narratives of international relations. Yet, the term itself points to a history of colonialism, and in application to steampunk, forces the reader to acknowledge that is steampunk evokes the past, then it will also evoke a colonial past, and a responsible writer will explore how inequalities were imposed on colonized peoples.

Postcolonialism as a field in its many forms matches steampunk’s predilection of looking backwards; where steampunk does so to mine for inspiration, postcolonialism does so to understand the historical specificities of different cultural and national contexts—so steampunk informed by postcolonialism offers a cultural product that lends understanding to a genre-reading audience. Both explore the notion of hybridity; postcolonialism in cultural terms, steampunk in temporal ways, allowing a writer of colour to dabble in anachronism and think through hyphenated and multi-heritage identities, which is incredibly useful given migration flows, issues of assimilation and segregation, and the impact of technology on the former two. This also allows us to think through the process of colonization and methods of empowerment. Not only that, but the resistance to fixed conventions in steampunk literature refuse a homogeneity that people of colour writing from a postcolonial framework can use to trouble imperialistic efforts to enforce a single ideal, no matter what manifestation.

I kinda wish I thought of this before actually writing the entire damn paper because it might have given me some much-needed direction, but apparently I needed about 21 single-spaced pages or 13,000 words before this idea occurred to me. But that's kinda how on-going work happens, you know? Heed my words, MA students: you might as well get started as soon as possible so you can get to these nuggets of awesome sooner.

So who wants to see my whole MRP on this blog?! :P

Steampunk POC: Monique Poirer (Seaconke Wampanoag)

2012-01-06T17:00:00.000-05:00

Some of you already know Monique Poirier, either from her Beyond Victoriana essay, or from Tumblr, or you know her from cons and stuff. So it seemed a pretty natural thing to get in touch with her for this series of steampunk POC interviews. I first met her at Steampunk World's Fair 2010, and found her again through K Tempest Bradford's musings about wearing steampunk fashion (Tempest said she couldn't imagine wearing the usual corsets and bustle stuff, then point to Monique as wearing very wearable, everyday stuff). We occasionally chat late into the night, and when I first thought about doing a series of interviews with steampunk POC, it made sense to get in touch with her.

So without further ado, gentlefolk, I present, Monique Poirier:

I know you covered this in your BV essay, about how you come to start doing Native Steampunk, but how did you first get to know about steampunk? What were your impressions of it? Were you like me, as in the "it looks pretty but but but white people and colonialism" sort of way? Or were you a participant in your own way?

I first became aware of teampunk through costuming sometime 2008-2009, and when I came into it I wasn't really involved in the non-European aspect. I originally loved steampunk for the pretty pretty clothes; not gonna lie, I am a sucker for lace and bustles and corsets and brass bits and top hats and waistcoats. I love cello music. I love clockwork. I was a goth in high school and college (this is what a Native steamgoth looks like). It hadn't even occurred to me then to incorporate my ethnic identity into my costuming, or to even notice the colonialism aspect because I was so USED to being invisible as an NDN person, in whiteness and European identity being the only explored aspect, that the problematic white mono-culture aspects just seemed normal to me – but then I started reading about Steampunk online to dig for costuming ideas, and came across your articles at Tor, and started reading Beyond Victoriana, and generally thought more about incorporating my indigeneity into my Steampunk attire. After the Beyond Victoriana panel at the first Steampunk World's Fair, where I (as an audience member) brought up the fact that colonialism effects NDN folks in that our colonizers never left, I was totally ready to make my outfits much more recognizably indigenous.

I remember being at the roundtable where you brought up how colonizers remain on Turtle Island. In fact, I was the one you corrected about colonizers leaving. Do you think people tend to forget this fact, or do you think steampunks are more aware of it?

It's very much a forgotten fact; steampunks may or may not be more aware of it than other folks; certainly the social justice contingent is. Steampunk lends itself to discussions of colonialism and the impact of colonization and empire on world cultures, but not everyone participates or wants to participate in those conversations.

How do YOU define steampunk? As an aesthetic? Genre? Life philosophy? Whatever? How does this compare to the "general" definitions of steampunk you hear?

Defining Steampunk is one of those questions that I think all steampunks are sick to death of by now. For me, Steampunk is alternate history with variant technological and cultural development as occurring in and around late 18th to very early 20th century, anywhere in the world. I'm not a lifestyle steampunk; I don't wear steampunk attire to my day job or live in a steampunk-decor house or try to live by the supposedly 'more genteel' social etiquette of a bygone age. For me it's about costuming and fiction; it's about exploring the past and envisioning how it could have been different and discussing it at length with other like-minded people. It's no surprise that I spend the overwhelming majority of my time at gatherings and conventions going to discussion panels.

I'm not sure how to compare it to general definitions of steampunk, because at this point I'm not sure there's any such thing as a general definition of steampunk.

How do you do steampunk? Or how do you steampunk or how do you participate in steampunk? Or what steampunk media do you do (lit, fashion, events)?

I steampunk through costuming and sundry making relating to costuming; I participate in the culture mostly through spending lavish amounts of time preparing for a few select events in the year (Templecon, Steampunk World's Fair, Steampunk Industrial Revolution) and talking about steampunk online. I've done some steampunk reading and guiltily feel that I should do more because so much of it is awesome. I have plans to write a steampunk novel, but that's had a lot of false starts and stops for a lot of different reasons. I've talked about my envisioned universe here and here.

So tell us your feelings about steampunk in general. What do you think of the existing / canon literature? The fashions? The communities that have sprung up around them?

I love steampunk, but it's got problems. There are a lot of people who are very happy to fully and heartily embrace and celebrate, without exploring or reconstructing, the most problematic racist, sexist, classist, and imperial aspects of the 19th century. They tend to turn up in comment threads when one criticizes something problematic in steampunk. But these people are going to exist in any fandom or subculture, so you can't judge the subculture by them. Steampunk is awesome and pretty and bursting with potential. I rather wish I was more involved in some kind of local steampunk community, but the nearest regular gatherings to me are still an hour drive away, and since they seldom bring the kind of discussion I crave anyhow, I seldom bother. Come on Providence RI Steampunk scene, why won't you be a thing?!

For all its flaws, what makes steampunk compelling to you?

Let me cite for a moment the wonderful webcomic Married To The Sea, from March of 2006:

But aside from that aspect (which is not small thing, let me be honest) I think I'm drawn to Steampunk for the same reason I'm drawn to renfaires and halloween and goth: I love costuming. I love pageantry. I love enthusiasm about the same. I love the kind of toothy discussions about history and culture and human nature, about sociology and philosophy and how the world is and what shaped it and how it could be that only seem to occur in certain settings – and steampunk is one of those settings.

What do you think steampunk has to offer POC who usually find themselves saturated in white spaces?

I'm not sure how to answer this question; Steampunk gatherings tend to be pretty white-saturated spaces. Steampunk fandom reflects geekery in general, and while there are definitely POC contingents in fandom, it's still very much white majority. Steampunk offers what other fandoms offer; fun and interest and discussion and gaming and costuming and generally having a good time with like-minded people. I think steampunk fiction, by virtue of being a newish genre, has more room for POC voices than 'traditional' fantasy and sci-fi in terms of how it's viewed by publishers and audiences – the same goes for comics and visual art.

What's been the greatest challenge in incorporating being NDN into your steampunk?

Balance. Deciding what I want to incorporate into my attire that will be both recognized by outsiders as being NDN without making myself into a walking stereotype. Deciding what in my alternate universe to keep and what to scrap in favor of what else. I don't wear feathers, by and large. I do utilize a lot of bead work. I wear a lot of buckskin – by the 19th century in our timetime, buckskin had fallen out of use in favor of tradecloth and calico in lots of applications; I actively choose to use buckskin because it's pre-contact traditional and using it speaks directly to a rejection of European assimilation. On the other hand, the way that I cut my pieces reflect Victorian lines; I use diamond-shaped back panels and fitted bodices and bustles because these lines are what I love about steampunk and the Victorian aesthetic. In an imagined world, in a timeline where clothing choices were dictated by fashion and not by assimilation, such a garment can exist.

Have you told your family and other tribe members about this weird little thing you do? If yes, how have they reacted?

My mom and I actually sit around doing leatherwork together pretty frequently; she strictly on regalia, me on either reglalia or steampunk attire (or pieces that I intend to use for both applications – my moccasins and one of my dresses have seen conventions AND powwows...). She thinks it's awesome that I'm so enthusiastic about it, and she's happy that I'm incorporating NDN stuff into fandom. In general, my extended family and tribe members write it off as 'nerd stuff'. Some don't really comprehend why I'd want to play around with 19th century history, because the 19th century sucked. If I weren't being so mindful about what items I'm willing to use and which I am NOT willing to take out of a powwow setting because doing so would be disrespectful, I have no doubt that I'd get an earful from one or more of my elders. In general the reaction has been between 'apathetic' and 'positive'.

Here is a touchy, possibly trigger-y question, feel free to skip: have you witnessed or experienced flat-out racism in steampunk spaces, beyond the online displays of flagrant appropriation? What about a microaggression that you didn't realize the breadth of until much later?

At last year's Steampunk World's Fair some dude in a hallway jovially said 'Hey, Steampunk Trail of Tears!' at me in passing, and since I was on my way to a panel and didn't even see who'd said it, I wasn't able to stop and address how incredibly wrong that was with him. That's probably the most directly insipid thing I've had to deal with, everything else has been far more microagressive and mildly grating – assumptions that NDN folks = Weird West, gracious and positive reactions from white folks with an undercurrent of defensiveness about their own costuming choices, on more than one occasion people coming up to me to expound about their reported NDN ancestry and ask me how I 'got enrolled' in my tribe. That, in fact, segues nicely into the next question...

Could you tell us a bit about the Pretendian Wannabe Sue Tribe?

So there's this vast contingency of folks who have a Cherokee princess grandmother. This is never actually the case. Even more people claim to have 'Native Blood' – this is so prevalent that Stuff White People Do has a page about it. Now, identity policing, blood quantum, and inclusion vs. exclusion in NDN communities is a massive, thorny, problematic issue. It's one of the enduring painful legacies of colonization that NDN communities have often been forced to determine their membership by rules other than their own. I'm not contesting that there are PROBLEMS with identity policing.

But there are also a hell of a lot of white folks out there who are happy to pretend to be NDN, or who known damned well they aren't any part NDN and want to pretend they are anyway, because of romanticized stereotypes about NDN folks. You can find these people wearing headdresses, turquoise jewelry, assorted feathers, dreamcatchers, and pendleton prints on tumblr. They usually ascribe to some new agey woo-based worldview. Thier homes might be full of this crap. This is a hilariously accurate portrait of a hypothetical one. I've met these people at every single open to the public powwow I've ever been at, as well at at steampunk events and in sundry 'real life' locations.

I dig this quote out a lot, but it's something that bears repeating: White people want to pretend to be Native, very often, out of misplaced guilt.

“There is a long colonial history of playing Indian, of settler-colonists assuming Native roles and cultures for themselves. [3] Philip Deloria even wrote a whole book about it. While I will not go so far as to suggest that white authors cannot, or must not, write from allegedly indigenous points of view, non-indigenous authors, and most especially white authors, must be aware of (and think hard about) the colonialist tropes of playing Indian when they write from an alleged indigenous point of view.

There are two points about “playing Indian” and white people writing children’s books about indigenous people that I wish to bring forward.

In “A Tribe Called Wannabe” (pdf), Rayna Green writes about an incident when white historical re-enactors went through some trouble to learn how to play lacrosse, and even make “authentic” lacrosse sticks, in order to “authentically” re-enact the roles of historical Iroquois and Ojibway in a particular battle. When asked why they didn’t just invite contemporary Iroquois and Ojibway to play those roles — people who already had the relevant knowledge — the white re-enactors eventually admitted that the point of even doing the re-enactment was that they had wanted to play the Iroquois and Ojibwe roles themselves. Green writes (emphasis mine),

The need to replay the roles, replay the battles, replay the historic scenes is there, especially when the distance of time has not resolved the historical ambiguity about the actions of one’s ancestors, or when the reconstruction of the past seems more glorious than the present. … In that world, not only do Indians not play Indian, but the role for whites to play is not the one they want. They already know that role. It is the “Indian” they want and want to be.

When one lives in a settler-colonialist state, when one is ashamed of or conflicted about one’s settler privilege or the actions of one’s ancestors, it can appear to be emotionally simpler, easier, to identify with an indigenous viewpoint. “If I had lived then,” so many of these books and movies say, “I would have done differently. I would have been on the side of the Natives.”

Almost always: would have done. Would have been.

Almost never: am doing.

I urge white people who are moved to pretend to connection with NDN identities to consider why they're driven to do so.

THE WORST THING ABOUT STEAMPUNK FANS?

Elitists. Didactic whiners dicking over the definition of Steampunk to decide what to exclude. Racists, classists, sexists, fascists, etc who hide their very real and very problematic ideologies and behavior behind role play and pretend it's a joke. People who shut down discussions because they don't want to be involved in them or can't comprehend why the participants do. But these people? They're in the minority. It's a pretty loud minority, especially online, but still a minority. Most steampunk fans are not like this.

THE BEST THING ABOUT STEAMPUNK FANS?

ENTHUSIASM! Steampunk is easily the most excited and enthusiastic subculture I've ever been involved in. Steampunk very much comes from a Rule of Cool and Rule of Awesome and Rule of Fun mindset, and there's something incredibly refreshing about that. Teddy Roosevelt riding a genetically engineered grizzly bear with robotic forearms and shoulder-mounted aether-powered ray guns? WHY NOT? Dirigibles with rockets on them piloted by sky pirates taking on the British Royal Fleet? SURE! Wearing your underwear on the outside? GO FOR IT! Your tophat is a functional sewing machine? You have giant brass and silk wings that run on clockwork and they're actually articulated? Your raygun is hamster-powered? YES YES AND YES. Steampunk fans are creative and full of ingenuity and the steampunk fandom is peopled by artists and writers and musicians and makers and all of them SO EXCITED. How can one not love a scene that has so much love to give back?

Have you met or seen many other NDNs participate in steampunk?

Not in person. I'm aware of several other steampunk NDN's online; particular Elizabeth Lameman nee Dillon. I'm aware that Jeni Hellum identifies as a Potawatomi descendant, but I've written at length about my criticisms of the way she engages her identity with steampunk. I'd really like to see more NDN folks engage with steampunk, but I also understand the reasons that many don't; the 19th century kind of sucked for NDN folks just a bit, what with the genocide and forced relations and boarding schools and child theft, the legacy of which is still with us today...

What would you say to NDNs who want to get into steampunk but aren't sure how to start incorporating being NDN?

I'd say that steampunk is what you make of it; there's room there for NDN identities, but I'm not going to lie – you have to fight for it. Steampunk is a fun way to reimagine the past and explore time lines in which the atrocities of history didn't take pace, or didn't take place in the way they took place in our time line. You can make your own history, and in doing so get people talking about the realities of history in ways that they often ignore. I've educated more people about the realities of NDN history via steampunk than I'd ever have reached in 'traditional' gatherings – steampunk is inherently political and volatile and interesting. Also, it's a great way to get some regalia items (but certainly not others – I trust NDN folks to have the sense of what's appropriate to wear) out of your closet when it's not Powwow season.

And that's Monique Poirier, folks! Give her a big hand!

We Interrupt Srs Blog Bzns to Bring You Fake Revolutionary Lulz

2012-01-05T12:30:00.002-05:00

I have received word that Steampunk Emma Goldman has just declared war on the Emperor of the Red Fork Empire!

This will mean nothing to you if you know nothing about the U.S. Northeastern steampunk scene, but I have met Steampunk Emma Goldman on a couple of occasions, and I also find such revolutionary moves, fake or otherwise, delightsome. Being humourless and all, it's rare for me to indulge in RP hilarity, but I can get on board a state-smashing subplot or two.

SMASH EMPIRE! SMASH IMPOSED HIERARCHIES! YAY THE PROLETARIAT! (I was gonna say "viva" but "yay" sounded more cheerful.)

(Also, check out Steampunk Emma Goldman's blog; she's got cool bios of radical activists from the 19th century. Plus, her lip makeup is nifty.)

Not-Postcolonial Links of Interest

2012-01-03T20:37:00.000-05:00

A couple of links to Brain Pickings came on my Tumblr dash today, which I got a huge kick out of, and thought you might too:

A List of Don't for Women on Bicycles circa 1890 - Personally hilarious because I used to be a huge cyclist as a kid. I'm especially fond of "don't wear loud-hued leggings," "don't ask, 'what do you think of my bloomers?'", "don't try to have every article of your attire match" and "don't scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run."

(The last one is dear to me because it reminds me of a late-night drive with my best friend, and we decided to drive around Putrajaya, which was very new then, so quite abandoned-looking. And we did come across a cow on the road.)

A Map of the Woman's Heart - An actual map, my God!

Steampunk POC Interviews

2012-01-02T20:07:00.000-05:00

So, for the last couple of years, I've mostly been focusing on steampunk literature, in particular re-reading stuff that deals with issues surrounding Empire to point out how these narratives barely center POC unless it's in problematic ways, or else ideas of Empire erases POC entirely. I've been formulating an understanding of the steampunk aesthetic in ways that could easily reach across different cultural iterations, riffing off Mike Perschon's delineation of the aesthetic.

I am kind of tired of having to say the same thing over and over: "racism racism White Gaze White Gaze Orientalism Orientalism Eurocentric Eurocentric"--if you're a regular reader, I imagine this is pretty old hat by now.

It's not to say I've found nothing that's POC-centric; of course I have, and that's why this blog keeps going. As BeyondVictoriana.com keeps demonstrating, there's a lot of POC history that simply never gets explored in mainstream steampunk. But just because there're histories, doesn't mean we see them happen in literature.

Being POC means also being a living, breathing human being who interacts with this world, not just in between pages of text. Dealing with histories is very much part of life, part of living, part of culture. It doesn't only happen in writing, although in my own way, I would like to try to document this part of living as much as possible.

For the first Friday of the month, hopefully every month, I will post up an interview with a self-identified non-white steampunk. They may be writers. They may be Makers. They may be musicians. Heck, maybe they're just fans of the aesthetic. The point is that, I want to talk to POC, about being a POC in steampunk. Some of us don't really see race as an issue at all. Some of us reckon with racial issues in steampunk all the time.

I have a few folks lined up for the next few months, and I will be on the lookout for more folks to talk to in the future. (And of course if you know anybody, or you might be interested, you can always email me!) Hope you enjoy this upcoming feature, for as long as I can keep it up =)

"On Wooden Wings" by Paolo Chikiamco

2011-12-28T12:43:00.000-05:00

So once in a while something interesting pops into my inbox, about POC, by POC, and Paolo Chikiamco's short story from the Philippine Speculative Fiction 6 anthology happens to be one of them. Paolo runs Rocket Kapre, a spec fic imprint dedicated to Filipino speculative fiction, and edits Usok, RK's webzine.

"On Wooden Wings" is one of those interesting stories I like to read, because while it has an accessible plot, there are nuances to the story which are best appreciated by local readers. And I'm not a local reader, so there're probably things I'm not picking up, and which are inaccessible to me, and that is cool, too.

The action takes place not in a landed city per se, but on the ships of the Fleet of Wisdom, a floating academy of sorts that moves from port to port, educating students, providing them with workshop space and allied to the Qudarat Sultanate of Jolo (which I can't suss whether it's a fictional Sultanate based off the Sulu Sultanate or actually real. It's actually a very interesting problem because if you give a shit about historical tidbits at all, you Google and Google to find out and learn other things along the way. Besides which, Chikiamco being Filipino himself has the lateral advantage of representing his people from his perspective, not from the White Gaze, which has the qualitative difference of who controls what the reader is viewing. Given the continued history of colonization the Philippines still deals which, this is pretty significant in terms of power differentials).

The main characters are Clarita Leschot Esteybar, a Moro of mixed descent and the best student in the Fleet, and Domingo Malong, a Tagalog artist. And here we see an interplay of the conflict that comes about from the history of Spanish colonization in the Philippines, made complex with issues of mixed heritage:

It wasn't the fact that Clarita was the best student in the Fleet, or that the Çelebi had turned her into Domingo's personal overseer and tutor. No, it was the simple fact that Domingo was a Filipino, and Clarita was "Spanish"--never mind that she had never seen Spain, or that her father was French, or that her mother came from a Muslim minority that was more persecuted in Spain than Domingo's people were in Luzon. It was obvious to Clarita that as far as Domingo was concerned, she was The Enemy. Considering that many of her fantasies involved using the Tagalog as a test subject for one of Nur's more unstable inventions, maybe he was right.

This sets up the ethnic conflict that we'll see for the rest of the text, with Clarita referring to Domingo as "kafir" and Domingo referring to Clarita as "moro" until their turning point, whereby Clarita finds something to offer Domingo in exchange for his help in building a model of her to use as a test dummy for her flying machine, the wooden wings of the title. Domingo is inexplicably privileged in this story--he's a cantankerous artist, more concerned with his carving than he is about his lessons, and Clarita, as the best student in the Fleet, has to tutor him. Clarita's position in the Fleet is tenuous and dependent on her keeping her status as the best student, but even she suffers the anxiety of being kicked off if she doesn't do as she's told, so she feels resentment in knowing that Domingo, who refuses to attend classes, somehow manages to stay in the academy.

Domingo's not really a sympathetic character for the rest of the text, and frankly he's kind of a self-centered jerk to Clarita, taking his art more seriously than her, getting angry at her, even though he's clearly concerned for her, in his own way. (What is wrong with dude characters like this? Can someone explain to me what is up with dude characters like this? I see them around quite a bit and I never know why I'm supposed to like them. Or if I'm supposed to like them at all. I mean I get having a ~complicated~ relationship with a character but this kind of dude characters are not actually that worthwhile having ~complicated~ relationships with either that I can tell...) His artistic self-centeredness provides a foil to Clarita's own kind of scientific self-centeredness.

But Clarita is better drawn out: she wants to be free of her family, in particular her father's influence. She's in the Fleet only at his leisure, and she lives in fear of being pulled out, therefore she works under pressure to demonstrate her work in front of the sultanate's elite. She doesn't extend help to Domingo out of generosity, but out of obedience to the Celebi who are her teachers, whose ranks she intends to join. She's a mechanical genius, ambitious, and outwardly self-confident. She's also manipulative, figuring out how to string Domingo into helping her.

I rather like Clarita much better as a character, but that is, I think, a result of Chikiamco doing her character better justice. Clarita has figured out her location within the scheme of things, that places her within the colonizer/colonized binary without necessarily embodying one or the other. Her in-between position (an accident of her birth) allows an in for Domingo to reach across that binary as well. One could argue, of course, that the one is using the other, but I'd argue that that's how give-and-take relationships work.

The humble beginnings of the Fleet of Wisdom, the flexibility of movement between ports, thus also the diversity of students found within its ships all point to a very ad hoc mode of operations. There is something very neat, something that is both self-sustaining and yet connected, about this idea of a floating academy, that goes from place to place as needed--one of the crises of the story comes when Clarita finds out that the Fleet will dock at Jolo in ten days instead of the three months she thought she had. Very steampunk, if you think about it.

The Fleet heads to Jolo because of an attack by the Spanish, and if one cross-references with general Wikipedia info, there are hints of a radical change from history, whereby Spanish colonization was made easier by the competition between various kingdoms and communities (here I'm back on familiar territory, because British colonization of Malaya occurred much the same way). The Qudarat Sultanate is stronger for the alliance with the Celebi fleet that now runs the Fleet of Wisdom, and everyone benefits from the added strength against the Spanish. This lends a local force against the colonizing power that both remains true to the revolutionary spirit that remained suppressed until 1896 and provides an equal footing of sorts against the colonizers. It doesn't deviate entirely from recorded history: Spanish colonization still remains a reality that affects the Filipinos, especially the Tagalogs like Domingo Malong.

The steampunk elements, the accelerated technology of engines and flight in this setting, with a hint of clockwork and revolution, pave the way for the upcoming events of British Occupation, which Chikiamco's next story, "High Society," explores from a distinctly local position. Which will be another post for another time!

(And before anybody asks, I do not know how to buy Philippine Speculative Fiction 6! It may only be available to Filipino readers for now. Which makes me sad, as the anthology as a whole sounds very neat.)

Christmas Present from Allison Curval

2011-12-25T20:08:00.000-05:00

This is a random plug!

Allison Curval of the Clockwork Dolls has put up an entire collection of instrumentals that went into the making of the band's album Dramatis Personae.

This is a free download until Jan 1, 2012. Holiday message from Allison runs thusly:

--EXCERPT FROM THE BOOKLET--
Looking back at the past four years of The Clockwork Dolls, I can’t help but think to myself: "Wow, I was a part of this." To imagine that it all began with two kids outside of a theater taking a smoke break between shadow casting a production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and led to performing in front of packed audiences from World Steam Expo, Steamcon III, and other conventions of which we could only have dreamt.
A personal milestone of my own was gracing the stage of the beautiful Gaylord National Resort at Katsucon and high fiving the audience as we marched triumphantly up the side of the stage to perform in front of the gathered masses. Not to gloat or anything, but it was pretty rockstar.
As the year 2011 winds down and the band is on a much needed break, I can’t help but look back at where we came from and remember just how innocent and humble our beginnings were. We were just a two kids with a cheap midi keyboard, a handful of borrowed gear, and a heck of a lot of moxie.
It’s with these thoughts that I’d like to share with you the full instrumental collection of The Clockwork Dolls. That’s right, you’ll hear everything from the first demo I pitched Helene to the full instrumental cuts in Dramatis Personae, and finally a the latest track that’s hanging around the old studio - appropriately called “The Finale Mix” of Maiden Voyage.
I hope you enjoyed listening to those tracks as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. In order to preserve the full “demo” experience, and because I’m a lazy person, the tracks have undergone minimum mastering. Regardless, I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say, “Wow we’ve grown ... a lot.”
-Allison Curval

Congrats on a great four years, Clockwork Dolls, and cheers to more years of wonderful music!

Hope ya'll're having a wonderful holiday season =)

We Interrupt Very Srs Blog Bzns To Bring You Search Engine Lulz

2011-12-25T15:59:00.000-05:00

So sometimes I get really bored and have time to kill, so I look up Google Analytics, and check out where people are linking to this lil' ol' blog from.

And then sometimes I check out the keywords that bring people here! They're usually really boring, like "silver goggles jaymee goh" or "silver goggles" or "silver goggles blog" or something equally similar.

But occasionally, I get some.... amusing ones. Let's have a look and see what keywords people on what looks to be very interesting Internet quests use to get to Silver Goggles:

"what is so special about december 12"
I'm not sure! I'm half-tempted to google this now and find out how it leads to here!

"why do we ask what if" "nightmare scenarios, by contrast"
Those are some very specific search terms, quester!

"books like peshawar lancers"
.... suck. That was an easy query!

"bible in victorian age"
I'm sure this must be a reference to the Steampunk Bible...

"british of why"
Why, indeed.

"can you explain why i can't say coloured"
Because it's a term historically used to be racist towards people who aren't white, particularly black people.

"can't say coloured"
Da-dadada, can't touch this! /MCHammer

"god-breaker plague"
I swear I was bothered by this term for like fifteen minutes trying to figure out whose book has this. Like, NK Jemisin? No. Cherie Priest? No. Tobias Buckell? No. No, it's Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate. Oh geez! I really am losing it these days.

"goggles i like to fuck hong kong girl"
Good for you, Giggles. I'm sure Goggles will be very happy for you.

"is better to pretend you're not a racist or openly engage in it?"
NEITHER! The point is to learn how to be NOT racist!

"not steampunk"
Was this quester looking for Regretsy?

"perdido street station rape"
Yes, well.

"shall we speak to ghosts"
If you bring the ouija board.

"steampunk is racist"
Yes, well.

"verysrs"
VERY THE SRS INDEED

"wolsung how do mooks work"
I won't lie, I am giggling the shit out of this search term. Oops.

The Implications of Less Devastated Empires

2011-12-23T03:03:00.000-05:00

So let's talk about Scott Westerfeld's Goliath, ya'll. Did you like it? I liked it, just like I liked Leviathan, and I liked Behemoth, and I thought Goliath was very well done indeed. The slow dawning realization of Aleks that his best friend is, after all, a girl and the OMG AWKWARD chapters afterwards and the EVEN MORE AWKWARD chapters when he realizes Deryn is in love with him was indeed super-awkward and I enjoyed that, possibly to an unwholesome degree.

I was a bit iffy with the visit to Japan, but ehh, it's Japan, weird shit happens there all the time, I guess, and I thought it was nice that we took a trip down to Mexico and met General Francisco Villa. The little rivalry between the journalists was fun, and I, too, wished to punch Eddie Malone when he also discovers Deryn's secret and gets to writing all about it. And I love how Aleks puts himself out there to protect Deryn, because you know, that is what best friends do!

And yes, I laughed out loud at that middle-of-the-book chapter where Aleks is really really really realizing that Deryn is, indeed! for realsies! a girl! And then Deryn takes advantage of it! And I was like, yea Deryn, you go for it girl, life's too short to spend it not kissing boys. Also, Dr. Barlow / Count Volger -- I WILL GO DOWN WITH THIS SHIP, understand?

And Lilit! My revolutionary anti-patriarchy homegirl! I knew in Behemoth that she was going to get sent away. If possible, get your hands on Marilyn French's From Eve to Dawn series; it's a history of women from as much recorded history as possible, and is French's ten-year opus. In it, French points to how so many times, women become involved in movements that will help everyone, and they get with them specifically because they see potential, and are told, all the time, "wait your turn, let us get rights for the men first" and when the men get the rights they want, they set the women aside, telling them, "you're asking for too much." Women constantly contribute to political movements led by men only to get shafted as soon as the men's goals have been achieved, and women's needs are ignored in due course. I was sad to see this happen to Lilit, but it still made sense to me, and isn't it sad that it made sense to me that this was the logical way her patriarchal movement would play out?

Fine, yeah, okay, Deryn isn't a princess by the end of it, and Aleks goes into obscurity instead of taking up the throne, that's cool (although I sometimes have misgivings about this; I'd rather thought Aleks had proven himself as a good leader and could've found some way of returning to his people while still abdicating, but, whatever, I'm the kind of person who still believes in ~~huge honking scapegoats~~ ~~ultimate martyrs~~ ~~vain and useless things~~ symbolic functions of royalty.

And of course Westerfeld, whenever we exchange tweets, is a cool dude, and it's nice to have him out at #steampunkchat, and I teethgnash at having missed meeting him earlier this year in New York City (where he ruined his feet walking at BEA and thus missed the Steampunk Bible signing as a result), bla bla obligatory this-white-dude-is-cool-by-me disclaimer bla-di-bla.

Now that that's out of the way, I can move on to talking about what I really want to talk about. Also, spoilers.

"Zoology," Dr. Barlow reminds Deryn, "is the backbone of our empire" (395). And for all the larking in the sky, the text makes it clear that the stakes of Aleks' mission--to save the world, poor sod--are stakes that everyone in Europe, and the neighbouring Ottoman Empire, partake of. General Villa's fight is tied to American business; the Japanese are still slightly beholden to Western technologies (notice how the British Leviathan heads towards Japan just to show up and show off, indicating that Japan still looks to the West for imperial inspiration in this iteration, and the hierarchy of European superiority still remains firmly entrenched). There's no mention of Japan's imperial ambitions in Manchuria (that I remember, anyway).

So, all the great European powers are fighting, and because of the way the war plays out, with all the advanced technology, everyone gets their boom-bangs in much faster, too. I remember in Belgarath the Sorcerer, by David Eddings, Belgarath complains, in an internal aside to the reader, "all these wars always ends up at conference tables anyway! Why can't they just start there??" (paraphrased, of course)

There's always an assumption of a specific trajectory on how such conflict begins: everybody wants to get a bigger piece of pie, everybody gets mad at everybody else for impinging on said pieces of pie, everybody gets into a big ol' pie fight, the pie gets ruined, someone or more gets hurt from pie in the eye, everybody stops in horror at what has happened to the pie, they gruffly say sorry, attempt some cleanup and make some solemn promises about how to divide up the next pie. (Nobody stops to question the existence or the necessity of the pie.)

And sometimes, there is an assumption that accelerated technology also means accelerated trajectories of this sort. I think Cherie Priest got it right that accelerated technology actually prolongs trajectories of conflict. I don't believe in one second that people with so much power--and there is so much power in a Clanker machine! We saw Clankers use their machines to murder Deryn's squad in Behemoth! And there is so much power in Darwinist tech! The flechette bats are pretty much tiny little living machine guns!--I don't believe these people would actually give up fighting so easily. World leaders have never truly recognized the costs of their stupid wars, all through history, even in our fucking present. There IS a reason why Afghani and Iraqi casualties far outnumber the 3000 deaths that supposedly precipitated the Iraqi War.

Science is a tool. And for much of history, science, particularly in the hands of Western powers, has been used to conquer and destroy. For all that people tout about the potential of science for world peace and somesuch, all too often, technology that can actually aid people? Exploited for greatest commercial wealth. Technology that aids destruction? Co-opted by militaries all over the world, for "self-defense", and we all know what I think about that.

At the end of the book, Westerfeld very nicely writes to his YA readers about the differences between his book and recorded history, which I think is also really important, because YA audiences are keen to learn. Young people want to learn. That is how they grow. And growing is what young things do. But Westerfeld also writes this:

"At the end of Goliath, however, my fictional Great War would seem to be drawing to a close. ... Europe may well emerge from this war less devastated than in our world, and therefore less vulnerable to worse tragedies to come." (underline mine)

At this point, I gotta pull out my cluebat, because this? This is some naive shit going on here.

Consider, then, what is part of this Empire that Dr. Barlow refers to?

Africa. South, Central, and Southeast Asia. They were colonized by the British and various other Western powers at this time. OK, fine, maybe with all this technology and this new trajectory, they wouldn't have fought in Europe, because, dudes, stop trashing the houses and shit, those giant things would have laid waste to Europe really quickly, and they might have recognized this. Don't you think they would have started outsourcing their conflicts? We've already been battlegrounds for empirical conflict; do you really think we would have escaped it this time?

While I get that this is a YA novel, why is there an assumption, an implication that there are no worse tragedies already? I think it does is a disservice when we teach children to ignore the capacity human beings have for abject cruelty. Consider: the Tuskagee experiments. Consider: Mengele's human experimentation projects. Consider the fact that up until today, those of us who are not white are considered less-than-human, abuse that worsens the darker your skin is. Who thinks that this great British Empire, with its grand experiments on lifethreads, would refrain from human experimentation on any level, when it is so often part of history of dehumanizing abuse?

Do any of us, with full knowledge of the heinous crimes of the past, believe that is not a possibility in such a trajectory? Because I fucking well don't. And who do you think are those inferior beings who would have become part of Darwinist Britain's grand designs to re-fabricate life itself?

And since Europe would not have been as devastated, do we honest to God believe that they would have naturally started to recognize and acknowledge the humanity of the people they colonize? These people whose colonialism they justify through generations of objectification and infantalization and exploitation and dehumanization? Are we thinking about this when we consider a timeline in which the Great War would have played out more kindly for European powers? What about us in Africa and Asia?

Come on, nobody really believes Europe would have eventually realized that colonizing other people's lands is not a cool thing, exoticizing other people's cultures isn't a good thing, exploiting other human beings is a heinous thing to do, fucking look at the American Civil War where people actually fucking fought to maintain the right to keep slaves. And only people invested in whiteness, in the absolute goodness of white people, actually believe that slaves were saved through this; no, slaves had to fight to be recognized as human beings, and their descendants still fight to be recognized as equal human beings today. Nobody eventually recognizes that horrible exploitation of fellow human beings for profit is a bad thing through any kind of natural process of progressive evolution; people fight for this, usually the exploited people.

Less. Devastated. Empire.

(Damn, I am getting so fucking angry writing this post I am slamming my fists on the table, and I ain't even mad at Scott personally.)

Do I think a less devastated Europe would have been a unilaterally, inherently bad thing? Not really, no. Any trajectory that could help alleviate human suffering is good in my books. But let's not forget that there are some fucked-up measures of humanity that these people employed.

And now this book is going out into the world with an observation for kids to think about how the Great War has been shortened, which means things for Europe will be better than in recorded history! It's still not great, but at least some of the upcoming tragedies that we know will happen may possibly be side-stepped! Yes let's completely not mention at all the ongoing tragedy that is still occurring as a result of racism and European imperialism, that's not important to the story at all. Let's have the kids read this and consider what's really more important to think about in the context of this story. Whose history are we talking about anyway?

I gotta ask, did any editor reading this just not think about this? Anybody involved in the publishing process? For all I know, Scott did mention it and it got edited out.

I know for a fact that kids are taking up the Leviathan trilogy as the beginnings for their foray into historical research. If you're a teacher, and you're using this text? Talk to your students about colonialism, remind them that imperialism was an actual thing, and many of us still live with the effects of it, now transformed into neocolonialism. Tell them about our stories too, because we also suffered the effects of the World Wars. Teach them that all the glory of the war heroes rested on their ability to take human lives. And if they start talking about how all this awesome Clanker and Darwinist tech would have showed up in our parts of the world? Don't gloss over the possibility that, you know, maybe they would have made life tougher for us. Maybe the tech would have been used to further replace and displace us. And I ~~beg~~ demand you never gloss over the idea that such tech would definitely have been used to keep the colonized in line, even at the cost of our lives.

Technology, in the hands of the powerful, has always had devastating consequences. And the powerless are always the ones who feel the brunt of it. A lot of us into steampunk think that steampunk's great because it puts technology in the hands of the less-powerful, in the hands of the underdog. I don't think we dwell enough on the fact that, given power, any of us could repeat the same abusive patterns, of violence, of cruelty, of devastation, that we have witnessed happen continually in the length and breadth of our known histories.

We Interrupt Very Srs Blog Bzns to Bring You A ToC: The Steampowered Globe

2011-12-19T23:47:00.000-05:00

So, there hasn't been that big a buzz about this everywhere, because firstly, The Steampowered Globe is a collection of steampunk short stories from Singapore, and secondly, it's published by Two Trees, a tiny little press in Singapore itself, with the succint description, "Two-person family business making books that we want to make because we can." These people are already out for my heart after making me burst out laughing with its website's layout.

The anthology is the result of a collaboration between the Happy Smiley Writers Group, edited by Maisarah Bte Abu Samah and Rosemary Lim. And here is the table of contents! oh my goodness will you look at that nary a white surname in that list.

"Ascension" by Leow Hui Min Annabeth
"No, They Dream Of Mechanical Hearts" by Claire Cheong
"Morrow's Knight" by Viki Chua
"Colours" by Yuen Xiang Hao
"The Morning Glory Incident" by Mint Kang
"Help! Same Angler Fish's Been Gawking for Eight Minutes!" by Ng Kum Hoon
"Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia" by JY Yang

Maisarah tells me that she has very much to say about the selection process, so stay tuned!

You can order the Steampowered Globe from Two Trees. Dead-tree versions only, it seems, alas, BUT, they WILL do international shipping! Prices are SG$ 18 for locals, SG$20 for folks in Asia, and SG$25 for those of us in the rest of the world! I know, I know, not enough time for stocking stuffing, but! You can order them anyway.

Singaporean writers, Singaporean editors, Singaporean press. Yes, technically I'm supposed to hate on them, since they're on the wrong side of the Causeway, but they are kind of on the other side of the Pacific anyway, so, bagi chance lorrr.... ;D

Dear White People, You CAN Say "People Of Colour"

2011-12-18T20:32:00.000-05:00

There is this thing Ay-Leen and I do at our Steam Around the World presentation, and it's when we get to talking about racism. We get the whole audience to yell, "RACISM!"

This is what I like to explain as a speech act. Here's a thing explaining what speech acts are, and how we like to rely on obfuscation rather than stating outright what we really mean. The bit I like the most is the recounting of the conversation from When Harry Met Sally, where Harry tells Sally she's attractive (7:10 - 7:26) and she says, "It's already out there." it then goes on to talk about the profound consequences of this mutual knowledge about what we're all talking about, that it enables a shared platform for which we can begin to have meaningful dialog about the same subject, and there's a great thing about the Emperor's New Clothes (8:56) enabling a collective challenge to the Emperor's assertion that his new clothes are awesome.

When you use precise terms, and you know their history and their meanings, the implications of saying them, it becomes a lot easier to have conversation. So when we get the audience to say out loud, "RACISM!" it means it's out there now. We can totally say it, and because we can say the word, we can now have a conversation about it.

I unfortunately use obfuscating language on this blog, because I try for a message that people can find themselves in, in as varied a subject position as possible. It's not always useful or helpful, of course. Which probably explains the lack of comments, haha.

But anyways, there is something to be said about being able to use the term "people of colour" in public to identify racialized persons, or people who self-identify that way.

Anecdote time!

So, I don't know how many of ya'll attended the Amphitrite Tea Party at SteamCon. Very belatedly, I realized that the con photoshoot was right afterwards, and I should take advantage of having so many steampunks out there to do a steampunks of colour shoot! So I went to Diana during the tea and asked her if it was okay for me to do that, and she said sure, and that she'd announce it, which was very nice of her to offer. And so she did, and afterwards asked me how it was, because she was sending people my way. And because it was so late-minute, and I was tired, and I'm still a socially-awkward person, it was kind of a mess anyway, but it was still cool, you know?

But during the announcement, Diana said, "and for those of you who are... who identify as... not Caucasian?" and she kind of stumbled over (not for long) the phrase, and finally settled on "non-Caucasian" but it was still kind of awkward anyway, and my brain was all like "!!!! /o\ =O diana what are you doing" and I felt so fucking awful for putting her into that spot where she was clearly not entirely comfortable nor sure of how to say it. Sorry Diana =(

This isn't any condemnation of her; I really do appreciate that she said it, but it probably would have been helpful ahead of time to have told her, just say "People of Colour." Most of us POC know what the term means, and yes, it singles out most non-white people in the room, and yes, it can be uncomfy-making because it does that, but it DOES have a history that makes it different from actually racist terms, like "coloured." Not to mention, "non-Caucasian" and "non-white-looking" are also pretty loaded unto themselves: LOTS of self-identified POC look white. Many POC are descended from, well, the Caucasus (*rolls eyes* See how terrible and unspecific the term "Caucasian" is?) and share many features with people who we can definitively say "Caucasian" (which is just the other term for "white").

Here's a video that explains the history behind "women of color" in the United States:

Here, have a transcript courtesy of Racialicious.

I don't always call myself a woman of colour--that is a very US-centric term that doesn't always translate into other contexts... when I go home to Malaysia, there aren't really any white people that I'm of colour next to. But here in Canada and in conversations with women from the United States, I will use the appellation "Woman of Colour" because, as Loretta Ross points out, it is a designation of solidarity. It tells you, immediately, who I am, what my subject position is. That's how labels are handy that way; then I don't have to give you my whole damn personal history explaining why I am doing this thing... you already understand, from this one label, what the stakes are for me and mine in whatever conversation we're having.

In fact, it's this "of colour" suffix that drew me to Ay-Leen. Even back then, when I didn't know the exact history behind the term "woman of colour," I knew enough that the term "people of colour" signified a particular political project, and when someone uses it, like Ay-Leen did in looking for other "steampunks of colour," it's done for a vision that I can co-sign. Not all of us will co-sign with this, obviously, and I rather suspect there're a lot of peolpe who avoid me because I will not stop talking about race in steampunk using overt language like that.

BUT THE POINT IS, that white people should not be afraid to use language that identifies race. It doesn't mean you have the right to use it for yourselves but in certain conversations, it makes more sense to use certain terms than others.

Language! I know! Wild stuff! I know it's hard! I still get the heebie-jeebies when asking people, "hey, do you identify as POC?" (I DM'd Janus Zarate of Vernian Process this question once. I went off to pace in my living room for several minutes out of anxiety before actually sending the goddamn thing. This shit is hard! Because I, too, have been in that race-denying colour-blind position and I haaaated the identification of my race, so I can never tell whether people will be offended by it!) It takes guts and practice and knowing how to deal with any potential outcome. And if a POC has a problem with it, why the fuck shouldn't you as a white person?

It is not that difficult to find out what's an okay term and what's not an okay term ("Asian" is okay, "Oriental" is not except for rugs, "Victoriental" will get you a glare of profound hatred from me). There is the great wide Internet. Just, please don't try to re-invent the wheel. Using the term "people of colour" side-steps all those issues quite neatly, leaving it a question of self-identification, without getting into other weird semantic and potentially racist territory. And if someone tells you, "that's now what I call myself" then just say okay and ask what they call themselves. (I can't promise it'll get any less awkward, though, and I wouldn't lie to you.)

Thanks!

Conversations with Ghosts

2011-12-13T13:02:00.000-05:00

A lot of times, I have imaginary conversations in my headwhere I have to explain the approach I take with steampunk, because while mostpeople have some sort of fuzzy notion of what it means to think about racialrepresentation in steampunk, it’s rather more difficult to grasp with how it’sdone. Among the many different ways to do steampunk is using steampunk—the ideaof messing around with history—as a way to engage with the past.

I think MarthaSwetzoff put it best when she said, “steampunk is a conversation with the past”because it fits nicely with my favourite notion: when we look to the past for coolstuff to learn about facts, the injection of our imagination, of anachronistictechnology and knowledges, forces us to consider how the past would reply back—wouldit have been acceptable? What would it take for such a modern way of thought tobe acceptable? What would have hindered such a trajectory, and how does itdiffer from how it played out in our history books?

Derrica, in Spectres of Marx, uses the metaphor of the ghost(Hamlet’s father’s ghost, in particular) to demonstrate a kind of engagementwith the past. He was talking more generally about Marxist theory and theapplication thereof in this era, since the ideal Marxist trajectory didn’t cometo pass and thus, Whither Marxism? (Aw, poor Marxists.) He begins by explaining what a ghost is, theimplications of a ghost’s presence (the haunting), and possible interactionswith the ghost (and there is some mucking about with economic materialisttheory that is more or less beyond me, but someone else better than me will beable to explain, I’m sure).

You see where I’m going with this: steampunk is aconversation with the past, but the past is what has gone before, yes?Therefore, when we engage with it in steampunk, we are speaking to a ghost—likeDerrida’s spectre, the past, even the alternate history, that we speak to insteampunk can only “begin by coming back” (11) through our efforts to bring itback, into our present consciousness. For many of us, this is how we begindoing steampunk.

For some of us, though, the past, like the ghost in Hamlet,has already come back. It keeps on coming back: the patterns of erasure, ofdiscrimination, our histories coming back in the violence revisited over andover. Each new generation gains new ghosts from the different manifestations ofpast haunting.

This is why knowing history, beyond fact and figures anddates and locations, is so important—it enables us to identity these patternsand realize that for all our ideals of time and progress happening in a singlelinear trajectory of social evolution (towards something better), we’re notreally aligned with it. We imagine the past as a separate, long-gone entity(hence people say “it was in the past! Get over it!”), while the present ishere, somehow more palpable, more valid—the future is that which will come, butalso a separate entity (that is why fans of distant future scifi will argue, “butrace won’t matter anymore in the future! Why is it a big deal that there seemsto be mostly white dude in all these stories!”).

The Doctor’s wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff theory makesmore sense, but even that needs to be teased apart—imagine, then, that the pastbleeds into the present; the past haunts, shall we say. “The time is out of joint!” Hamletcries—we are out of joint with him. This is where we work in steampunk, becausesteampunk is purposefully in a time out of joint. Derrida writes, “scholarsbelieve that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the mostcompetent position to do what is necessary: speak to the spectre” (11). We mustinterpellate (the fancy word for "call out to") the spectre, we must apprehend it, we must address the ghost,speak to it, and help it speak.

I wrote the other day about Beth Lameman’s video, and how itis so culturally specific that only people who grew up in Anishinaabe cultureand such stories of the Moon People would get what goes on in the video rightoff the bat. I’m a scary forrenner, so it totally went over my head. Culturally-specificsteampunk does a very special kind of work that can only be done by those whobelong to those specific cultures: they speak to the ghosts thathaunt their presents. They recover the ghosts' stories, re-establish a relationship that has been deemed unnatural.

Some people prone to appropriation may demand the right tointerpellate these ghosts of POC, will ask, “why is this only for certainpeople?” They will hem and haw over “rights” and “just wanting to share” and “howselfish POC are for not being free with their culture.” And we cringe, becausewe know that there are better ways to apprehend a ghost, to beseech them speak.There are rituals to be observed, offerings to be made, and here we seeintruders demand, “I charge thee, speak!”

This is, I think, a symptom of how commodified cultures are,that even our ghosts must be items that can be bought and sold. The wayappropriators speak, one would think we aren’t allowed to interpellate andapprehend our own ghosts before ensuring other people have had a chance. And isn’tthat the history of so many marginalized peoples? Before we are allowed toinherit our cultures, colonizers inspect them, pull them into pieces, allowtheir descendents first rights to invade all the secrets that make a cultureunique to a people, and sloppily put things back together. Or they simply withholdour cultures in museums, perhaps, or into forced assimilation, where we have towork hard to meet the colonizers’ terms of acceptability before they returnthat which is ours.

Why do these ghosts exist? Because they are remnants of ourpasts. What are they doing in the present? Derrida writes that the presence ofa ghost signals “the persistence of a present past, the return of the deadwhich the world-wide work of mourning cannot get rid of” (126). To simplify, awrong was done in the past, and like Hamlet, the heirs must address this wrongand do right by it.

In many Western frameworks I’ve seen dealing with ghosts,the ghost is inevitably a signifier of things that are wrong—a crime, an act ofviolence, something that the ghost is disturbed by. Not only that, but theghost also disturbs the living. And for some reason, this haunting is moreimportant—the ghost must be exorcised, for the living’s peace of mind. Theghost is often banished, or the originating crime is found out, and the ghostis laid to rest, neat as a pin, and then all is well.

This is a useful framework up to a certain extent. It’s notso useful when you consider ghosts—when you consider the past—to be part ofeveryday life. I am sometimes appalled by this attitude of wishing to distanceourselves away in such a fashion. I am also appalled by the methods and intentsbehind such exorcisms: not all ghosts deserve to be violently thrown out. Sojust let me add that new angle to the ghost—that which has gone before, whichkeeps coming back, haunting the present.

(In my world, if a spirit is causing you such pain anddistress, nobody is going to be all, okay, let’s get it out, without firstasking, wtf did you do wrong? Who did you offended? What resting place did youdisturb?)

(So you can imagine my displeasure when I read Jay Lake's story in Weird Tales' May 2010 Steampunk issue, where he mis-uses the Chinese myths of hungry ghosts for a Western story of exorcism. Like, wtf are you doing?? That's not the way to treat a ghost!!!)

For many POC, these ghosts follow us around, thesesignifiers of our past—ghosts of colonialism, ghosts of racism, ghosts oferasure, all haunt our present. It is impossible to take up our cultureswithout also encountering these ghosts in some form.

I wonder if stories of easy vengeance, easy exorcisms are awhite way of dealing with racialised ghosts. To think that haunting fromgenocide could be so easily laid to rest calls for a kind of sorcerousobfuscation—a purposeful form of interpreting the ghosts that remain, a charm that istouted and sold as the best cure-all: “get over it!” says one group. “Weapologize!” says another. As if ghosts are laid to rest with a mere speech act.

Who, then, apprehends these ghosts? Who interpellates andwho attempts to create dialog with these ghosts?

Here lies the importance of POC-specific work that does nottranslate easily into a more ‘universal’ language. There are rituals andapproaches—not all of them can be performed by just anybody. The way I approacha ghost of the Chinese mainland is fraught with mistranslation because I mustinterpret this ghost differently. Ths does not mean I do not inherit the ghost. It just means that I, the living,must come to my own way of understanding it. The important thing is that I puteffort into this task.

(I am allowed to ignore the ghost entirely, but again, that assumes that the present is ahistorical, that I live in the cultureless space where I can sever all ties without consequence. The ghost will only remain.)

But I cannot speak to these ghosts myself; it assumes that Ialone know how to speak to them, which is unjust—the assumption of the OneRight Way has been the basis for so much violence, the cause of so muchhaunting, because it denies the heterogeneity of ghosts and their legacieswhich their presences signify. And there are some ghosts who would defy myattempts at interpreting them. This acceptance of ghostly defiance is a movetowards justice, too:

An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one withitself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, canconsist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. “One must” meansone must filter, sift,criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabitthe same injunction. [...] If the readability of a legacy were given, natural,transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defyinterpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. (18)

This is why the Eurocentrism of mainstream steampunk failsPOC, because it is a language only for a certain kind of ghost, acertain way of interpreting a haunting’s significance. If we tried to speak ofEurocentrism as itself a kind of ghost (because metaphors can inhabit eachother), it is the poltergeist that spends so much time rattling things that oneis hard-pressed to notice the other ghosts haunting the same house.

We must speak to ghosts, in hopes of a conversation—not toexorcise the ghosts, the past, but to hear them echo and speak back. We hear theirvoices in the present, because they have already come back, because a ghostalways inhabits the now. We live with these ghosts; their haunting signifiessomething about our present that we must figure out for our future. Is this notwhat we do in steampunk? Surround ourselves with ghosts that have come back,that we have addressed and interpreted and made part of our lives?

Call out to the ghosts you have inherited, and listen.... what do they say?

Special Responsibility Not So Special

2011-12-12T00:03:00.000-05:00

The first time I wrote about disability in steampunk, I got a comment which basically ran, "but these are problems everywhere. Why should steampunks be charged with greater responsibility for them?"

Anecdote time!

When I was in Form 1 (which is like, first year of junior high school), I was a probationary prefect, a prefect-in-training, I guess. Among the things we were put in charge of was getting students of the class we were in charge of for the week to line up in the few minutes before school began. Don't ask me why we had to do this, and don't ask me why the students couldn't go straight to class, I don't know, something to do with how chaotic it looks and thus how bad it looks.

And for those of us handling Form 2 students, we especially had a hard time: we had to herd students who were one year our senior and no respect for us as probation prefects. All we wanted was for them to line up, so we could all go to class sooner. I don't really understand why, to this day, this was so difficult; everyone basically wanted to hang about in their cliques, for as long as possible, even if no one was saying anything. This drove me up the angsana tree. Like, I get not wanting to get into barisan if you had a super important conversation! But if ya'll are just standing around, why the fuck not??

And I would ask, these seniors, why won't you get into line? What would it take for you to get into line?

And they replied, "you get them to line up first, then we'll follow."

I've since seen this pattern happen over and over again, and didn't have a language for it until well into my 20's: this is a deferral of responsibility. It's a refusal to accede the slightest bit of consideration that would make everybody's life a little easier and a hella lot less annoying, out of a point of pride and arrogance, that I should not have to do this, it is beneath me to have to do it first, why should I have to take on the special responsibility of setting the example. Nonsense bullshit like that.

You get to say shit like that when the problems of the world don't really affect you that much, and you don't care about everybody else to consider how your own initiative could benefit them.

You even get to say shit like that in my face, but don't expect me to not laugh loudly, because it's either that, or punching you for being dismissive.

And then you don't get to expect me to take you seriously at all, because clearly you haven't even thought through how nonsensical, unproductive and arrogant your answer is.

You don't get to do all that and then say nothing when people get all "but steampunk is so welcoming! It's for everybody!" because you obviously patently disagree. You would stay silent then, but when someone else says, "hey! let's make steampunk more welcoming! Let's make sure everybody can participate!" you would disagree because it's too much goddamn work?

Bitch, please.

(Yes, this answer is two years late, but it had to be said anyway.)

"The Path Without End" by Elizabeth Lameman, Anishinaabe/Mètis

2011-12-09T18:24:00.001-05:00

The Path Without End from Elizabeth Lameman on Vimeo.

Elizabeth Lameman, an Anihinaabe/Mètis creator of the graphic novel "The West Was Lost," made this video after she was "fed up with the inability of words to capture [her] interpreation of Native Steampunk." You should pop over to her blog to read about the process behind making this animation, which is a retelling of Anishinaabe stories about Moon People. The soundtrack to the video, "Prosperity," is by Cris Derksen, a Cree cellist.

The result combines multi-textured visuals, made with familiar objects such as beads, with a narrative about interplanetary travel that could take place in any time period, a story that has been handed down for generations, and a soundtrack that also does its own work of combining different kinds of sounds.

Please go check out Beth's commentary on making this video, and leave her comments on Vimeo if you have an account! When I first watched it, I... I had no idea what was going on, and she explained to me, that it's about "travel back and forth between worlds and the Wetiko chasing us wherever we go." And it was amusing for her, because her kid, who's three, knows exactly what's going on, but an adult who didn't grow up immersed in Anishinaabe culture, like yours truly, has a much harder time understanding what's being depicted.

It makes me tip my hat all the more, actually, that it is so recognizably steampunk, and yet so culturally specific. It makes me really happy to see more of this kind of work out there!

Elizabeth Lameman, Anishinaabe/Mètis, everybody!

Ruminations on the Broken System

2011-12-09T03:14:00.001-05:00

So here's a thing I was thinking about.

I've been reading a few books lately. I mean, I've been starting to read some books, and by the 50th page I put them down. They were steampunk books, even, which just goes to show how sick I am of mainstream right right now, and by mainstream, I mean stories stuck in the straight white cis able-bodied "rational" male paradigm that so much of the world is steeped in.

(Look, I know there are some steampunks wailing about mainstream getting into our steampunk, but hrrnngghh, what does it take to explain that much of what comprises steampunk is already mainstream?)

And because I am a simple-minded person, I think right now in terms of spectrums and stories.

There are stories about broken systems. There are people who like stories about broken systems. The are stories about people who live in these broken systems, because it is so painful, look at these people so brave to live in these broken systems, to challenge it and stand up against it. These are stories about people who learn how to smart and savvy. It is an act of heroism to cast your defiance into the teeth of the broken system's machine. And from this broken system someone will rise and be supported by sacrifices of friends and family, and there is a glory to their rise, and there is so much pain they have to go through, but it is so noble and so true. They fix the broken system, maybe, or maybe they create a new one far far away, but what beautiful people they are to do so.

I love these stories. When I was a kid I wanted to be that hero. Even today I could be persuaded to die fo my ideals.

Then there are stories about broken systems, very much like the one I described above. And there are people who don't think broken systems are anything special, because they live in those broken systems. If they wanted nitty-gritty, they wouldn't read stories about broken systems. They lives those lives of pathos and despair, they challenge the broken system with their very existence. They're not thinking about the heroism of survival, they want to know how to get through to the next day. It's not a gritty life, it's just daily living. It's not especially terrible, who has time to make that judgement call? They survive by working together even though they live in corrupt places where it looks like everybody's out to get each other. They try to make things work, try to feed their kids, try to feed themselves. They know something is wrong, and work to fix it with their limited resources. Theirs isn't a life of glory or of self-improvement, but of getting by and doing right by their neighbours the best they can. In this kind of story there isn't a single person to follow. They cobble together whatever works the best they can, with whoever they feel they can trust.

I don't think I've ever come across any published books that talk about these stories because they're not pretty enough unlike Austen's high societies, and also because they're too real.

Plato wanted to ban poets from his ideal state for a reason. Capitaism co-opted the poets instead to sing hero songs that always sound so great, so full of hope and potential and life, but in the end, not terribly challenging to the status quo.

A mother shot her two kids and then killed herself the other day. A poet could tell her story, but in our broken system, the only story to get light of day about this would be one that drives in the pathos of her story, how sad, how pathetic, all she had to do was keep trying--filled out, all over again, that 18-page application--and eventually she would have gotten that aid she so desperately needed. The story that wouldn't get published would be the one that asked why people applying for welfare, already under stress, already hungry, already unable to think straight from desperation, have to fill out 18 pages of a form. That story would articulate, in paralysing detail, all the numerous factors that would have led to this decision, and in doing so, make the readers understand their complicity in that system.

You know, what I like about steampunk is that it makes no illusions as to new-ness. I like the sight of things cobbled together into some lackadaisical mish-mash, things replaced over and over again, things falling apart over and over again. I don't understand the purpose of getting new things and making them look old, but I understand the purpose of finding old things and making them work, all over again. It's not that we make them new; it's that from the old stuff, some bits here, some bits there, we make something that works with us and makes us happy. Or we take something broken and then we find out why it's broken, and we re-build.

Amal El-Mohtar declared last year, "I want to destroy steampunk" because she wasn't satisfied with the way things were and wanted to reshape them to accommodate new visions of what steampunk could look like. I felt that way too, felt her clarion call to create something new.

But I've studied steampunk awhile and I know this shit is not new. The challenge Amal and I and so many others face is not that steampunk is limited, but that people are limiting it. And this, too, is not a new challenge.

If you can understand that something is not new, then you can also understand that something has a history. What is this history? How did it come to be? Who made those decisions? Why?

I look for these stories. I like doing steampunk stuff because it brings me into contact with people who bring other stories into my life, stories I usually have no idea about, which I'm not sure how they're even relevant, but I assume they will be, someday. Stories that help me find out what my place is here. And that tells me who I need to thank, who I need to be careful around, who I need to help, who I need to be responsible to. Steampunk is a helpful label to find other people like me, although I have found just as much wonderful affirmation through other names too: feminism, science fiction fandom, social justice.

I keep doing steampunk because it helps keep me aware of my complicity in the broken system. The way I do steampunk keeps me on the search for the stories where I can trace how I came to be where I am, how I came to make the decision that I made, how I can make more responsible decisions in the future.

It's not how I came to steampunk, true. I liked the shiny shit just like so many others do. I still do; I was born in the year of the Rat, and we will make of with shiny shit if we want to. There's nothing wrong with this, okay? Don't let anybody ever make you believe otherwise. You have a right to a shiny that makes you happy.

More than that, but the more stories I kept reading, stories that weren't mine, but stories that are inextricably linked to mine anyway, however tangentially, the more I come to understand the broken system for what it is, and the more I come to understand the necessity of calling out the broken system for what it is.

This blog is about postcolonial steampunk. It's a kind of steampunk that seeks to examine the broken system left behind by centuries of colonialism. It's a kind of steampunk that will go right into those stories of colonialism and re-tell them, over and over, until the descendents of colonialisms the world over squirm in their seats, because they will be held accountable for their continued complicity in it. It's a kind of steampunk that says to those who have been marginalized by colonialism, hey, you know, this shit is fucked up, and you're not alone in feeling that way. It's the kind of steampunk that points out how those patterns repeat themselves, over and over and over, into new forms of colonialism. Until everybody gets a goddamn clue and gets on board with fixing this.

I personally do not think I'm doing a good job of it; there is so much to say and so much to learn. But you know, it's not really just about me, which is the other part of why I think I'm doing a pretty crappy job at this blog. It's about the people I meet. I learn about the legacies I inherit, I learn about the responsibilities I have to take up to the rest of the world. It's through them that I learn how to identify the patterns of how things happen, and it's through them that I learn I, too, can commit the same mistakes of the past.

I'm part of the broken system. I'm a result of the broken system, and frankly, the way I live my life, I contribute to the broken system.

Here's one of the cool things I've seen being done in steampunk: people find broken things all the time. Salvage them. Repair them. Make them better. Or use the parts into something else, something that works, something that fits their vision.

I won't lie, I can't do this. Not even metaphorically like in the hero stories. My vision is about a system that quits hurting people. And to find out how that even works, I have to find out what it is that hurts people, and how. Sometimes I find the thing that helps some people hurts others. Sometimes I find the thing that helps is not sustainable because of the rest of everything which is so broken, it takes any little repair down with it. (You know how it is with today's methods of production; it's so much cheaper to just buy a new thing than it is to repair it.)

But I am kind of tired of trading in new things for new things for new things. The system is broken and I can't fix it by myself, because not only is that beyond my ability, it's also pretty fucking presumptuous and arrogant of me to assume I could. The system has been broken a long time, and there have been many people at work, fixing it, and nobody notices that there are efforts to fix it because no one ever tells those stories.

That's how I would like to do steampunk. Nothing on this blog is new or special; it's just building a bridge that wasn't there before, and the idea of a bridge is admittedly not a new thing.

So, there's my thing I've been thinking about. I know! A whole new post just to tell you it's not really new! But just because it's not new, doesn't mean it's not worth talking about. That's another neat thing about steampunk, eh?

Conversations Steampunks Are Not Immune To, Part 2

2011-12-07T20:38:00.001-05:00

White Person: Look at this cool thing!

POC Friend: Dude, that cool thing completely misrepresents POC ish.

White Person: Aw, sorry I goofed, but I totally didn't mean it that way!

POC Friend: Well, here are the ways that it does.

White Person: All right, thanks. How's this?

POC Friend: Dude, you just completely erased POC ish from the picture instead.

I wonder why race matters in steampunk, do you?

2011-12-07T03:10:00.000-05:00

At my first ever steampunk-themed event, I looked around, and I was the only visible POC there. Same time, Ay-Leen would go to a con and at a crowd of over a hundred, maybe more, only two people in the crowd would be visible POC.

Recently, two little boys were called racial slurs in class. They're not the first, and won't be the last.

At the moment, black people are raising their eyebrows at white people who are crying out against police brutality during Occupy Wall Street raids.

In the Netherlands, a tradition of blackface continues. Darker-skinned people face prejudice at the same time that people declare this blackface tradition is not racist.

Blackness is still considered suitable as a symbol of evil and assorted bad things in art.

Back home in Malaysia, a trans woman friend of mine confesses that she feels normal when a child calls her a "Cina babi" -- Chinese pig -- because it means she's considered normal enough as a woman that people are just racist towards her, not transphobic.

White American guys think Asian and Russian women are perfect wives because we are docile and traditional.

Well-meaning white people tell me and Ay-Leen to our faces that it should be okay for them to say and do racist shit because it's just an act, and people should be able to recognize it for what it is, except, of course, if I'm on the receiving end of racism, how am I supposed to know it's an act?

White folk can come to this blog and ask me to explain why should racism matter in steampunk, why steampunk should be purposefully anti-racist, while by-passing my 101 Reading List, and tell me my experiences don't validate the existence of racism nor the necessity of anti-racism in steampunk.

They do the same thing at Occupy, they did the same thing during RaceFail, they probably did the same thing at every single major turning point in history where racialized peoples try to raise awareness of racial injustice.

Meanwhile, people tell me that I can't use steampunk to talk about racism because steampunk is supposed to be fun and fantasy. They tell me my presentation isn't as good as it could have been because I talked about issues and stopped having fun. To my face, even.

People think "non-Caucasian" is a good way to say "person of colour" and obviously have never had to think about the words they use to talk about race.

Hollywood whitewashes more Asian films, cutting off chances for Asian-Americans to star in favour of white actors who look more "American".

Folk have the temerity to tell me that "racism will always exist" and apparently I should fucking accept this. Yes, I and all POC like myself should accept racial injustice embedded into systems of employment, education, healthcare, housing, access to basic standards of living.

Somehow people can understand that the world is made of different cultures, different nations, different social groups, different genders, different this different that, but think everyone should be treated the exact same way anyway.

I get called a "racist" very casually for wanting to meet people who identify with these differences of theirs.

At my own party, to my face, again, when I say, I don't believe in tolerance, because tolerance is no longer useful in gaining equality, I am equated to Matthew Shepard's killers. (FYI, that was not a problem of tolerance. That was a problem of hatred.) At a steampunk convention.

Just a few things off the top of my head that demonstrate how racism is an everyday part of life. Does steampunk happen in some alternate dimension completely insulated from everyday life? If so, please direct me to this magical portal.

And somehow, all through this, people honest to God do not see why conscious anti-racism is necessary, in any fandom at all, and think it's okay if people just aren't obvious assholes to each other's faces.

Oh gee. I cannot imagine why.

Conversations Steampunks Are Not Immune To

2011-12-05T11:15:00.001-05:00

Within the last week alone I've had to have the following conversations.

White Person: Look at me with this cool thing!

POC Friend: Dude, that cool thing is not cool.

White Person: Oh, sorry. Will stop doing it. What's wrong with it?

POC Friend: It's terrible in X, Y, Z ways.

White Person: I thought it was A, B, C.

POC Friend: Maybe you saw it that way, but there are other cool things which do A, B, C without doing X, Y, Z.

White Person: Wow, didn't think about that. Sorry I goofed. Will do better next time.

Compare and contrast to the following exchange:

White Person: Look at me with this cool thing!

POC Friend: Dude, that cool thing is not cool.

White Person: Aw, sorry I goofed, but I totally didn't mean it that way!

POC Friend: Well it comes across as terribly X, Y, Z in these ways.

White Person: Well hopefully other people will see what I mean anyway.

One conversation is more productive than another. Such conversations are also easily applicable to other kinds of marginalizations, not just racial ones.

Hey, hey, Mr. Stirling!

2011-12-01T11:55:00.001-05:00

I got your comments.

They're sitting in moderation.

And if you didn't care about my criticism and don't give one whit, then why the hell are there four long comments responding to simply one comment of mine sitting in moderation?

Joker.

*deletes*

Review: Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell

2011-11-26T23:17:00.000-05:00

I'd been excited to read Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain for a while, for several reasons: 1) It's got a pretty bitchin' cover, with a dark-skinned man with a hook for a left hand and a flying ship; 2) it's a POC-centric novel, and I was curious to see how it worked out; 3) Tobias Buckell identifies strongly as POC, as Caribbean, despite passing as a generic white American dude.

I did not get around to reading Crystal Rain for several reasons: 1) grad school; 2) I somehow couldn't find a way to get my mitts on it on Amazon (Buckell's store only offers a hardcover); and 3) grad school (seriously, moving to a new city and getting used to grad school sucks up your time. Things nobody tells you). Also, priorities and all that meant that I had to pick other texts to read that more strongly coded as steampunk, and I wasn't sure whether Crystal Rain did.

Well, it kinda does and doesn't.

The way it does is this: Nanagada, where pretty much 90% of the action is set, is mostly a pre-industrial society. However, at the Capitol city, the new Prime Minister Dihana is working closely with a group of Preservationists, who are basically restoring and re-discovering old-father technology. Thus, Dihana is working to bring about a kind of Industrial Revolution, but it doesn't have the same basis nor timeline as it did in our world.

Thus, there are trains and airships, telegraph wires and some marine travel. Buckell kind of glosses over what powers them, or else I just missed it on my first reading.

On the other side of the Wicked High Mountains are the Azteca, who are a people with a cultural based on what little we know about Aztecs, ~~complete with~~ most notably the human sacrifices. They've apparently spent the last hundred years digging a tunnel through the mountains, because they want to invade Nanagada. Conflict ensues.

I subscribe to the notion that steampunk invokes some form of history. Crystal Rain does and doesn't... it invokes a past that believes and lives alongside gods. Except the gods are, predictably, aliens. So you get that long-ago-fantasy-feel through a very distant-future-science-fiction device. Because there are so many markers of futuristic advanced technology within the text, I have trouble classifying the "past-ness," especially towards the ending, where we get a whole exposition on the interstellar travel that humans have managed to accomplish.

But I'm still going to review it here, because I think it does a lot of really cool, very culturally-specific work that I feel postcolonial steampunk ought to be doing.

The first thing it does is establish that brown is the default in this world, with the introduction of Pepper, an ambivalent character in the book:

"He wore a top hat, a long trench coat, and black boots. His eyes were gray, his dreadlocks black, and his face ashen. It was as if this man had no seen sun in all his life, but was born brown once." (2)

This guy, found sitting on a "steaming metal boulder" is clearly a spaceman. The villagers who find him take him back and feed him back to health, and when he leaves, "his skin looked like earth now; a proper and healthy color for a man" (3).

The Aztecs consider the Nanagadans "black," while their skin is more "red." There is also a group of "Frenchi" people, who are "very white," which is very uncommon. Yes, skin colour is important while trying to de-center Eurocentrism. It really matters that John DeBrun is a black man, and that most of the major characters are not white. There is a certain kind of work being done here that actively uses skin colour to mark cultural groups without demonizing any of them. Combined with the language used throughout the story, that contrasts John DeBrun's language (which is a kind of standard English) against the speech of the Nanagadans (which is an English dialect that is no less comprehensible), the world setting makes clear that wherever we are, we are not in a white space. This is a place that is marked with cultural specificities all over, from the mango tree in front of John's house, to the description of both the sea and inland, to the very people themselves.

The characters are all nuanced, with motivations of their own; although John DeBrun is the obvious protagonist, so many of the other characters undergo their own transformations in their own arcs, changing as a result of the conflict that is inflicted on them through aliens who pass as their gods: the Teotl for the Aztec, the Loa for the Nanagadans.

A few things are going on here with the aliens-as-gods trope: one, it demonstrates that the human diaspora are not all high-tech people who move and bring tech with them wherever they go: as mentioned above, most of the Azteca and Nanagadans live in rather pre-industrial living conditions. The aliens take advantage of this to make themselves gods, or just take advantage of the local mythology that these humans have brought with them. There is a flavour of hands-off colonization on the side of the Loa aliens, and outright colonialism on the other side of the mountains with the Teotl attending and demanding human sacrifices on a regular basis. In comparison, the humans are infantile, in need of guidance.

However, the aliens-as-gods trope also serve to show how humans retain their culture, even in far-flung planets, changing with the times, but still recognizable. It doesn't feel like the religion has remained static, but rather, has adapted to incorporate these weird otherworldly beings who do, for all intents and purposes, function somewhat like gods. There is no such thing as a homogeneous religion as a result of migration, even interstellar migration. This, Buckell's text demonstrates cultural heterogeneity between a single race, something that most other texts (I'm eyein' you, Star Trek) wouldn't think of. And it is a cultural heterogeneity between non-white cultures, rather than a single white culture, and a single non-white culture (who are usually aliens).

So, back to the characters, who are all awesome. The cool thing about ensemble casts, which I personally have never managed, is writing each perspective as fully as possible, from their own subject positions, and keeping them separate. There are groups of characters who never meet each other (also something I've never quite managed: I always want people meet up and intersect together at some point), yet their existences depend on their differing roles in the conflict:

1) Haidan and Dihana- Haidan as the gruff general with firm hand and a loyal heart provides a defense for the Nanagadans and the Capitol City, which Dihana rules over as the young female Prime Minister who has to fill her father's shoes, and her father is an old-father, one of the first-generation migrants with enhanced biology. Dihana has to make extremely difficult decisions, which makes her relationship with Haidan even more necessary. Dihana's in charge of a city that has its own hierarchy and schisms, its own spies turning it inside out.

2) Jerome and Troy: Jerome as John DeBrun's son provides John with an anchor and a reason to go on, although Shanta, Jerome's mother and John's wife, dies about a third-way into the text. Jerome's arc is painful, as Troy reveals to him, very slowly, John's natures as old-fathers, which Jerome has to digest alongside dealing with his mother's death and his father's uncertain absence. While Troy doesn't have a developmental arc, he has an arc intertwined with Jerome's that explains the intergenerational link between old-fathers and the people of Nanagada.

3) Pepper: the ghost from John DeBrun's past, here with his own agenda, which he can't accomplish without John. There's not much that's really nice about Pepper, but he's pretty fucking badass: he knows what he wants to see happening, and is efficient at what he does (killing, mostly). He rolls with the punches the best he can, and there's little vulnerability to the man aside from the fact that he's a real asshole about everything. Well, not everything. He has a sad scene with sewer urchins that demonstrates how lives are still valued differently, despite migration to other worlds: "The price of one boy, some boy you know nothing about, acceptable. You just like anyone else, we nothing to you," an urchin accuses, to which Pepper can only say, "I'm sorry for everything" (188). The bond he has with John is very palpable, and explained only towards the end that still pulls in the cultural specificity of the setting: "They were both islanders. ... Both from Earth. .... Two native sons on an alien planet, far from home" (318).

4) Oaxyctl and Aztecas represent the bad guys, but Oaxyctl is a beautifully portraited man, working a job as a spy he doesn't really care to do, but has to because of tradition. He doesn't believe in gods until he meets one face-to-face, and part of his character that gets briefly mentioned here and there involves missing an old life that was very domestic, very everyday and very, er, normal. His interactions with John DeBrun, I think, bring out the most of the complexities of being human: warmth in the love left behind, and coldness in the purpose of war. There is a lovely page where the two men speak about their wives, and another challenging passage that demands the reader take into account, and sympathize with, the practice of human sacrifice:

"What would you offer your god?" Oaxyctl asked. "The mud from he bottom of a river? Or the holiest gift of all? I have seen verse that say the gift of human life is a holy deed. Is not that one of the tenets of the christians who live on this side of the mountains? ... What religion doesn't have a strong connection to blood? The Vodun and christian faiths ask for blood in one way or another. You have others as well. What god do you worship? I am sure you will find some strange, if not horrific, practice there." (221)

And ya'll, the pacing of the story is tight. There're some lulls, but they make sense to the characters, you can see them coming and the moments are appropriate. Nothing gets cut off, nothing feels forced, and the lulls are used for some very important exposition that helps the plot make sense further on.

So, anyway, I'm just going to finish with my favourite line from the book, said after Jerome's done explaining what's happened the night before, exciting events that involve a small airship landing on John DeBrun and his family's mango trees and a man dying in the kitchen. I'm possibly very taken with this macabre event because growing up, my family had two mango trees growing up the front of our house.

"Man, everything cool happen to you. ... You father have a hook, you mom cook well, and someone fall into you garden last night." (55)

Everything cool happening in this book.

Things This Blog Doesn't Cover (But Wishes It Could)

2011-11-25T13:17:00.001-05:00

So I was saying to Adrienne Kress the other day while hanging around the autograph table at SFContario, that there have been three separate incidents throughout this year, at three separate cons (that'd be Nova Albion, CNSE, and SteamCon), that have something in common: at each con, someone has asked me, if I knew anything about Jewish steampunk.

My first reaction is always an awkward, "well, um." The first time, I spouted Ted Chiang's story in the first Vandermeer Steampunk anthology. The second time, I listened to a woman tell me about the difficulty of researching Yiddishness, particularly from Eastern Europe where her family is from. The third time, was during a SATW presentation and all I could say was, "there is some."

I write a lot about literature and analysing it, as well as analysing practices in the steampunk subculture, mostly focusing on the rhetoric people spout in defense of racist practices like cultural appropriation. I write about tropes and common ideas that are harmful.

I think a lot about decolonizing the mind, which tends to be a deeply personal thing for me. It's tied to my history as a Malaysian, in which I have to question what it means to be a product of colonialism. I have to ask myself what is racist about my upbringing and what I was surrounded with and how to combat that in a productive manner that promotes dialog between the races living in my country. I have to criticize the people I was brought up to respect and obey. I think about the colonization of my people and how it has continued, even after we were "independent." Because, make no mistake, our independence is relatively modern, and although the economic neocolonialism of our wealth and resources come from other sources beyond the traditional British, the reasons why my people often uncritically and unwittingly embrace these memes that deprecate and demean us, that tell us that we are lesser (because we are not rich enough, according to white standards, because we are not pretty enough, according to white standards, because we are not cultured or civilized enough, according to white standards) are rooted in hundred of years of a foreign presence that persisted in maintaining a military and a culture war against us as national, political, tribal and ethnic entities.

But there are other stories to talk about, too.

I do not, for example, talk specifically about black Americans/Canadians and American indigenous peoples very much. I read about them a great deal on Tumblr, and I always have to cringe at the anti-black racism that comes from Asians in such conversations, just as I cringe from the continued erasure from white people that black people face. I could not list the hundreds of tribes, either.

I do not write about the Roma who still face persecution in much of Europe (and their exoticization here in North America). Thank you, Colette, for reminding me of this. Just like how I do not know much about the Jewish Diaspora (from which we get diaspora studies from, as well as trauma theory) I don't know much about the Roma diaspora either.

I do not write about other specific regions of Asia, such as Laos, much less our own indigenous peoples in Asia. Thanks, Bryan, for taking up that particular region, and also to people like Mia, who write consistently about the Philippines' history with colonization and how that colonization has affected the people today.

In the middle of writing this post, I reblogged a post on Tumblr about the women of Jeju Island, a very generic post, which was then reblogged with a great deal of history and the current conditions that the island faces today. I am guilty of the charges in the post, of reblogging uncritically and buying into the exoticized and romanticized images of the Jeju women. I am guilty of that ignorance. Which is why the extra commentary is so important, because it is important to acknowledge that ignorance and share the knowledge that I, and so many others, have been freely given.

In a world where privileged people demand answers and knowledge from the oppressed, defensively crying "well how was I supposed to know?" and becoming impatient when the knowledge is not delivered in a kind, maternal tone that soothes their soul and assuages their desire to be a Good Person, it is important to step back and take stock of that which we do not know. It is important to be able to acknowledge that this lack of knowledge is dangerous to people less fortunate than we. It is important to accept the fear that our ignorance will harm others is an important part of the process of teaching ourselves to seek knowledge.

Let me admit straight up that this blog, whenever it is my own thoughts, is mostly theoretical. What else do I do here, besides ask questions? What else do I do here, besides ask you, my audience, to ask questions? How else do I square my knowledge against that which I do not know?

Knowledge in which it is not just theory, but lived experience, is no longer just my purview alone, but a shared knowledge among other people that I am simply communicating to you. How do I then turn this knowledge (new to me, not to others) towards productive uses? What does it mean to use the knowledge productively?

This is not to downplay this blog. I appreciate every one of you who have decided to follow me, every one of you who have added me to your RSS feeds, everyone of you who have recommended this blog to other people, and every one of you who just keep reading, even through this blog's long silences. I appreciate the emails I receive (just as I regret the emails I don't find time nor words for a response).

I have spent the last two years thinking through issues of colonialism. There's a lot I have thought about, which simply doesn't make it to this blog, because, it always feels repetitive, since other people have said it much better, or because, it feels lacking, because there're better ways of saying the same thing.

It is one of those things I need to stop myself from worrying about. Just as I have to stop worrying about reaching the widest audience and hurting white people's feelings. (It's not that I don't love ya'll. It's just that I don't exactly owe ya'll the effort.)

But there are things I do spend time worrying about, which I don't regret worrying about: does my work do justice to the stories I am unaware of? Is there a way I can tie my understanding of the world to these stories I am less aware of, that my language will always reflect an awareness of them, even if it doesn't center them? Are there people I should be listening to who center these stories as parts of their lived experiences?

It's important to ask these questions while doing work in steampunk (and anti-racist work in general). I still can't decide whether it's because it's the backward-looking aspect of steampunk that makes it possible to ask these questions, or because these questions are important when doing steampunk. It could be both. But if you can acknowledge that you look backwards in steampunk for inspiration, then it is entirely possible to look in other directions, too.

There are lots of things I wish I could talk about, but can't. And I could also talk myself blue about my subject position and whatnot, but that would still only be a sliver of the big picture, a tiny piece of the many conversations happening at the same time.

Therefore, here is an open invitation to you, to talk to me about what you wish you could talk about, the questions you're looking for answers to, the histories you are looking for or trying to preserve.

Decolonizing Geography, Starting with Names

2011-11-17T12:14:00.000-05:00

"What's in a name?" as Shakespeare wrote, and then he goes on with some claptrap of how roses smell the same. Except, of course, that's not how communication works: the essence of a thing is always communicated through a lens, and the lens will be affected by a lot of other things, including but not limited to, what any given thing is called.

Names are important.

This is a post brought to you by this excellent list of names of the Caribbean islands as called by the natives before the colonizers popularized the names used today. So if you don't want to read what's under the cut, you should at least go have a look at that.

Lots of places, peoples, artifacts are called specific names because of a particular history with that which gives it its name. Malaysia, for example, only took up that name in 1963 after Sabah and Sarawak joined forces with Peninsular Malaya. And Malaya is the name the British gave us--locals called the Malay archipelago (which includes what is now called Indonesia, and the Philippines) Nusantara. Some people still refer to the region as Nusantara, especially when speaking in Malay, because it refers to a particular region and shared cultural roots (as well as some shared biological features).

Being able to name something is a kind of power; if you can name something and make it stick, you obviously have the political and social clout to be taken seriously and have people adopt your terminology.

Names also shift from region to region: as I mentioned above, what's called South East Asia (a name taken up for geopolitical and economic reasons) is called Nusantara by some folk, and I've no doubt that the Laotians, the Vietnamese, and the Filipinos have different names for the same region. It is not important to agree on a single name; that's where a great deal of unhappiness comes from (and seriously, imposing what you think its name should be at the expense of others? That's imperialism). It is, however, a sign of consideration, multicultural respect, to acknowledge the other names, and use them when appropriate.

No, it is not a lot of work remembering different names for one thing. I get that it may be difficult for someone who has learning problems, but if you can remember that there are certain rules and codes of behaviour for certain situations (like, there are ways to act in class that one does not act with family), you can certainly remember, different people call different things different names.

I talk a lot about de-centering Eurocentrism, and part of the postcolonial project involves decolonization. While it's not possible to go back to that perfect uncolonized state, it's possible to begin a process of reclamation. Part of that process involves names.

When writing Between Islands, I had to make a ton of decisions about naming certain places and regions and things. For example, I had to find an alternate name for "airship," because there's no way to nicely translate that into Malay (itself a mixture of Arabic, Sanskrit, Portuguese, and English) (you think the English language is the only language to pilfer? Vocabulary exchange happens all the time, especially in an entreport region like Nusantara). I also had to find a pre-colonial name for Penang (which, as it turns out, have different pronunciations, depending on the speaker's language).

To make these names commonplace, part of a daily lexicon, when we've been taught so long that there is a specific name for it, is sometimes very difficult. To use the names that another has given us, and sometimes imposed on us, that elides a huge part of a story, is a little success, a little push against a hegemony that permeates every part of our lives.

Philippine Steampunk: High Society

2011-11-15T19:54:00.001-05:00

So some of ya'll may be aware of this by now, but apparently my head's been in the ground for the last while (between studying for the GRE, NaNo, depression, and PhD apps) so I missed the release of High Society on Amazon!

Written by Paolo Chikiamco, and art by Hannah Buena, this story is set in the same 'verse as Chikiamco's "On Wooden Wings," which can be found in Philippine Speculative Fiction 6.

From the Amazon description:

Take your first step into a world of automata, magic, and alternative history! The year is 1764, and, for the first time in nearly two centuries, the Spanish forces have been repelled from the great walled city of Manila. While the Spaniards are quick to lay the blame at the feet of the invading British and their clockwork machines, the secret to the success of the Filipinos may lie closer to home, with an ally that is both ancient and new, mythical and mechanical. “High Society” is a stand-alone steampunk comic book in the “Wooden War” series.

Check out the teaser pages on Paolo Chikiamco's site!

And if that is intriguing, there is a giveaway (closes Dec 18) at Tinamats of a Kindle version! She also has a review.

Link of Interest: One Hundred Percent Mixed

2011-11-07T10:01:00.001-05:00

Some of ya'll might be on Tumblr (and possibly some of you follow me on there too), therefore, you might have heard of this new Tumblr which takes submissions: One Hundred Percent Mixed.

One Hundred Percent Mixed is "an illustrated documentary on what it means to be mixed", with questions relating to the mixed-race POC experience, with some optional questions on how being a mixie intersects with other issues too, such as gender and sexuality.

I've been chatting to quite a few folks about what it means to be mixed and identify strongly with one identity or another and how it feels quashed by another, but there're other some others who identify firstly as mixed, such as Dov Sherman, which is a different mindset and experience that takes place outside a more essentialist identity.

So if you identify as mixed-race (as in, someone asks you, what are you, and you can't give a simple reply like "Asian"), hop on over to represent, or see yourself represented. Or pass it on to other mixed-race folk you know. Or just plain check it out, to edjamacate yourself more on how people navigate the world.

Quote of Interest

2011-11-01T18:45:00.002-04:00

In my previous post on multiculturalism, replyhazy asked, "but what can I do?" which is not a question I don't hear, and often comes from people who really really really want to be able to play in the sandbox and dress up as POC and they've done their research!

In "Restarting Clockwork Game: A Self-Examination of White Privilege Through an Ongoing Work," Jane Irwin writes about how her desire to write her graphic novel turned into a research project on Orientalism. Here's an excerpt:

"My imperfect understanding of the subject matter stemmed from a combination of cultural ignorance and lack of research, or rather, a blinkered focus on only one kind of research. After reading through the first hundred or so essays in RaceFail09, I realized that while I'd spent hours looking up clothing and wigs and scientific discoveries of the day, I'd devoted almost no time at all to the politics of the era, politics clearly visible to a sizable portion of my audience. ... I'd been so hung up on examining the Uncanny Valley and seeing the automaton only in terms of man versus machine that I'd completely failed to address the equally large issue of how 18th century Europeans chose to depict and interact with the Mysterious Orient."

I doubt it'll help any of you white people directly, but I hope it'll make ya'll feel slightly less alone. There ARE conversations on what white people can do and have been doing to make safe spaces for POC. Part of your job is to actively go looking for them.

This has been your Tip For White People To Not Be So Faily Of The Day. Don't expect another tomorrow.

We Interrupt Very Srs Blog Bsnz To Bring You Story Ideas

2011-10-28T22:55:00.002-04:00

So tonight in #steampunkchat, we were talking about queer steampunk, and author Nisi Shawl said, "Sex and war move technological progress. Sex includes queer sex, right?"

And something just PINGED in me, you know, as in, "OMG! A setting where sex drives the technology, not war!! ALL KINDS OF SEX!"

And I hear this whole "conflict drives technological innovation!" meme so much, it's really fucking tiresome. Technology adapts to our needs at the time, which doesn't have to depend on conflict. Assuming that conflict is the only way to drive forward technological innovation is a kind of tired old trope that just has us falling back on war as a setting and doesn't paint us as very imaginative creatures who can dare dream about progress without ridiculous notions of bravery and nobility through slaughtering each other.

So NaNoWriMo is right around the corner and if you were looking for a challenging setting to work with, here's my challenge, write a steampunk world where technology is inspired by, not conflict, but sexual activity. ANY KIND OF SEXUAL ACTIVITY! As Nisi continued to say, "yes, the vibrators and milking machines belong in queer steampunk." Hell, vibrators and milking machines belong in ALL STEAMPUNK!

So maybe it's my being single and not getting laid for just about two fucking years now, but I really want to see this happen! Like, Chester 5000 XYV, except society-wide!

BRING ON ALL THE SEX!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled srs blog bsnz.

A Culture, Not a Costume

2011-10-26T17:41:00.002-04:00

Oh hey, it IS about close to Halloween, right? I know it is because I've been seeing more anxiety about people dressing up as racist stereotypes than usual. I mean, I have this anxiety all the time! I do steampunk! Non-white steampunk, even.

But all this stuff I do in steampunk? It's just a continuation of stuff that happens outside of steampunk. Dressing up as something from a different culture? Happens every year on a pretty mass scale!

So here are two related but separate links about cultural appropriation during Halloween which I think are extremely pertinent for steampunk:

An Ohio University group called Students Teaching About Racism Society (STARS) has begun a campaign called "We're a Culture, Not a Costume." In it, people of colour hold up pictures of Halloween costumes that depict racist stereotypes of how a costume is supposed to reflect an entire people. Some of the costumes look innocuous enough, like the geisha costume, for which you probably will want to acquaint yourself with the longer history of how geisha costumes are deeply problematic as stand-ins for Asian women.

At Native Appropriations, Adrienne K writes about how she wants to reason with white people into NOT wearing the hypersexualised Indian princess costumes (PocaHotties) or warrior outfits, only to realize that words like those would be wasted anyway. Who the hell wants to be told that what they're doing is wrong?Who wants to be told that their having fun is racist and based on a system of power that allows them to get away with this kind of shit, while ignoring the wishes of the people of colour who says, "don't do it, it hurts"?

I kind of have this conversation all the time with folks, hell, there's a conversation like this happening right now in some other comment thread. These people want to be reasoned with, they want to have a deeply intelligent conversation with rigorous debate before they will be satisfied. As if these things were logical and we're dealing with the pragmatics of material, not with things like empathy and power.

So when people asked me, "why weren't you at [SteamCon III's] Multicultural Brunch?" I said, I don't want to run the risk of raising my blood pressure in seeing [colour]face. It's not worth it. I don't want to hear about the research people have done about their costumes, the history of a suit, the changes it has undergone--not the day after I've been called a racist for simply looking for people like me who are, with or without costume, different from default.

I'm sorry I don't appear to give a shit about what you've done with pieces of cloth when I'm more concerned with what people do to other people. It's not that I don't appreciate these efforts of yours, because I do, and if you're studying the history of my people to create that, perhaps you will also come across the history of my people as people, and come to understand why we are the way we are today through your studies.

p.s. I use the "theory" tag for this type of entry, but really, it's not theory so much as it is real-life. Unfortunately, there's no other way to express such kinds of abstractions that have so much direct impact...

Happy Blogiversary to Beyond Victoriana!

2011-10-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

It is! I know! Yeah, our blogiversaries are only a few days apart! No it's not because we're sekrit twins or anything like that (though we HAVE confused people before by our similar-but-not-same content)!

Ay-Leen, as you may know, began writing about steampunk and being Asian in steampunk MUCH earlier than this first official Beyond Victoriana post, aaaaand she's also been a lot more disciplined about getting a post out every Sunday, on schedule. She's also featured some terrific people on the scene, such as Jess Nevins, and Evangeline Holland, as well as people overseas such as Eccentric Yoruba (who is one of my favourite people to follow on Twitter). Since then, Beyond Victoriana has grown, won awards, and gained recognition all over the place, and still kicks ass.

It's terrific and exciting and I'm glad to be sharing the Internet with her! Happy Blogiversary, Ay-Leen!!

SteamCon III: Starts with a mugging, ends with dog poop

2011-10-23T21:07:00.000-04:00

OK, these things did not happen to ME, but I think that's kind of indicative of the mixed bag that was my first SteamCon experience.

The mugging actually happened to Pablo Vasquez, a con-chair of Aetherfest, also known as Mr. Saturday. You should ask him about this story sometime, as it involves himself being a Panamanian and getting lost in Bellevue, and the mugging didn't actually follow through, ending with Pablo receiving a free bowl of chili. This was Thursday night, while I was out having dinner with Airship Ambassador Kevin Steil, Steampunk Workshop owner Jake von Slatt, Out From Behind the Curtain founder Phineas Von Stitch, and Seattle-based writer and Steam-Powered 2 contributor Nisi Shawl.

From left: Kevin, Nisi, Jake, Phineas, all in civvies

It's on this weird note that my SteamCon experience began, with several ups and downs, meeting new people and getting re-acquainted with folks I'd met before, and gnashing my teeth at not having had enough time with others.

Friday

The first official day of SteamCon began with ~~herding cats~~ organizing my roommates, Pablo, and Jake for breakfast and figuring out the setup of the convention. Joining us were James Carrott, the steampunk of the steampunk-futurist duo producing Vintage Tomorrows, and his adorable little daughter, Mimi.

Mimi and a festive balloon companion

We wandered around the convention spaces to check out the layout, so we knew where we were going for later. Towards the end of the hallway of the 2nd floor where the Regency rooms were, there was this photoshoot setup:

Mr. Saturday laughs at Jake von Slatt's troubles

Afterwards, we went down to the Artists' Alley, outside the dealers' room, and guess who I ran into? Mikel Sauve from the Vulcania Volunteers! I met him at GearCon, and here he was, providing ambience to a nautical-themed SteamCon. He and Stephen McConell had a full display this time:

Serious men with serious business

Papa Smurf captains a sub

Mikel said he'd let me ride this bicycle steampunk'd by Stephen

Sometime after all this wandering, I headed to nap, and then to the Vintage Tomorrows screening, where I arrived late, and found it difficult to get a seat in the darkness. The screening went well, and I cringed about as much as I expected to. For a first cut, I think it went well, although it'll be nice to see more diversity in there besides myself and Tony Hicks of Tinplate Studios. Pictures of Ay-Leen showed up, in different outfits, and that just doesn't count! I hope Byrd will get a chance to interview more fabulous steampunks out East too. There was a Q&A afterwards, to critique the documentary, and I think some of the comments rather missed the focus of the documentary, which is about the interaction between humanity and technology in steampunk. It's not meant to be another overall general documentary talking about the different ways steampunk manifests. That's what the Steampunk Bible is for, folks.

After the screening and Q&A, I scootched out and wandered the dealers' room before my next panel. In the dealers' room, I renewed acquaintances with familiar faces from GearCon, such as Tony Hicks, and Thom Becker of Last Wear.

Dapper gentlemen selling dapper gear
AND THEY HAVE POCKETS

Ay-Leen the Peacemaker had been nominated for an Airship Award, and she wanted me to accept her award in her place, so we also spent time coordinating that. (Sometime before ~~the cat-herding~~ breakfast, I was writing down the speech, since I didn't think I could find a printer anywhere.) This means that although I had a ticket to the Airship Awards, I wouldn't be able to sit down for the entire dinner, since it started at 6pm, and I had a panel at 6pm.

(And then Unwoman's performance in Sepiachord's Tiki Lounge at 8, at the same time as the Artists' Reception, followed by Steam Federation's absinthe party and Out From Behind the Curtain's social mixer. Ready?)

At 6pm, I moderated a panel on Cheng I Sao, a fab and cruel lady pirate who ruled the South China Seas for about three years before she retired rich. I think the panel went well, with my panelists Margo Loes and Beth Wade sharing all their knowledge at hand.

Right after, I hustled to the Airship Awards! And hung around while K.W. Jeter made his keynote speech, in which he said some very nice things about steampunk. I stayed until they announced the winners and when they announced the Community category (congratulations, Jordan Bodewell!), I applauded the winners, and went to decompress a bit before Unwoman's show.

Unwoman's first show was CROWDED! I have no idea how many people can fit inside the lounge, but there were only maybe 10% of rows left to sit in, and those filled up pretty quickly. And it was good, because she's a very talented singer. And a fabulous person in general, but anyway. When I saw Mike Perschon leaving surreptiously, I stepped out to meet him too, and we walked down to the gallery together for the Artists' Reception. You know, where the Famous People hang out (well, the artists and panelists and guests of honour).

The Artists' Reception was a simple little affair, and I don't do wine, so I helped myself to much toast, crackers, and cheese. I was there mostly to get a hold of the literary Guest of Honour, K.W. Jeter, with whom I had a panel Sunday, and was a bit worried that I hadn't had a chance to discuss what he wanted from the panel ahead of time.

But Jeter slipped out while I wasn't looking! Oh, why wasn't I looking? Diana Vicks and I fell into conversation, that's why, and she wanted to clear right up with me my criticism of her definition of steampunk. Now, there are very different conversations in steampunk, and sometimes two people can be having two different conversations, because they just aren't using the term in the same way. When Diana talks about steampunk, she talks about the genre as it manifests currently and in the past; when I talk about steampunk, I take my cue from Mike Perschon and talk about it as an aesthetic, and how it can be reflexively used for more possibilities than what we currently see.

It's not that we disagree fundamentally on these definitions of steampunk, but we use the terms differently. She needs to delineate (for her stress levels' sake) boundaries on what it is to decide how to put her convention together the way that fits her expectations best. I need an understanding of the term that allows me to explore the aesthetic with my approach. So we talked about this, and while I still don't find her definition useful, it works for her, and it's her con. We all need to use what works best for us.

Kevin, Mike and I skipped out to the absinthe party Unwoman was hosting with Steam Federation in one of the party suites, but it got really overwhelming, really quickly, so after a drink for everybody, we headed on up to Phineas von Stitch's social mixer.

My gay dads Kevin Steil and Mike Perschon, with my gay brother Phineas von Stitch
~~and then they sent me to bed~~

I went to bed at the reasonable hour of midnight, for my 9am presentation.

SATURDAY

Saturday morning, I discovered that thirty minutes before panels start is way too early to be looking for the tech folks. But I found 'em! And got my presentation ready and rolling and underway by the time people started coming in too. I started off by asking POC to identify themselves (even ya'll white-looking ones). It's a difficult question for me to ask, because I have totally been the person who didn't want to be marked by race (having grown up marked and marginalized and wanting to get away from that), so I didn't want to similarly alienate people by asking that question. Plus, how does one go about identifying folks who don't look but feel racialized? "Hello perfect stranger, may I ask if you consider yourself a person of colour?"

I like to think it was a pretty decent presentation. We had a spirited discussion on racism and how people with culturally specific heritages are erased. There was no fail this time, which was great, and some audience members had great advice and book recommendations. I'd like to thank Mrs. Mary Lou Sullivan, of the Rose City Steampunks, specifically, for her input on white-appearing people who have a Native American ancestor and are trying to find their roots (which I hope folks took to heart!) and to Tom and Jason for sharing their experiences on how having a non-white (or, as Tom put it, a "vaguely ethnic") face creates different dynamics as different communities identify certain kinds of faces differently--you may be Asian in one neighbourhood, Hispanic in another, for example, and pass as white elsewhere. It's always a different conversation every time, and I hope people got a lot out of it.

I got the POC-identified folks who stayed 'til the end to pose for a picture:

From left: Tessara, Tom, myself, Mrs. Sullivan

Then it was lunch with Jake von Slatt and I messed around waiting for the Annual Tea. Among the things I did was FINALLY meet K.W. Jeter, our literary Guest of Honor, while he was at the signing table, to introduce myself and talk about the Evolution of Steampunk panel (only to discover he likes talking off the cuff, so my anxiety was wasted).

I asked my cousin Andrea if she'd like a picture with K.W. Jeter, because, she's walking in the Artist's Alley with a fucking boat on her head, and we can't seem to go anywhere anyway, and K.W., bless him, comes all the way around the tables to stand beside her:

Holy ship!

I also got his autograph, and because I don't have any of his books, I did the next best thing:

Hey, the ribbons have gotta be more than just decorative!

The Amphitrite Society Annual Tea was a fun time, although, I didn't take pictures, so I can't show you the contestants, who included a fishman stomping around on flippers, a jellyfish family (from the Rose City Steampunks! they were really cute), a deep sea diver underwear model, and much gratuitous eye-candy of the two main sexes.

I had the good fortune to be sitting with many distinguished ladies (including my cousin in her Marie Antoinette costume), among them Geri Jeter, wife of our guest of honour! Which I did not know until much later when she approached me to plug Mr. Jeter's latest series of books, the Kim Oh series. They talked about the job market these days, the difficulty of finding a job once laid off, due to age discrimination against people who are much older, and with much more experience.

Spending my after drinking tea isn't exactly my, uh, cup of tea (I hear your groans) but as I said in an earlier post, I didn't get to see Unwoman perform at all during GearCon, so was determined to get to all her performances this time. And of course, she didn't disappoint. In the middle of all this, I went looking for Diana, because I had this brilliant idea of co-opting the group photo shoot towards the end for a POC-only shoot, and wanted her permission to do so. When Diana Vicks announced the group photo shoot, she surprised me by also announcing that any "non-caucasian" people could stay back for a shoot.... which was a bit awkward. The term "Person of Colour" exists for a reason, and some people who identify with the term are also Caucasian! Oh well.

After the tea, I hung around for the group photoshoot, and to be honest, I found it more fun to watch the coordinators and camerapeople:

SMILE

KIDS TO FRONT

HATS OFF

CHEER!

KISS YOUR S.O.

When the shoot was over, I yelled: "Asians! Black! Latin! Native American! Please stay behind!" over and over, trying to organize this terribly impromptu shoot.

As I mentioned earlier, I really hate asking people if they identify as POC. Much less showing that I'm singling them out due to their appearance. I really, really did not enjoy this part at all, because not only were people approaching me in response, but I had to figure out, very quickly! where to pose them, and gather more people before they lost interest. I was also really tired (it was naptime! I'd been awake since 7.30!) so I was sort of losing it. I asked them to pose on one of the staircases, and went back to yelling again.

In the midst of this, a white dude walked past me and said, casually, over his shoulder, "that's racist!"

I will have to expand on this. But suffice to say, this was an off-hand comment that really fucking upset me. I couldn't respond to it adequately, and went back to what I was doing, and folks were introducing themselves. Someone asked me, "excuse me, but, I'm half-Latina and look white, do I count?"

"Do you identify with that?" I asked.

"Yes." She looked so timid about it.

"Get right in there!"

Here is the result:

Please don't ask me to catalogue these people

(The next morning, I would look at this picture and ask my cousin, "where the fuck were all the Asians I saw?" Because I know at least 10 other Asians were in the crowd; I counted. "They were there!" she told me. "They were behind you, taking pictures." I facepalmed so many times. I mean, seriously.)

So after this? I was SO EXHAUSTED. I went up to my room to try to get the fuck to sleep! But! Housekeeping had been trying to get in all day, and at those times, my cousin was still asleep, or changing, so my roomies told them to come back later. When was later? An hour into my nap. Oh well! But that was okay; I organized a dinner with VIRTUOSO writer Jon Munger (I'd been trying to get hold of this mofo ALL DAY!!! I was hoping he'd come to Steam Around the World and save me the trouble of introducing his comic to the audience, but nooooo...) and folks from Last Wear. It was good to catch up with Brad Russell, a half-Pinoy I met at GearCon, and he introduced me to Gabino Mabalay (another Pinoy!) who does all of Last Wear's promotional pictures. While hanging out in the lobby to gather, we struck up conversation with an artist still hanging around, who also turned out to be a Pinoy! I was flush with Pinoys that day, I tell ya.

Brad Russell's badass Pinoy self; phear the mofo's straw hat, all

As a troup, Last Wear crew and all, we tromped down to get sushi, all fifteen of us. Good times. We got back in time to polish off a bottle of wine before my roomies and I went to the Nautilus concert.

Unwoman's set was awesome, as expected. And it was good to catch up with Erica, too.

I also had a conversation with this lovely lady who'd attended my SATW presentation earlier, wearing a Chinese-inspired blouse with super-large sleeves that reached down to the ground.

Epic sleeves that do a period HK drama proud

This is what I would consider a walking-away dress
'Cos you'll love to admire it while she walks away, it's that epic

"I was really nervous wearing this around you after this morning," she admitted.

"Well good," I said. "You should be. But you look lovely anyway." And I proceeded to dissect how it wasn't that problematic. I really shouldn't have to do this, but eh.

I hadn't seen the Clockwork Dolls before, for some reason (even though they're an East Coast band) and I was surprised! It's so metal! It's like Nightwish before Tarja left! Except steampunk! And there was an Asian chick on stage! (This shouldn't surprise me, because Genevieve Pang of Psyche Corporation is also Asian, but shit, guys, look, it was an Asian chick on stage at the keyboards and on guitar and rocking right the fuck out! Model Minority Myth, game over, go the fuck home! If I had role models like this growing up, I might have stuck to my piano lessons.)

Here we have a powerful vocalist and badass keyboardist
rocking the fuck outta the stage

After their show, I went to get a CD, and introduce myself to Allison Curval, who'd attended #steampunkchat just the week before for the session on Steampunk Music (it was like a Gilded Age Records Twitter Extravaganza). And because I am very bad at researching people before I introduce myself, I did not realize Azn rocker chick was her! WTF! Well, that'll teach me! She totally greeted me like an old friend though, and here's a picture of all three of these cool and totally fucking hot people:

Allison Curval, Helene de Fer, and their handsome guitarist, Christopher Bass

(Helene De Fer, by the way, has a delicious accent.)

My roomies abandoned me at this point to go to bed, because they were pretty tired. So was I, but I really wanted to see Vagabond Opera. I especially wanted to know if Eric Stern would actually hold that long note in "Transformation into Marlene" because that shit is impressive, ya'll.

What happened was somehow the crowd move around to clear for what appeared to be a kind of steampunk mosh pit, where instead of knocking each other around, moshers linked arms and spun about each other, eventually creating very large dancing circle (grabbing other people into it), and then there was another circle inside this dance circle. I'm not sure how it happened:

I'm not sure I adequately describe what the fuck just happened

I caught two songs performed by Robin Jackson, a song sung by Ashia Grzesik, and a couple by Eric Stern, and a cello solo. Unfortunately, I had to go to bed, which I did right after "Marlene" (in which Eric Stern DID hold that long note, and I felt deeply, deeply, deeply satisfied).

SUNDAY! (almost done!)

Sunday began early too! I headed down to Regency B early to rearrange chairs, and run into the IT guys who thought I'd need a projector for this roundtable, for some reason. It was pretty informal, as formal as I tried to get it. I really wanted to be able to talk about both queerness and race in steampunk, but for some reason never quite stuck to it. A lady brought up the issue of the elderly in but that didn't last long. It was a lively discussion about slavery, and how slavery remains prevalent today. Thanks, everybody!

And one of the people who came to the roundtable, Russ, gave me a bottle of wine! As a gift! I never got a gift at a con before! That was pretty fantastic. I got all warm and glowy and probably sounded crazy when I said, "well, no, I don't want to carry that back across the border, but, let's drink it right now!" and I invited anybody who wasn't going to another panel to come join us at the hotel food court for alcohol and food. Thus was a pleasant time achieved. Thank you, Russ!! It was very sweet of you!

Sometime around now, I was meant to hang out with Unwoman, so she could interrogate me on my very uninformed opinion of steampunk music. If any of you have noticed, I don't deal with music very much, because although the rules of applying the steampunk aesthetic are very much the same, I don't have the knowledge about music to know exactly how it's done. That is why I leave it to actual musicians to talk about it.

But we hung out long enough for me to be a bit late to my panel with Guest of Honour K.W. Jeter. Oopsie! He was already on a roll talking to audience members, which made my job a little easier. A moderator's job is to make the panelists comfortable, which he certainly was already, leaving me to do domestic chores like get water.

The panel went well enough. K.W. Jeter really knows how to hold forth, so we didn't really even get into the latest stages of steampunk, where a lot of cool academic work has been produced (what's up, steam-scholars mailing list?) and there's been a movement to really push the boundaries of what's commonly thought of as steampunk. I did manage to interject long enough to plug Steampunk Magazine and Beyond Victoriana. Folks were cool with my draconian control over the room.

There was a question I almost wish I didn't let through, because it was a general writing question directly at Jeter, and nothing to do at all with the panel; "how do you do your research" is more suited for the Meet Jeter panel than this panel, but I let it through, and Jeter told us about how tanners would judge the quality of leather by chewing on it to taste the amount of dog shit in it, because that's what they used.

Which I thought was a pretty cool way to end the day. Afterwards, I got a picture with K.W. Jeter, because Ay-Leen told me, pics or it didn't happen.

A pic, to prove it totally happened

And that was it! My SteamCon was pretty much over after that! My cousin Andrea and roomie Jaime had to leave for Portland right after. I took a while to say my goodbyes. I went to say goodbye to Mikel, and told Jake and Pablo to nail Mike Perschon at Kevin's booth, only to run into Mike as he was leaving the vendor room, and what the fuck was up with that? And Pablo and Jake babbled, "we don't know what happened! He was there! And then he disappeared!" Pfft, whatevers.

So, all in all, Steamcon: way too many people for me to deal with after some time of travel (did I mention there was a bit of me getting lost in San Francisco before this? I almost fell sick from that trip) but I'm hoping that renewing acquaintance, and making new ones, has been good for me. I'm hoping that people found my panels and programming worthwhile waking up at 9am for. I'm hoping I opened the conversation more for some Seattlelite steampunks to question ideals of multiculturalism.

It's not SteamCon's fault entirely that I'm exhausted (except you, racist asshole, I still got my eye on you). I'm naturally an introvert, so a large con doesn't suit me. If I get invited to pitch programming next year, I'll certainly do so, but it's not the kind of con I would just only attend.

I do happen to have more pictures, which I'll post when my internet connection isn't so goddamn flaky, as well as videos, so check back =) There were so many awesome people, I just didn't have time to fit them all into this report (like, I ran into Kaja Foglio of Girl Genius on the way to sushi, and she recognized me, and it was awesome, even though she said she was sick; I hope you're feeling better, Kaja!) and there were some faces I knew from the Internet, and of course, more pictures of awesome POC representin' and colouring up steampunk!

See ya'll next con!

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Nisi Shawl

2011-10-22T16:13:00.000-04:00

Nisi Shawl is one of my fucking favourite people, and I am so honoured to share a TOC with her! She wrote a very useful book on Writing the Other, and has a short story collection or two. She's part of the Science Fiction Writers Association, has a LiveJournal, and recently got Twitter and Facebook, even. In Steam-Powered II, she writes us a story called “The Return of Cherie.”

A two-sentence summary:

Twenty years after she helped found a socialist Utopia in the Belgian Congo, Lisette Toutournier returns to the nation of Everfair with urgent advice about its role in Europe’s fast-approaching “Great War.” And despite their ages, Lisette also hopes to rekindle the love she once shared with another co-founder still living there, Daisy Albin.

How did your characters come to be?

Three of “The Return of Cherie’s” five characters are loosely based on historical figures: Matty on Peter Pan's creator, J.M. Barrie; Lisette on Colette; and Daisy on children's author E.M. Nesbit. Rima is a sort of mash-up of Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston. Fwendi evolved from photos and anecdotes of several sub-Saharan children and women; the histories of indigenous peoples in that area are pretty much eradicated, so I have to use lots of references as her armature. Her name is a phoneticization of the nickname a young playmate gave to Barrie, which he eventually elided into Wendy.

Why this setting?

I chose this setting because it’s where most of Everfair, my novel-in-progress takes place, and the story is a fragment of said novel. And I chose this setting for Everfair because King Leopold’s devastation of Equatorial Africa is one of the most extreme examples anywhere of the costs of Victorian technology, which is the fetish and domain of most current steampunk.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

In emerging pan-African culture at this time, in this world, I’m positing grudging acceptance. Lesbianism is okay, but it’s not great. Like burned toast—scrape it a little and it’s edible, with lots of jam. Everfair is of much the same opinion on “inverts,” with a thin layer of liberalistic tolerance sprinkled on top. In Europe (which Lisette just left) lesbianism is simply shameful. Think “Well of Loneliness.”

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

What has been the most fun about writing “The Return of Cherie”? It's hard to choose between the research and the characters. And then there’s researching the characters. I’ve wanted for years to write about Colette and E. Nesbit and J.M. Barrie. I love them so much! Lisette’s voice is an emulation of Colette’s, in this story and in Everfair. She’s so sense-oriented, and that makes her scenes are tremendously engaging for me—and, I hope, for our readers. Thinking of the project as a whole, research has in some ways been a nightmare, because much of the material I’d like to draw on for indigenous viewpoints is gone. Millions of people died during King Leopold’s reign of terror. History is told by the unslaughtered, so there are huge gaps in our recorded knowledge of this time and place. However, there are material traces of Kongolese culture, museums full of looted goods. I have a book on these museum collections (African Reflections, edited by Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim) that has helped me immensely. Of course I want more—I could spend thousands on an Everfair library. I’ve already spent over a hundred, even though I’m also using lots of the supplementary information available on the internet.

A random ramble?

“The Return of Cherie” is a reference to two of Colette’s best known novels, Cheri and The Last of Cheri. Colette’s Cheri is a young man in love with an older courtesan. I’m 55, and I think about age and love a lot. In my story, Daisy’s 55 and Lisette is 41, and there’s some concern that the advancing years may be putting an end to their amours. Race is also a factor. As for the technological aspect of steampunk in this story, there are gears, and gleaming brass, and dirigibles, and rubber fittings, just like in most current genre works—but it’s what people do with these icons that matters most. It matters to me and it matters to them. I hope it matters to you.

And this concludes this round of author interviews! By this time you should have enough information to make a decision whether or not to pre-order, so I shan't ask again. Thanks to all the authors for answering these questions, and thanks everybody else for reading!

Today's Steampunk RaceFail: Wolsung

2011-10-21T20:45:00.001-04:00

Via my friend bankuei comes this, uhm, delightful example of casual racism dressed up as entertainment.

Bankuei's only posted the two images, and it's possible that there may be more egregiously racist images that I'm not seeing.

Now, I get that this is a Polish RPG game, so there may not be a whole lot of African, indigenous, or Asian peoples there who have lived there long enough to find these kinds of racist caricatures of their home cultures insulting. But this is, in fact, an example of what I'm talking about when I say steampunk is not a form of escape for many, and is not immune to racism. Here we have caricatures of... I don't know, pygmy Africans? Carib natives? And then there is, of course, the pinch-faced caricature of Chinese people, complete with pointed ears; this hobgoblin figure draws on the Fu Manchu character (as well as an exaggeration of other Chinese characteristics).

I don't really know what goes on in Poland in terms of race relations, but that doesn't really excuse the fact that it draws on racist stereotypes of what Foreign Peoples look like, stereotypes that render the Foreign People looking Not Human or Completely Barbaric. And thus the tradition of dehumanizing the non-West by cultural producers continues to feed the ignorance of folks who may likely never interact with these stereotyped peoples on a personal basis, to see folks like us as, you know, normal people.

Which is why it's so important for us POC to be creators of our own worlds, where we won't be these kinds of caricatures. Because these stereotypes live on, and sometimes in us. How many of us are working hard to decolonize our minds of what has been taught to us about our own people, as inferior to Westerners? How many of us are products of the White Man's Burden to civilize us? How do we re-invent ourselves to be free of that?

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Alex Dally MacFarlane

2011-10-20T22:49:00.000-04:00

Alex Dally MacFarlane is another of those rare souls among us with a .com URL and stuff and a prolific writer to boot. Her story is “Selin That Has Grown in The Desert.”

A two-sentence summary:

Dursun, a teenaged girl in 19th century Central Asia, must soon be married—but she is starting to realise that she only wants to be with other girls.

How did your characters come to be?

Even without the lesbian parameters of the anthology guidelines, I would have wanted to write about women. Their stories are too often ignored in favour of male endeavours. The lesbian aspect immediately gave me more details: my character is a lesbian, and I quickly decided she would be young, grappling directly with the difficulties of being a lesbian in a time and a place where such a concept was not acknowledged.

Why this setting?

My starting point for the story was actually my quite strong disinterest in most of the steampunk I've ever read. In short, it's very male and Victorian, with a great deal of glorification placed on Victorian England (and a lot of terrible attempts to write in Victorian prose). JoSelle asked me to write a story for the anthology, but I didn’t really want to write a steampunk story.

At the same time, I was reading a really beautiful manga, Otoyomegatari (A Bride's Story) by Kaoru Mori, set in 19th century Central Asia. I loved the domesticity of the story, how it focused primarily on female relationships and day-to-day life.

These two combined, giving me the idea of a story set in a part of the world where steampunk was at best irrelevant, at worst an indicator of foreign imperialism. And I wanted to focus primarily not on the technology, but on the people of Central Asia.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

As far as I can tell from my research, lesbianism was simply not a concept in 19th century Central Asia as it is in a number of present-day countries. Women married men and bore children—and that was that. Dursun does not want to fit into this norm, and the story is about how she deals with this problem.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

Research! I've spent many hours in the British Library, reading about Turkmenistan past and present, and many more hours online, sourcing pictures and snippets of historical texts and travel stories and Turkmen-authored information—it is not an easy place or period to research in the English language, and I enjoyed the challenge (and still do).

My greatest find so far has been Carole Blackwell’s Tradition and Society in Turkmenistan, which collects several hundred folksongs sung by Turkmen women and recorded throughout the 20th century, now translated into English. It is a rare and wonderful resource—far too often, women's voices are simply not written down, and are gradually lost over time.

A random ramble?

I am now turning the story into a novel, which I am really excited about. I even have an idea for a second book, narrated by someone else—also a young Turkmen woman, with a story of her own that connects to Dursun's.

Hey, hey, hey! Less than a week to Steam-Powered II's release! [HINTHINTHINT]

Happy Blogiversary

2011-10-20T16:43:00.000-04:00

So, about two years ago, I started up this blog and made the basic housekeeping items. Two years later, I'm still writing on it, and I feel it's been underwritten. This is mostly my fault: I started the blog, liked doing the subject of steampunk and postcolonialism so much, I took it to grad school, which sucked up my time, and I never made much effort to update here, except to let ya'll know when I would be at conventions and such.

My bad =(

But, two years later, I have an MA in steampunk and postcolonialism, and things are starting to look really cool in the steampunk world (as evidenced by the roundtable interviews you've been seeing!), and not only that, but I'm back to reviewing and thinking out loud for at least the next few months.

Steampunk postcolonialism has been doing great things for me. Everytime I do a Beyond Victoriana presentation at a con, people always want to talk to me afterwards. It's even more rewarding when it's a POC who's now gung-ho about exploring their own background (that favour Ay-Leen did me has been passed on!). Not only that, but steampunk's provided me a useful vehicle to think through issues of identity, race, marginalization.

I don't like everything I see in steampunk: lots of the literature's still same ol', same ol'; steampunk conventions are little cornucopias of consumerism; I still have to have the same old arguments with racists and racism-apologists who think that the imperialism inherent in so many of our systems today is A-OK because that's the way things worked out, hey? So get over it! (ahaha fuck you no).

But even that I can think through. Because steampunk is so many things, watching the steampunk subculture is even more of a slice of North American society that one mightn't see anywhere else, and not only that, the creative element of the entirety of steampunk combined offers a glimmer of hope, a light in the wall to a different world that is better. With hopefully fresher air. (It means that others and myself make a lot of noise and create a lot of dust digging / smashing out that wall.) (It is very hard rock, ok?)

So... I guess I will share with you a list of things that I've learned in the last year or so, from reading and writing and blogging and conventioning, and even costuming. Some of these are general life lessons, but which really hit home for me in the steampunk sphere:

- I cannot build anything worth shit.

--- This is why I still do not have any actual silver goggles.

- The vest makes a great silhouette, and a kind of armour.

--- Always buy clothes a little loose and let the vest handle the rest.

----- Damn, I put on weight fast.

- People get very antsy when I swear.

- They also get very antsy when I talk about privilege and racism.

--- This may then devolve into whitesplainin'.

----- A decision will then have to be made whether I want to bother.

------- The answer is usually no.

- Packing will NEVER GET EASY (and I am a very seasoned traveler who knows how to pack light).

--- Made more difficult with a different outfit every day / night.

----- Blogging is a great way to procrastinate from packing.

------- Packing is a great way to procrastinate from something else.

- Always check local weather before packing.

--- The States is warmer than Canada.

----- California is warmer than New Jersey. Even though I went to Cali in spring and NJ in summer.

- 'Tis probably a good idea to find out someone's relationship status before hitting on them.

- A hotel room with double beds can fit a lotta people.

--- Helping each other dress and make up is fun.

----- Corset congo lines are also fun.

- Even the awesomest, sweetest people can say and do intensely asshole things.

- Distance does not damper friendships.

- For whatever reason, I am pretty fucking lucky to be hanging out with very cool people on a regular basis.

So.

Enough maudlin', back to work! Hope ya'll stick around for the next year!

Using the term "multiculturalism"

2011-10-19T02:32:00.000-04:00

I'm currently re-reading Angela Davis' Abolition Democracy, and her interviewer, Eduardo Mendieta, in response to her reiteration that "we need a new age--with a new agenda--that directly addresses the structural racism" (30) about multiculturalism: "very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism" (31).

Over the last year or so, I've become incredibly disillusioned with how the term "multiculturalism" is used in various spaces, including steampunk.

I've always loved the term, and multiracialism as well. In Malaysia, we are openly a multi-racial society; you see food stalls with Chinese lettering and Indian mamak shops. Wherever you go, there are clear signs that any given space caters to the needs of specific races, and it's only hyper-consumerist spaces that cater to as many people as possible, that are, ahem, "race-less". (Neocolonialism, you see, strips a country of its cultures, and replaces it with a singular culture of buying and selling and marathon window-shopping.)

We're super-imperfect, and there are a ton of things I do not know about the different races and cultures within Malaysia alone. Partly because it's simply not part of regular interracial interaction and thus it never comes up in conversation. Partly also because sometimes these practices are deeply private and specific to certain groups, and we kind of don't see why we HAVE to tell others about it. But at functions, we are fairly happy to see each other dress appropriately, and in the cultural clothes associated with the race of the host.

Contrary to the politics of Malaysia, I really do think that the Malaysian people get it right sometimes, or at least, it did. Recently I've come to believe that our taciturn attitude towards talking about our cultures has become a wall and now we stand around awkwardly and don't really know how to talk to each other about our cultures anymore.

Multiculturalism is much unlike what France and Britain's leaders think. When those prime ministers bleat about how multiculturalism has failed, they're really saying, brown people refuse to get in line. Non-white people are refusing to learn the language properly (by abandoning their own and their funny accents) and they are refusing to integrate properly (by entering and staying in white spaces that alienate the shit out of them). Multiculturalism to these people has failed because these immigrants have refused to play by the rules set by the white people who so nicely let them into the country. (Sara Ahmed's chapter on the Melancholic Migrant in her book The Promise of Happiness talks about this.)

I've said this before, but it is worth saying again: culture is about the people, not just the stuff. A culture isn't just about the clothes and the language and the literature. It's also in the way people interact and behave, the way we think, the way we live.

And I just don't see this happening in steampunk very much.

Now, I get why. If you're white, you can't very well pass as someone of another race without engaging in some squicky, racist-as-fuck colour-face. And I don't deny that some folk do some fine work adapting the fashions of non-Western European cultures into workable, lovable clothing that looks good, makes sense, stays true to the original garb, and doesn't bank on racist stereotypes.

But here's what bothers me most: the fact that when we say "multicultural" in steampunk, I'm often hearing "non-white". It's just another way of saying "ethnic" which is also code for "not white". And "exotic", which means "foreign."

This bothers me, partly because it's semantically incorrect (there are various ethnicities associated with people lumped into whiteness, and multiculturalism includes interacting with whiteness as well, or European-derived cultures, but from what I can see, "multicultural" currently signifies anything that's not Western European), partly because it's another way of celebrating some mythical post-racial state ("we're all human! let's celebrate each other's cultures by raising awareness about them through these clothes we are wearing on our white bodies!"), partly because... I just don't see anything that really engages with what it means to be multicultural.

Multiculturalism, in its very name, indicates the interaction between multiple cultures. Which could be very different cultures. With some major disagreements between them. Living in one space.

And, in our racist world, these disagreements have some shitty consequences that include but are not limited to work discrimination, disproportionate crime rates, exclusionary laws, and flat out shitty behaviour that receives no punishment or is outright supported. In our world, the presence of multiculturalism means that certain cultures get to be dominant, and stick the others into disadvantaged spaces (aka ghettos).

I have never encountered a space which consists of a plurality of cultures living alongside each other, elbow to elbow, where each community has the wherewithal to take care of itself, and members feel free to speak to other communities without fear of reprisal or discrimination. A space where any neutral ground has rules negotiated upon by representatives of different groups (like in Nancy Fraser's articulation on public spaces in plural societies, as opposed to hegemonic societies).

And let's face it, this shit ain't happening in steampunk. Non-white people are expected to play by the rules. We're expected to mess around in the Victorian era. We still come in by way of Western European, specifically English, frameworks and paradigms. If we're there as purposefully non-white, we're nifty, but... beyond that? What do we mean to white steampunks who dominate the scene? How is someone like Monique Poirier supposed to comfortably do Native American steampunk if random folk will joke about the "steampunk Trail of Tears" around her?

That is why I can't get behind a celebration of multicultural steampunk that really seems to bank on being able to create and dress in costumes and clothing and props of other cultures. Something different and something fun to do. Something cool to research. Something interesting to get to know, and maybe learn something about a different culture. But for all your knowledge about how we dressed and what the gender norms of 19th century China were, what is being done to ensure POC steampunk feel safe? Feel more than just tokens? Tony Hicks of Tinplate Studios said to me at GearCon, "sometimes, you just want to be." And sometimes, that being also means being able to talk about some of the dumb shit we experience and being understood for that, being comfortable that no, we're not alone.

Before you start bleating about how it's a multicultural world and ain't we all human and race doesn't matter and we should all be free to use different things from different cultures, let me reiterate once more: culture is more than just things. It's about people. And people of colour live in the still very racist system that dictates the discourse on what multiculturalism should be like. And thus multiculturalism is co-opted, not to begin critical conversations between peoples, but so white people can get their jollies off dressing like an exotic non-white person, eat weird foods, learn about foreign cultures, as a nifty thing for the day, without necessarily doing the hard work of confronting how difficult living in a multicultural world can be, when certain cultures are privileged over others.

And this needs to change.

Stuff that got cited in here:

Angela Davis. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture.

Sara Ahmed. The Promise of Happiness. Chapter 4.

Nancy Fraser. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition. Chapter 3.

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Beth Birdsall

2011-10-18T22:28:00.000-04:00

Beth Birdsall's main internet presence is at LiveJournal, and she brings to us the story “Journey’s End.”

A two-sentence summary:

In an alternate 1910, Chief Engineer Dolores Salas has spent her career working on sentient, aetherium-powered airships. When her airship’s time to die comes, Dolores agrees to accompany her into the unknown—but the sky contains more surprises than the certain death she thinks she’s sailing towards.

How did your characters come to be?

I wanted to explore a character who was blue-collar, from an immigrant background, and not an aristocratic officer from a privileged upbringing. Dolores is the child of Mexican immigrants, and a no-nonsense woman who’s spent her whole life working with her hands and navigating a world that may not be actively against her, but also isn’t set up for her success. For Mabel, her sort-of-potentially love interest, I wanted another working-class character, but one from a different background—she’s mixed-race, daughter of an ex-slave, from California—who grew up in a different setting, and had slightly different challenges in life.

Why this setting?

I wanted to do a steampunk take on a fantasy trope, and I settled on the idea of ships sailing into the west, and into the epilogue, and what happens when a character gets to live into her ‘epilogue.’ Airships were the logical choice. I didn’t want to rework an active war, and I didn’t have time to do as much research as I would have wanted to do a setting I didn't know as well as the US—but I definitely wanted to address the blue-collar side of the military that a lot of military-set history ignores. I also liked the slightly claustrophobic self-sufficiency of a vessel on a long voyage, and this version of airships let me play with that to an extreme.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

It’s a semi-accepted, semi-ignored subculture of Dolores's US Navy—basically, an officially ignored open secret. Women refer to it as being "old maids together" or "particular friends" or similar, but because the US military accepts women and forbids them to be pregnant or married while enlisted, there’s a large proportion of women who for various reasons aren't interested in heterosexual marriage. Some of them are asexual, or heterosexual women willing to postpone marriage in favor of a military career, but women who are interested in other women have pretty good odds in the military, and a subculture has grown up around that.

The civilian world varies a lot. In the town where Mabel grew up it’s fairly similar, except with less statistical assurance that the ladies around you may well be amenable.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

The science! *laughing* Both fun, and frustrating, which made it a really interesting challenge. The aetherium propulsion system is pure handwaving, of course, but I did a lot of work on figuring out whether what I was proposing for high-altitude life could actually kinda-sorta work.

The other funnest part doesn’t show up in the story in any detail, but it was designing a 1910 naval uniform for women.

A random ramble?

I don’t often listen to music when I'm writing, but nearly the entire time I was writing this story, I listened to Dougie Maclean’s “Ready for the Storm” on loop. When it comes up on my iTunes now, I still have to repeat it a few times before I can move on to another track. It’s habit, and it makes me think of Dolores. I’m very fond of her now!

Back from SteamCon!

2011-10-17T18:20:00.000-04:00

There is no con report yet because my brain is way too fried.

Highlights include Pablo of Aetherfest's near-mugging, a jellyfish family, music, and KW Jeter talking about leather and dog poop.

There are a ton of pictures. And this report will also get cross-posted to BeyondVictoriana.com too, so it don't make no nevermind to me where you read it first (I don't often check comments that-a-side, though).

I'd like to thank everybody who made it out to my 9am program items. I know that's a pretty early hour to be talking about heavy issues in steampunk, and those of ya'll who came out for "fun" just to "check it out", I really appreciate it. Also, thanks Russ for the bottle of wine; it made for a great way to continue the Social Issues Roundtable after we ran out of time!

If you liked the programming, feel free to contact the SteamCon programming committee to tell them to bring it back next year!

And if you just wanted to say hi on this blog now that we're all safely ensconced behind our computers, feel free to do so. I know some people find me kind of, um, intimidating in real life.

Or, you know, say nice things about stuff that happened during the panel, or bad things, I don't care, just let me know you're out there.

Steam-Powered II Roundtable: S.L. Knapp

2011-10-16T22:15:00.000-04:00

S.L. Knapp can be found cross-posting between LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, and she brings us a really cool set of answers about her story that features Cuba, “Amphitrite”

A two-sentence summary:

An engineer from newly-independent Cuba must recover her stolen submarine. While crossing the open ocean, she has just the plan to evade anyone who might try to claim her vessel.

How did your characters come to be?

I knew I wanted a submariner and a mermaid and had the basic plot structure laid out, but they really came into existence as I wrote the story. Two paragraphs in and I knew the sort of woman Consuelo was. I mentioned Amphitrite, and I knew that at age twenty, Consuelo had met this rough-around-the-edges older woman who taught her what’s what. Twenty years later, she does the same thing for the naive but earnest Aurelie.

Why this setting?

I don’t see much about Cuba in fiction and I wanted to put more out there (I’m also lazy and it required less research). I set the story a bit later than traditional steampunk, but the War of Independence was a fascinating time, especially for Cuban-American relations, and it’s fairly close to when my great-grandfather graduated from medical school and had female classmates. I figured a woman engineer would be historically believable. You know, if Cuba were building a fleet of super-subs.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

In the confines of the story, being queer isn’t that big a deal. That’s not historically accurate in larger society, but a lot of women flew under the radar this way—Consuelo’s an inventor and engineer, she’s probably a spinster being single and over 40, and nothing more is said. Consuelo knows what’s up, and that’s all that matters. I just wanted to set a story where being a lesbian is normalized, even if it isn’t in society.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

The submarines! I went a bit overboard with the Jules Verne-y fantastical elements but that’s the sort of universe I was hoping to evoke: a little more science-flavored magic than science itself. Can the machine work? Probably not. Do I care? No. It’s pretty in my head, just like the Nautilus. I mostly relied on my knowledge with sailboats to write it, and some reading up on historical submarines, which were mostly pedal or diesel-powered.

A random ramble?

My grandmother studied medicine during the Cuban revolution. She has stories about fights she’d have with the guard at a US hospital she worked at because “only doctors can park here” and seeing as she was a woman, she couldn’t possibly be a doctor. Whereas, in Cuba, her father’s class in medical school graduated three women (in the 1920s). According to my grandmother, a lot of women didn’t go into medicine, but there were really no institutional barriers to stop her from doing so if she wanted to like there were in the US. I found the disparity interesting, given how often I’m told that I come from a culture brimming with machismo and sexism by fellow Americans. I used to take it for granted that a given patriarchal society (especially in the West) behaves in similar ways to others—but the nuances that come up in the differences have been really interesting to me. So that colored my decision to set the story in Cuba, too, and how I wanted to frame some political relationships.

As an aside, gender norms re: occupations varies so much in different countries! In Malaysia, we're fairly evenly split in the IT field, so I was really surprised when I got to North America and found that there're so few women in IT. Mind-boggling.

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! C.S.E. Cooney

2011-10-14T16:01:00.000-04:00

C.S.E. Cooney, also Claire Cooney, lives at LiveJournal, and brings to us a piece reminding us of the source of steam power in C.S.E. Cooney on “The Canary of Candletown.”

A two-sentence summary:

A burnt-out revolutionary’s kindness awakens the passionate devotion of a young mining laborer. But the Candletown Company is careful to stomp out any flame ignited underground.

How did your characters come to be?

It started with the name Kanarien, which is the German for canary. I’ve always been haunted by the idea of sending a singing thing into the dark, then waiting for it to stop singing. And I really like the name Dagomar. I didn’t necessarily want two German characters, so I played with the idea of a girl growing up in the mines without a name, and also what it would mean, suddenly, to be given one by the first person to care about her.

Why this setting?

I share my morning commute with a very clever Belgian named Thomas. One day, we had this conversation:

Thomas: What are you reading?
Me: Steampunk’d. I have to write this story, and I'm trying to get a feel for the genre.
Thomas: What is steampunk?
Me: Still figuring it out, myself.
Thomas: (looking up the definition on his smart phone) Ah. I dislike the literature of the aristocracy. Where does steam come from?
Me: (getting goosebumps) Coal.
Thomas: Where does coal come from? Earth. Who digs it? The people. Children. This is the era when Dickens was writing Oliver Twist. Zola's Germinal...

It was at that moment I had an idea for a story that might have to do, rather than with the great inventions of air and industry that were possible because of coal, with the coal mines themselves.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

These characters are the lowest of the low. They’re so far down the social ladder, they’re underground. Nobody cares about them, or what they do, so long as they get their work done and don’t raise dust. They have no one and nothing else to care about than each other. They’re best friends and lovers and family—and none of that matters in a world where they are already invisible.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

I wrote mine at the same time, and in the same room, where Patty Templeton wrote her “Fruit Jar Drinkin’, Cheatin’ Heart Blues.” She was letting me sleep on her couch for the month of April, and she’d bring home these huge bags full of research material from the library. We were writing in sort of the same time period, in a generally similar geographical location, and we’d each discover these interesting (or sickening) things in our research and say to each other, “AAUGGH!!! If you don’t use that, girl, I’m gonna!”

So that was fabulous.

But then! Then, later, writer Delia Sherman offered out of the blue to beta-read my early draft. I don’t think I’d ever spent an hour on the phone talking about writing that blew my mind quite so far into the stratosphere. She has a way of making previously nebulous ideas diamond-clear. Her encouragement was incredibly heartening during the mire of the draft process.

Two fabulous things. Both were the funnest.

Whaaaat, a little under two weeks before Steam-Powered II comes out? How exciting! Didja get your order in yet?

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Rebecca Fraimow

2011-10-12T21:48:00.000-04:00

Rebecca Fraimow is also one of us dual-denizens of LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, and wrote the Mid-Eastern-inspired piece “Granada’s Library.”

A two-sentence summary:

In an alternate Emirate of Granada that never fell to Christian Spain, a great mechanized library has for centuries peacefully guarded the wisdom of three faiths. But as the spirit of the Enlightenment starts to reach Al-Andalus, Chief Curator Pilar—a woman who has her own secrets—finds herself at the center of a battle for the library's future.

How did your characters come to be?

I knew that I wanted to write about an established couple who were very secure and comfortable with each other, because that’s something I always want more of in fiction than I get. From that point, I started to develop Pilar and her lover Zainab, older women in positions of authority who know each other very well and can communicate with each other very well, and whose duties and responsibilities play an important role in their relationship.

Why this setting?

The golden age of al-Andalus provided an incredibly rich and exceptionally tolerant intellectual atmosphere for philosophical and scientific development, with scholars from all over the world taking inspiration from the work being done there—and that was circa the year 1000. Once I started to wonder what would have happened if the Reconquista had played out differently and that culture had lasted through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, it seemed to make perfect sense that al-Andalus would have managed to develop sophisticated clockwork technology before our Europe ever did!

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

I wanted my characters to feel comfortable in their sexuality without having to angst about it, so I set up the library as an almost entirely-female space in which the existence of homosexual relationships is a fairly open secret. Nobody in this context is going to particularly care if two librarians develop a “special friendship,” although it isn’t something they could be public about in the wider city.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

I have a total weakness for stories about THE REVOLUTION, so I had a lot of fun taking the kind of idealistic young revolutionary women that normally I would be all over in fiction, and then showing them from the perspective of older women with completely different priorities who are really uncomfortable with all these excitable teenagers running around trying to pull their world down around their ears!

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! A. Tuomala

2011-10-10T21:38:00.000-04:00

A. Tuomala has a novel, Erekos, from Candlemark & Gleam. Her Internet home is here, and her story featuring a Moroccan mercenary lady is “Dark Horse”:

A two-sentence summary:

The evening before her mercenary company departs for the Balkans, Suhailah al-Saghira bint-e-Azzam meets a desperate stranger: Prudence Crewe, who claims to be searching for her runaway husband. Before they’ve exchange three words, Suhailah knows that the steely-eyed Mrs. Crewe is trouble—but Suhailah has a taste for trouble, and she could never resist a woman with a secret.

How did your characters come to be?

I’ve been looking for a home for Suhailah for some time. I created her ship and crew over a year ago, when I thought I’d be writing a comic book about her captain; unfortunately, that project never panned out, and the Ebony Horse’s crew had to wait for another war. When I saw the call for submissions for Steam-Powered II, I thought, “Yes! Finally, a chance to bring out my Moroccan mercenaries again!” The engineer Suhailah was always my favorite, with her keen mechanical mind and her need to uncover secrets. I put together Prudence Crewe as a foil for Suhailah—someone who would engage her curiosity and make her fierce intelligence work. I got a stunning James Bond of a woman for my trouble, and I couldn’t be happier.

Why this setting?

I’m terribly fascinated by 19th century Balkan warfare; if you check who allied with whom at any point in the drawn-out slugfest between Russia and Turkey, you could get a reasonable idea of European politics in the day. I knew when I started this story that I wanted to play with those shifting alliances in an urban, commercial space—a space as potentially potent in the steampunk imagination as Victorian London (but alas, woefully underused!). For me, Istanbul was that space: a commercial hub mediating between numerous confluent cultures, modern and urban and ready for war.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

“Dark Horse” takes place in a kind of alternate history and culture, like many other steampunk works; in this alternate Istanbul, I’ve treated lesbianism as largely a non-issue when it occurs in private, sex-segregated spaces. Female mercenaries make coarse jokes about it in coffee houses, after they’ve driven out the people who usually drink there, and Suhailah feels comfortable making an advance to a stranger in that enclosed space. Part of what thrills Suhailah about Prudence, though, is how brazen they can be together—kissing in the market, of all places! I wish I’d devoted more time to this aspect in the story, because lesbianism is an important cultural phenomenon as well as an interpersonal one.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

I’m a huge language geek, so I really enjoyed playing with Istanbul as a multilingual space. It was also fantastic devising Mr. and Mrs. Crewe’s coded messages, which was a bit like piecing together a language of my own from mythological and literary references.

Little over two weeks to Steam-Powered II's release! Get yer orders in!

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Nicole Kornher-Stace

2011-10-08T17:27:00.000-04:00

Nicole Kornher-Stace, besides having an impossible name, has an actually functioning website complete with bibliography and stuff, as well as LiveJournal. I don't know if this needs saying, but LiveJournal is still cooler than Facebook, ya'll. She wrote “Deal,” another steampunk western.

A two-sentence summary:

Alt-western silver-mining tall tale. Midwife vs. Pinkertons!

How did your characters come to be?

I don’t remember when or how I realized I wanted my narrator to be a midwife. I know I wanted her to be a Strong Female Character who specialized in something that’s traditionally very much women's work. I don’t see enough of those so I thought I’d try making my own. As for Deal, she’s a rabble-rouser and a would-be revolutionary because those tend to crop up in almost everything I write. Together they fight crime. Not really. But they’re fantastic at pissing off the Pinks.

Why this setting?

Well, earlier this year, I wrote a poem in a similarish setting/voice (“The Witch’s Heart” in Issue 21 of Apex) and had an absurd amount of fun with it. I wanted to get back in there and play a bit more. Also, Claire Cooney read my mind and reminded me—though she hadn’t known—that I’d always wanted to write a Western. And then I got to thinking how much fun it would be to write a Western steampunk story using traditional tall tales as a framing device. Somewhere along the line, the story decided it wanted to take place in a failing silver mining camp. After I got all that squared away, the rest pretty much wrote itself.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

The story takes place in an alternative California in the late 1800s, where it seems that what with race, gender, and class issues running high and none-too-subtly, lesbians were probably lumped in with the rest as “secondary” citizens and didn't really stand out as much more or less “inferior.” To write “Deal,” I did a lot of research into the time period in that part of the country and didn’t really come across anything suggesting otherwise. I’ve been meaning to read more into this topic, actually—I’m curious as to what the actual answer for real!California might have been, but I couldn’t find much on it at the time. Now I’m extra-curious.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

Oddly, there was nothing frustrating about writing this one. I loved playing with the narrator’s voice, with the language I picked up in my research of 19th century mining towns, with writing my own tall tales. Really, it was the most fun I’ve probably ever had writing anything ever. I hope it shows!

Steampunk is a Subculture, not Escape

2011-10-06T23:43:00.000-04:00

Whenever people talk about steampunk as "an escape," I used to snarfle out loud. Of course I'm usually reading such sentiments, so my obnoxious laughter is usually kept to myself, and in offline contexts, I strain a smile. I don't really want to ruin anybody's fun, you know?

I've said it before, and I've said it again, there's something very apt about the term "subculture," which we should be paying attention to. It means that steampunk is a part of a larger culture. I've yet to hear steampunk referred to as "counter-culture," and I suspect the reason runs along the lines of how we don't wanna end up vilified like the goths, or we don't want to be seen like those angry punks. Not that all of us are averse this, of course.

I could go on with theory on how steampunk is not counter-cultural (check out, for example, Brian Ziff and Pratima Rao's anthology Borrowed Power: essays on cultural appropriation), but I want to keep to the community aspect of steampunk for the moment and speak to concerns that I suspect many people aren't thinking about when they say, "steampunk is an escape."

Earlier this year, a friend of mine was kept in a room against her own will. This is a complex situation that continued with an escalating relationship over several months, and ending with him cutting her off completely, leaving her heartbroken. She calls it "coercion," so that is the term I'm going to use. The basic facts remain the same: a man using his physical strength and charm to keep a woman from leaving, even though she has clearly stated "no". Both of them met through steampunk. Arguably both of them have gained some fame in the North American steampunk world.

And more recently, another friend, a Jewess, whom some of you may known as Steampunk Emma Goldman, was at a steampunk event, and some dude wandered around in a dieselpunk outfit, with the Nazi swastika on display. Nazi symbolism remains illegal in Germany to this day, for a very good reason. Just because the Holocaust happened some 60 years ago doesn't make it irrelevant, and it doesn't make the use of Nazi symbols any cuter. It is still a racist symbol (doubly so, since Hitler adapted the symbol from other religions, mostly Asian, where it is a symbol a peace and the sun). She had to explain to this clueless man why it was problematic; he was apologetic, but then some other woman bore down on my friend to tell her off, that dude had a right to wear whatever he wants to wear.

And of course ya'll know my beef with Nova Albion.

I'm not interested in resting on resentment; I'm interested in addressing this idea of steampunk "as an escape".

A woman doesn't escape being a woman wherever she goes. She lives in danger of being raped, wherever she is, because no one can ever tell when there is a rapist present. She lives in danger of sexual and emotional predator. This danger is so ubiquitous we don't even notice it anymore; we sort of just assume if it happens, it happens. If a guy makes a pass at us that makes us feel uncomfortable, we're told that it's just a little thing. If a guy corners us, he's just really into us, and trying to be friendly. If a guy rapes us, it was a misunderstanding. We have been conditioned to accept that this is the natural way of things, and there is no shortage of mansplainers there to pontifate on how we are wrong, if we express our discomfort.

Similarly, a racialized person lives in danger of being ignored, dismissed, demeaned, or outright abused. We can count on there being That One Bigot out there to ruin our day, at some point. We can then count on our friends to dismiss this moment as "just a jerk" or "not really important" or "how do you know he really meant to be racist?" followed by well-meaning encouragement to "let it go." This is wearisome on our psyches; it erodes our spirit to fight back. It is, in fact, a form of violence inflicted on us by a racist society. But we learn early on that we are supposed to pretend this is the natural way of things, and if we disagree, there will be someone, somewhere, who will be sure to tell us otherwise.

This doesn't even go into issues of disability and whoa we got some issues here, okay.

So, an escape? Really?

I say steampunk is a subculture, because we are made out of members from a larger mainstream society. Our perceptions and perspectives are formed and informed by the larger culture. The way we have shaped steampunk is also in response to what we see in the world at large. And when we participate in steampunk, we bring what we have learned.

No one has a natural filter for racism, and no one can truly know how complicit they are in racism. No matter how much you defend yourself as having worked in such-and-such organization, no matter how varied your background, you cannot judge yourself to be perfectly harmless.

And you know what? It's okay to not be perfectly harmless. I'm pretty sure I trigger someone every so often, because I swear, and I use harsh language, and I talk about experiences that are intensely traumatic for some of us. And sometimes they cannot choose to avoid this.

But it is deeply disingenuous, and downright dismissive, to claim that steampunk is an escape, and thus any concerns we may have from the larger world would be irrelevant in steampunk. Steampunk as subculture requires participation, of human beings. We as human beings are shaped by the world that is not steampunk.

The steampunk subculture cannot offer guarantees that people will keep their biases and prejudices out of their performance in steampunk. In fact, the steampunk subculture offers avenues for such biases and prejudices to play out, hidden under a veneer of play-acting.

When I see folks claiming that steampunk is an escape, I often wonder, escape from what? Especially those who are clearly white and middle-class. What is so terrible about your life that you need an escape? What are you escaping from?

It is telling that we use the term "escape" for what appears to be the doldrums of daily life, but we rarely speak about the actual little violences that happen day after day to so many people. It is even more telling when we are indulging in a deeply-historical exercise that could lead to understanding how these violence remain in place, what has changed in how they manifest, what could be better, under the pretext that "it's all better now, look how awful it was then!"

If you say something like this? You're just reproducing shit we already hear in "real life". You are enacting the same oppressive structures, the same problematic discourse that perpetuates the problems we face on a daily basis.

In short, you foreclose "escape" for many people in steampunk.

There are ways to deal with this, of course, but let's start by really thinking what we mean by the word "escape."

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Shveta Thakrar!

2011-10-06T17:06:00.000-04:00

Shveta lives on LiveJournal, and her story is “Not The Moon But The Stars.”

A two-sentence summary:

What would’ve happened if Buddha had never become Buddha? In its way, it’s a tale of first contact.

How did your characters come to be?

I was gazing up at the full moon as I drove home from work one night last fall, and the thought struck me how much it looked like a silvery pendulum at rest. Not long after, I typed out that image, and before I knew it, I was writing about a jeweller who loved the moon and wanted to recreate it in her own style. Her lover soon followed, unintentionally bringing the seeds of conflict with her.

Why this setting?

Siddhartha Gautama, the man who didn’t become Buddha, is very much a product of his world. Besides, ancient Nepal seems like it would have been an exciting place to be, especially when you bring in steampunk technology.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

Definitely accepted. I wanted to write a story where sexual orientation wasn’t an issue, so the characters, who were already in a loving relationship, could go on to have rollicking adventures, solve mysteries, save the world, and all that good stuff.

Also, even if Siddhartha didn’t go on to become Buddha, I imagined he would still be a wise and compassionate man, so his kingdom should reflect that in its acceptance and empathy. (Whether that’s actually the case or not, well, you’ll have to read the story to find out!)

What was the funnest, or most 'hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

I’ll go with option B. Oh, wow, the characters came so naturally, but trying to get the plot together was something else. It sprawled in all directions, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I was seriously close to tearing out my hair; just ask my critique partners! But somehow, after much gnashing of teeth, I eventually found the story’s heart and built it into a more coherent foundation, embellishing from there. (My critique partners could not be more grateful that they don’t have to hear about this anymore.)

For your dignity's sake, do NOT confuse her with Shweta Narayan, who was in the first Steam-Powered anthology! To see how different their stories are, you can get the first anthology here, and pre-order the second here.

The Steampunk Postcolonialist at SteamCon

2011-10-04T22:46:00.000-04:00

Yes, folks, I will indeed be attending SteamCon III. I'm not crazy about how they define steampunk (really? "Victorian science-fiction"? Really?) but since it's the biggest one out West, I figure I should give it a go. On the way there, I'll be stopping by San Francisco to visit Roget Ratchford, whom I met at Nova Albion, and will spend Monday, Oct 10, swanning around San Fran like a tourist. If anybody has any ideas for me, or would like to hang out that day, let me know! Then it's off to Seattle to visit Nisi Shawl, who will be in Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Nisi is one of my heroes and I'm glad to be sharing a TOC with her!

So! Here's my nefarious itinerary for SteamCon:

Friday, 6pm - 7pm, Regency B - Cheng I Sao, Queen of the (pre-)Steampunk Pirates, moderating Beth Wade and Margo Loes. We'll be discussing this legendary lady, starting from some generalities, to historical specifics. Beth will provide some comparisons to show how awesome she is. We'll finish with some discussion on how to include her into your steampunk narratives. SANS FAIL.

Friday, 8pm, Sepiachord Music Lounge - Performance by Unwoman. This will then devolve into absinthe tasting and general alcoholic socializing. I will have a bottle of Kittling Ridge ice wine and brandy on me. Feel free to ask for a sip, because I ain't finishing that on my own.

Saturday, 9am - 11am, Grand Ballroom J - Steam Around the World: Steampunk Beyond Victoriana. A presentation, which some of ya'll may be familiar with. But I'll be glad to see some familiar faces!

Saturday, 2pm - 3.30pm - Amphitrite Annual Tea. I'm there to watch Erica, really. I missed all her solo performances at GearCon so I'm compensating.

Saturday, 9pm - Nautilus Concert. Well, yeah fuck yeah I'm going to get my dance on.

Sunday, 9am - 11am, Regency B - Envisioning a Better Steam Society: Social Issues in Steampunk. This is a roundtable discussion. Some of ya'll know what this is, feel free to come again. =) I'll be a bit more focused this time, with a specific frame for racial issues, because I hear Seattle is another Whitelandia, and sounds like ya'll could use some practice.

Sunday, 1pm - 2pm, Grand Ballroom J - Evolution of Steampunk, moderating K.W. Jeter. I haven't actually talked to the man yet, so I have no idea what will go down, but generally, what the title says.

I leave for the airport around 4pm, because I'm very tetchy about timing.

See you there!

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Zen Cho

2011-10-04T16:30:00.000-04:00

Zen Cho is the other Malaysian writer in this anthology. She's based in the UK, is a loyar (as we say) by trade, and her work's appeared in Strange Horizons and Expanded Horizons. She can be found on LiveJournal, Dreamwidth and Twitter. Her story is “The Terracotta Bride.”

A two-sentence summary:

Siew Tsin died young and has been trying to avoid surprises ever since. But her hopes for a quiet death are destroyed when her husband brings home a new wife—a beautiful terracotta automaton who comes with secrets that may overturn the order of the universe.

How did your characters come to be?

They arose naturally from the setting. The viewpoint character being Chinese Malaysian was a bit of a departure from that setting, but I like to include Malaysian characters in my stories where I can.

Why this setting?

Since I first encountered Eileen Chang's short stories, I've been wanting to write an elegant, tragic story about glamorous Hong Kong women leading miserable lives poisoned by family and love. Plus, robots! I can’t remember how Hong Kong morphed into a version of the Chinese afterlife plucked from TVB series and a Singaporean amusement park, but it probably proves that I’m not very good at being Eileen Chang.

The great thing about working off a vision of the afterlife derived from Hong Kong TV is that it allows for deliberate anachronism, which is very steampunk if you think about it.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

Lesbianism is marginal, but not unacknowledged. I had the idea of a romance between wives before I read Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life, but in it, he describes how his wife seeks to arrange for a singsong girl to be his concubine because she’s in love with the girl herself. The point is made by a reference to “Cherishing the Fragrant Companion,” a Qing era play by Li Yu about a married woman who successfully conspires to have her husband marry her female lover so they can be together. (This is still performed as an opera, the Fragrant Companion.) So it’s obviously a bit of a cliché!

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

Nailing down the terrifying but vague childhood recollections I had of the Chinese hell (thank you, Haw Par Villa) by research. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think conversion might not be such a bad idea. At least the Christian hell only features one pit of flame...

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Patty Templeton

2011-10-02T20:46:00.000-04:00

Patty, like so many of us awesome people, can be found on LiveJournal and Tumblr. She contributed the steampunk western “Fruit Jar Drinkin’, Cheatin’ Heart Blues” to the anthology!

A two-sentence summary:

Balma Walker is plain tired of Cazy Tipple’s cheating, especially now that it’s interfering with business. The moonshine ain’t gonna make itself and who has time to feud with ex-lovers, current sheriffs and make ends meet?

How did your characters come to be?

Once I name someone, I can think clearly about them. I start to see their personality form on the page. I wanted women who, even for their opposite natures, found solace in one another. Balma Walker became a sturdy, town educated woman and Cazy Tipple, a hard drinking rake.

Why this setting?

My father’s from Harlan, Kentucky and it’s a setting that I haven't written much in, but have plenty more to spill about.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

This story is set in an alternate 1914 Kentucky. People live and let live. Folks think more on Balma and Cazy’s moonshine than they do on their bedroom. Unfortunately, what is acceptable to most, doesn’t mean acceptable to all. The town sheriff has an idiotic bone to pick with Cazy about his daughter... who is not Balma.

What was the funnest or hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

The best part of writing for me is always the research. This round I was able to call my dad and jaw for an hour. He told me piles of moonshine tales from when he was a kid in the ‘50s in Kentucky. I still need to write a few stories inspired from that conversation, like the drunken plane crash or the juke joint brawl or the tree-climbing spy.

The next best thing about writing Balma and Cazy's story was that C.S.E. Cooney* was sleeping on my couch while I was writing it. It was wonderful to live with another writer, not only to keep me on task, but to share in each other’s creative processes. Now if only we could actually make time to write the John Henry story we thought up while researching our Steam-Powered stories...

*C.S.E Cooney is ALSO in this anthology. Keep an eye out for her answers in the upcoming days!

Theory Adventures: Civility and Colonialism

2011-10-02T18:09:00.000-04:00

I know there should be more of substance but right now I'm catching up on theory I didn't get to read. I'm currently reading Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture, wherein he talks about mimicry and hybridity.

And this line caught my eye:

... at the same time as the questions of cultural difference emerged in the colonial text, discourses of civility were defining the doubling moment of the emergence of Western modernity. Thus, the political and theoretical genealogy of modernity lies not only in the origins of the idea of civility, but in this history of the colonial moment. (46)

Note that the concept of "cultural difference" is different from "diversity"--cultural difference refers to the sense that many philosophers and theorists have that apart from their subject position in the West, there is an Other space, against which they compare their own civilizations to. It's very much tied to how we construct identity by contrasting ourselves to something different from ourselves.

The reason why this line in particular caught my eye is because there is a sentiment I see every so often in steampunk conversations, usually by some well-meaning white person, waxing poetic about how the Victorian era was so refined, so polite and well-mannered, and part of the draw of steampunk is to bring those good manners back.

Because let's face it, the Victorians as a civilization were terribly ill-mannered. I would consider stomping yourselves all over other people's homes and taking their resources, forcing them to surrender their crops so they can buy it back from you at high prices, and finding excuses to launch an attack because they wouldn't let you sell your stuff on their shores by encouraging the use of poison to be very, very bad manners.

When I took an etiquette class, I was taught that etiquette's more than just knowing how to use the right kind of spoon... it's about making the people around you comfortable. And therefore, if someone next to you isn't Using the Right Spoon, it's not really a faux pas. Those are things we can overlook.

And there is a lot to recommend of a way of life that encourages poise, graciousness, and wonderful clothing, a culture that encourages articulation and reading, as well as enterprise. But let's not forget that often, the price of this graciousness is that someone else must be uncouth so you have a yardstick for measurement, someone else must do all the labourious work so you can focus on your reading and writing.

Understanding where we get this idealization of Victoriana from, and understanding what we elide so we can believe in those ideals, is really important. We got many of our ideals of modernity, civility, and prosperity on the back of colonialism, land appropriation, cultural genocide.

Yes, be well-mannered! But remember, good manners should be more than just your individual gracefulness and more than how you perform it. We need to think about what we mean by good manners, and who that serves, and why. We need to think about where we learn about good manners from, and from who, and what we do with this knowledge.

Caricature and Sense

2011-10-01T20:53:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I like to turn my Judgey McJudgerson eye on people's costumes, and judge them. I try not to do this very often because usually it ends up with me counting the ways a costume is wrong, trying to balance them with what is right, and then getting pissed off anyway.

And yes, it is true, there are definitely some costumes out there which do not piss me off.

I was thinking about two particular costumes while considering what my own lines are (but if you want a nice comprehensive list on whether or not you should do this outfit you really want to do, Thursday of the Sadness of Pencils has a pretty good list). I've mentioned them before, too: during Nova Albion, I saw a terrible outfit which appeared to consist of disparate Random Asian Things pulled together into some semblance of a peacock-themed outfit. The other is a traveler's outfit at GearCon.

What's the main difference?

The first outfit, though it looks like a lot of love has gone into it, doesn't make sense. In no historical period would anybody be wearing a giant fan at their backside to approximate a peacock that I can think of. Staring at it, I couldn't place what or where this person is supposed to be, except at some a-historical space where one can apparently pull random shit together.

Outfits, to me, generally ought to have some sort of sense, even if it's a bit of a stretch. Even if it means really stretching. This Cthulhu bustle, for example, is a bit of a stretch. But you can tell where it comes from: Lovecraftian lore, combined with a Victoriana-inspired outfit.

The fact that outfits really should have sense is even more imperative when you're not using an outfit from your culture. And I really wish people had more of an explanation for why they're doing it besides "I love this [usually non-white] culture." I get it if you're not white and you're wearing white fashions, because assimilation and the imposition of white culture has been pretty widespread. That's what colonialism is all about. But the only reason I can ever think of, for white people using non-white cultures, is this sense of entitlement that's so often on display: "I SHOULD be able to!" Cue racist bullshit about post-racism, culture-belonging-to-anybody, you're-racist-for-noticing-racism-and-harshing-our-squee.

There are totally outfits that make sense, even when non-white on white bodies.

Dude I met at GearCon, for example? His was a traveler's outfit. It was a plain white shirt, and a shawl, and loose trousers, and a pointy straw hat. I really liked it. Why? Because it made sense. It is entirely possible that a white dude would be traveling in Asia, and he'd adapt these random things, which have some goddamn function, by the way, not like a bustle in the shape of a giant fan, into a workable outfit for traveling. It's comfortable, looks sturdy to protect against the elements, and even though I can't exactly place the outfit historically, it looks like something that belongs on the Silk Road. It looks like something an actual traveler would wear.

I've only been able to articulate this because other people have already done it, of course. Monique Poirier recently took an attempted NDN steampunk cosplay to task for its appropriation:

If you want to dress as a character who wears NDN attire, be prepared to have a backstory that explains why you, a white person, are wearing it (please not ‘My character was adopted into X tribe!’ either as a child or later in life or through marriage when they fell in love with a Badass Native/Chief’s Beautiful Daughter - that is the most overplayed Mighty Whitey bullshit fantasy ever and for fuck’s sakewhen, when, WHEN will white people get tired of it? I cannot tell you how many white people I have heard expound unto me thier Dances With Wolves or Little Big Man or Every Third Romance Novel With NDNs In It backstory. Shit gets old, and you do not have enough we-sha-sha.). Do some historical study on what characters might be likely to do this (fur trappers and prospectors come immediately to mind). Know that some things are never, ever ok to wear (war paint, feathered headdresses, ESPECIALLY war bonnets, specific religious symbols, etc.) and that evern of you think you’ve done all your homeworks, NDN people might still be pissed at you and that they are right to be so. If you’re not willing to do this, to take these extra steps, then just don’t do it.
Stop and think about why you even want to.

Note the bit about fur trappers and prospectors. Those were real people, who interacted a lot with NDNs and therefore, it makes sense that they would be wearing some NDN attire as a result. When people bleat about "cultural exchange", I doubt they're actually thinking about situations like this; too often, I get a sense of "cultural exchange" being "I SHOULD be able to!"

The first outfit, because it makes no historical sense, nor even functional sense, ends up being a caricature of Asian Things, drawing on everything that looks Possibly Asian to create an image that Looks Asian, but doesn't actually say anything besides the fact that this person that the wherewithal to buy Asian-Looking-Things. And you know what? White people pulling random Asian-looking shit together is part of white privilege. It reminds me that a white person can do this and they can take it off later and not suffer for it; that it's only a costume, and thus meaningless when taken apart.

I don't even trust that GearCon dude did homework or has a profound sense of respect for Asian cultures. I can't read that from his outfit. What I can read is that it's historically-logical that a white person in Asia would be wearing such an outfit, and that signifies a story. And fine, white Orientalists traveling the depths of Asia, that's not a new story either. But it's a story that potentially engages with Asia and Asians, as a fellow human being, not as a consumer.

And that makes a real difference in how I'm going to feel about an outfit.

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Jeannelle Fereira

2011-09-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

Jeannelle Fereira has been published most recently in Not One Of Us #44 and Stone Telling #4, and wrote “A Thousand Mills Lofts Gray” in this anthology.

A two-sentence summary:

Polly Clarke can buy anything she wants; Rachel Isaacson must work for everything she gets. The abstracts—optimism, hope, romance—they have to create for themselves.

How did your characters come to be?

Rachel and Polly’s names—and the names of Rachel's parents and siblings, and their neighborhood—came from a 1910 census. I thought about Rachel first: what kind of young woman would live in this building, with her parents and younger siblings, unmarried at about 23? I was fairly sure what sort of job she would have and how she would fill her scant leisure time; then I just needed a love interest who was a near-polar opposite.

Why this setting?

1910 in New York had very clearly delineated haves and have-nots. Introducing subtly advanced tech to the time period let me play with class issues, immigration, workers' rights, and extremely intricate costuming.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

Well, Polly Clarke is from Boston, home of the Boston Marriage! And the lower east side of New York was a strange combination of tradition-bound immigrants with tightly stratified paths in life, and the “anything goes!” world of the populist Yiddish-language theatres. Both of my main characters have been exposed to underground gay culture, and Polly, who’s older, has had a long-term relationship.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing about writing this story?

The most fun/challenging aspect was deciding what kind of tech would find a home in what parts of Steampunk New York. Everything comes to New York first, right? But what advancements are experienced by a community who can’t really afford them, even when the innovations are taking center stage a few blocks away?

(If ya'll didn't know what a Boston Marriage was, I didn't either until I read her answers and looked it up. The more you know! See, steampunk can be so educational!)

(Don't forget to pre-order!)

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Stephanie Lai

2011-09-28T20:20:00.000-04:00

Stephanie Lai is one of my fellow Malaysians, which kind of psyches me out! In this anthology, she wrote “One Last Interruption Before We Begin.” You can find Stephanie on Dreamwidth or on Tumblr.

A two-sentence summary:

In post-Merdeka Malaysia, Shu Ping bustles through her life, drawn to a life of adventure but unsure if it’s what she really wants.

How did your characters come to be?

Shu Ping came first, because I love turning points and Chinese-Malaysian characters. Everyone else came after, a natural flow of people she might have known.

Why this setting?

I first created this universe in my short story The Last Rickshaw. Malaysian steampunk (and South East Asian steampunk in general) is not super common, and once I encountered it, I was hooked. I love expanding this universe, and every story is like a love letter to the island of Penang. It is a setting I enjoy revisiting.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

Shu Ping herself feels a need to hide her lesbianism, a reflection of older laws and colonial attitudes flowing through the setting. In a way, her story is one of working out which bits of herself she can put forward, and how she chooses to do so is somewhat political, too.

What was the funnest, or most hair-tearingly frustrating thing in writing your piece?

I loved it all, for reals. My favourite bit was the creation of the MR, a made up building functioning as a stand-in for the building I really wanted to lovingly describe to the world, but which wasn't built until decades after my story was set. I hope other Malaysians will be able to guess the building.

As a friendly reminder, Steam-Powered II comes out October 26th! Getcher pre-orders thru JoSelle Vanderhooft!

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Sean Holland

2011-09-26T20:12:00.000-04:00

First writer in this series is Sean Holland. He runs the Sea of Stars resource site, an RPG setting which you can find out all about here. His story is “Playing Chess in New Persepolis.”

A two-sentence summary: A young and now broke mechaniker enters her mechanical chess set in the yearly competition hosted by the Persian Shah. There she finds that chess is only one of the games being played.

How did your characters come to be?

I wanted a Dutch main character, and so she is. The supporting cast just sort of appeared, mostly a microcosm of Europe in this reality with a few characters from the Americas and Asia.

Why this particular setting?

It really just sort of fell out of my head, I needed a story quickly and this is what came out. Persia/Iran is one of those places that has always been important in the world but often ignored in the West, though, sadly, it is mostly a backdrop to the story.

You’re in an antho of lesbian steampunk stories. Obviously you are writing about lesbians. How does lesbianism fit in your setting?

Skilled mechaniker are rare and valuable so are given some leeway, but period mores still dominate.

What was the funnest, or hair-tearingly frustrating thing about the writing process?

Realizing at the end of writing and re-writing the story and multiple revisions, that the main character’s first name is never mentioned.

A random ramble?

JoSelle keep pushing me to add more and more politics to the story, so now I have a twisting little political map of that world floating around in my head.

Steam-Powered II Roundtable! Editor JoSelle Vanderhooft

2011-09-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

So! Remember when I said I'd start a series of Steam-Powered II writers answering a set of questions each about their stories? I thought it would be a fine idea to start this off with the fabulous editor herself, JoSelle Vanderhooft, answering a few questions on this series in general:

So tell us about your feelings for this anthology!

This is such a strong and diverse collection of steampunk stories, with tales set in India, Malaysia, Turkey, China, Persia, Africa, and all over the United States. I'm deeply honored to have been able to assemble it.

So why, specifically, lesbians?

The obvious answer is that I’m a bisexual who is oriented almost entirely towards women--a 5 on the Kinsey Scale, if anyone wants me to be more specific. I love writing and reading about lesbian and bisexual women, and this interest informs my editing. But obvious answers are usually boring and not entirely accurate.

Although lesbians, bisexuals, gay men and transgender people are often viewed as one political movement, the letters in the abbreviation LGBT are not equally represented in the U.S.’ political landscape or the global political landscape. This is also true in publishing. Right now, it’s easier than it has been previously to find novels about gay men, thanks to things like the advent of m/m romance—though, of course, the debate about appropriation and misrepresentation of gay men’s lives in this genre has been going on for quite some time. That said, LGBT people are still underrepresented in every area of publishing, and queer people who are not cisgender men especially so. I want there to be more fantasy, science fiction, and horror out there for lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, genderqueer people, and everyone else who fits under the queer umbrella but not neatly into LGBT. A lesbian steampunk anthology is just one way to do this.

What trends have you noticed in steampunk? How has it, or has it not, translated into the submissions for this anthology?

Well, a caveat first: I spend a lot of my time these days writing, reviewing, and editing, and my leisure reading time is not what it used to be even a year ago. So I'm afraid that my answer is not going to be very representative.

That said. A lot of the steampunk I have been reading has been taking a lot of chances with the genre, by blending it with other genres (steampunk and noir seems to be gaining in popularity, and I couldn't be happier with that!), or by being more willing to wrestle with or at least examine steampunk beyond the aesthetic and concerns of upper-class Victorian England. For example, I recently attended Armadillo Con, an excellent annual SF/F convention held in Austin, TX every summer. Here I was fortunate enough to be placed on a panel about steampunk and fashion, where my fellow panelists included another author and three people involved in designing costumes and jewelry. We spent most of our time discussing not how awesome corsets, goggles, and gears are—though make no mistake, they are awesome—but such things as the clothes that lower, working, and middle class Victorians wore, how steampunk costuming has moved towards multiculturalism, and how few design boundaries steampunk actually can have. It was very refreshing and not something I expected to happen.

All of this said, I’m unsure whether Steam-Powered is, at least so far, an accurate scion of steampunk writing in general. I do my best to solicit submissions that involve perspectives that don't get a lot of attention in most areas of publishing—women of color, women living with disabilities, women who don’t come from Christian backgrounds, poor/working class women, trans women (yes, by the way, I do want stories about lesbian trans women, but so far I have not received any!). Consequently, many of the submissions I receive are from writers who are either from these underrepresented parts of the human family, or who are interested in seeing publishing become more diverse. So while the submissions are about what I expect them to be given the guidelines I put out there at this point I don't know how much I'm fitting into a trend or bucking it.

You’ve mentioned before that the Steam-Powered series will be continued for as long as you can manage it. Congratulations on the annual contract from Torquere! Do you feel this series fills in any significant gaps in steampunk, or genre fiction in general?

Why thank you! I’m thrilled that it is a series and look forward to doing many, many more volumes. For the reasons I said above, I hope that it is filling a need for readers and writers who don't often see stories about themselves in print or get to print stories about themselves. I hope I’m doing well in my selection choices on that front. As for whether or not Steam-Powered is filling significant gaps, I think that it is certainly contributing towards doing so, but of course no single book, story, or anthology can really fill a gap. It takes a movement to do that.

What are your hopes for this series?

That it can be part of such a movement consistently! And that the writers who appear between its covers go on to get lots and lots of Year’s Best nominations and reprints. It’s their house ultimately; I just polish the furniture.

You can pre-order your copy of Steam-Powered II directly from JoSelle herself by emailing her. Her official website is here, but you can also find her on Twitter, LiveJournal, or Facebook.

The Steam-Powered II Roundtable!

2011-09-23T21:39:00.000-04:00

It starts tomorrow! I just wanted to warn ya'll. Over the next few weeks, every two days there will be a new author interview, everybody answering pretty much the same questions. You can totally ask the authors any question you like in comments (please remember comment moderation is turned on after 7 days) as long as you are Not-An-Asshole-and/or-Creepy. You can leave squeez and comments, you can link at will, and you can also repost content, so long as you link back to the author in some form (posts will have links to author websites).

I hope ya'll enjoy the posts, and will look forward to your further questions and comments!

The Steampunk Postcolonialist Out Of School!

2011-09-20T21:45:00.000-04:00

Hallo readers! All three of you who are still with me, that is.

Guess what! I've finished my M.A. Major Research Project! The final product is a cool 17,000 word thingum, entitled "Towards Chromatic Chronologies: Using the Steampunk Aesthetic for Postcolonial Purposes" in which I tear apart S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers (I got a lotta mileage outta that one), and to some extent Cherie Priest's Dreadnought, analyze the shit out of Karin Lowachee's Gaslight Dogs, and tease out the awesome of N.K. Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine" all in the name of getting a degree. I handed this in on the 15th, and since then, I've read and finished 3 books, written a poem, and attempted arranging my apartment into some form of livable space.

So! That means since I am currently gainfully unemployed, it is back to business blogging about postcolonialism and steampunk, while I scribble up application forms for PhD programs (anybody want to rec me schools, I'd be much obliged), write new fiction, study for the GREs, and generally figure out what to do for the next year or so.

Within the next few ~~weeks~~ months you can expect the following:

- Steam-Powered II authors answering a set of questions I posed to them, one by one, day by day, after Tor.com's Steampunk Week, and ya'll can mosey in and ask them more questions if you so please;

- a review of Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain. I am not convinced it is steampunk, but I am convinced it is an awesome book with all the cultural specificity that steampunk ought to have;

- a recap and review of Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, because I just got GOLIATH today after much gnashing of teeth since everybody else and their dog seemed to have it;

- further gnashing of teeth at not being able to attend TGNESE, since everybody and their dog seems to have attended it;

- interviews with various steampunks of colour of my acquaintance. If you are / know a steampunk of colour who would like to be interviewed about your radical awesome POCness in steampunk, feel free to get in touch;

- con reports (I appear to be attending SteamCon, and perhaps TeslaCon. If you'd like me to appear at yours, you know the drill);

AND various rants and raves and thinky thoughts I've been having for the last few months with just no motivation / time to write them down. Get prepped; they're angry as all get-out.

It's good to be back, Internet!

We Interrupt Very Srs Blog Bzns to Bring you Squeez! Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories

2011-08-03T11:14:00.000-04:00

I'm very pleased to announce that I'll be sharing a table of contents with some very excellent writers for Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories!

Introduction: Kevin Steil (of Airship Ambassador)

"Journey's End," by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall

"Amphitrite," by S.L. Knapp

"In the Heart of Yellow Mountain," by Jaymee Goh

"Playing Chess in New Persepolis," by Sean Holland

"A Thousand Mill Lofts Gray," by Jeannelle Ferreira

"Dark Horse," by A.M. Tuomala

"The Return of Cherie," by Nisi Shawl

"One Last Interruption before We Begin," by Stephanie Lai

"Selin That Has Grown in the Desert," by Alex Dally MacFarlane

"Granada's Library," by Rebecca Fraimow

"The Canary of Candletown," by C.S.E. Cooney

"Fruit Jar Drinkin', Cheatin' Heart Blues," by Patty Templeton

"Deal," by Nicole Kornher-Stace

"Not the Moon but the Stars," by Shveta Thakrar

"The Terracotta Bride," by Zen Cho

Article/Afterword: "Winding Down the House: Taking the Steam out of Steampunk," by Amal El-Mohtar

Some other words:

I'm really excited to have Kevin introduce this anthology, since it makes more sense to have a queer person introduce a queer steampunk anthology.

Nisi Shawl's story is set in the same universe as the one she's developing for her upcoming Belgian Congo steampunk novel.

And I'm just fucking psyched to see three Malaysians (myself, Stephanie and Zen) in a single anthology, which is even more hilarious because we don't all live in Malaysia.

If you'd like to review Steam-Powered 2, fire me an email and I'll forward you to our wonderful editor, JoSelle Vanderhooft, for an eARC!

Con Report: Growing Pains in Whitelandia - PDXGearCon July 22-24

2011-07-30T19:55:00.000-04:00

Because let's face it, Portland is pretty white. A couple of people asked me for numbers for how many visible people of colour I saw all weekend, and I counted the following:

4 black men - Tony Hicks of Tinplate Studios; a dapper gentleman I didn't get the name of; a goth at the Saturday concert; and a man who came by with his wife and her two sisters.

5 Asians - Said wife and two sisters (I'm guessing East Asian; the two sisters were in lolita gear); my cousin Andrea (yep, that fab Azn rocking the boat - on her head - is related to me); and Brad working for LastWear.

ETA: I should also add Peter Zarate of Vernian Process on this list. Very remiss of me to have forgotten! I have no idea what he identifies though.

There was also another man who mentioned in passing that he didn't identify as white but I didn't get the details. I never do unless they're volunteered. It's not good of me, because it does mean I overlook a lot of invisible racial minorities, but I hate poking into people's ish without permission.

The lack of POC, though, is not my problem, it's Portland's. (Although I AM curious as to the final count of people who registered to attend.) PDXGearCon, however, had other problems besides the need to colour up.

And holy crap did it have problems. The website was down for a really long time earlier, and I almost thought that the con wasn't going to happen because there was so much radio silence on what, exactly, was going to happen.

Con chair Stephen was really accommodating to me for all my ideas, but programs are nice. Very nice. Mostly because I wanted to know what my schedule was so I could be sure to make the most of my con experience, seeing as I'm so rarely out to the West Coast. The day after I arrived in Portland, which would be the Wednesday right before the convention, I received an email asking if I still wanted any workshops in! What! I can't even respond to that.

And I didn't know if I had a projector! And I didn't know who to talk to, besides the con chair, and you know, I hate that. The con chair shouldn't be taking so much onto hirself, no matter what. But it worried me enough that my first words to Stephen, ever, offline, were, "So do I have a projector?"

Not only that, but programs for Friday and Saturday weren't even available until the day of itself. Sunday's program was at least available the night before. At least. Still, this is something that should have been set in place weeks before.

Now onto the good stuff, with pictures even.

The site chosen for the convention, however, is a darling, darling, delicious hotel. Although it's not great in terms of food, there was at least some fast food nearby. It's a bit confusing at first, with two hallways (Belmont and Windsor) which loop around a courtyard. There were no vendor rooms, which is nice at first because most vendor rooms I've seen tend to be really crowded (and I always get a skin-crawly feel of consumerism in them) but it must have been really annoying for the vendors to have to keep their stock away every night.

In the Belmont hallway from the steps leading in

The other side of the Belmont hallway from the steps leading in

Tony Hicks of Tinplate Studios with his display of grotesque mantelpieces

A shot of the vendors in the Windsor hallway, with Erica Unwoman Mulkey in its midst

An insta-bustle vendor

I bought a lovely brass train musicbox from this gorgeous family.
It plays "I've Been Working On The Railroad".
A little slowly, but I like it. The slowness has a melancholy to it that makes me think of the Chinese railroad workers.
That, coupled with the recycled, reshaped brass, makes my purchase damned worthwhile.

Nonetheless, despite all hiccups, I think it's safe to say that at least from the attendee point of view, the con went really smoothly. I took things VERY easily this convention, and skipped out on panels I would ordinarily attempt to attend, such as the What Is Steampunk panel headed by Diana Vicks.

Despite the lack of paneling I did, the program offerings were really awesome: readings by various authors (holy awesome author lineup!), workshops on crafts (my cousin attended several sewing lectures led by Andie Letourneau, and I looked in a few times and was both weirded out at the classroom-like setup and impressed by how really absorbed everybody was in the subject matter), and of course, awesome performances. I missed Friday night's shows featuring Vagabond Opera, because I was hosting a little wine and cheese, but the next night's offerings, with Veronique Chevalier and circus acts and Vernian Process was excellent. Vernian Process performed with a new member this time, Martha, and she had a couple of songs with Unwoman, which were fabulous. (I missed Unwoman's solo performances earlier in the day. If I make it out to SteamCon this will not happen.)

Have I mentioned the impressive guest list? Cherie Priest, Margaret Killjoy, M.K. Hobson, Devon Monk, Andrew Mayer as a few of the people off the top of my head.

MK Hobson, Devon Monk and Cherie Priest at the Pacific Northwest Regional Steampunk panel

GearCon also saw the introduction of the Vulcania Volunteers onto the steampunk scene! These fine fellows are a little group of artists working on models and reproductions of the Nautilus, and Mikel Sauve presented a workshop on making models. I understand they will be at SteamCon, which is quite perfect, considering SteamCon III's theme.

Wayne Orlicki beside a Vulcania Volunteers display

Mikel Sauve beside a modded scooter out in the courtyard

This is a GPS

This is the emergency brake

Besides these nifty people, there were also various folks present, and I was really happy to have had the chance to hang out with a lot of people this time around rather than hustling around like at last Steampunk World's Fair.

Mrs. Sullivan, founder of the Rose City Steampunks

Phineas Von Stitch of Out From Behind the Curtain , found on both the Steampunk Empire and Facebook

Airship Ambassador Kevin Steil talking to cultural historian James Carrott

James Carrott was out and about doing some final research touches for the book and documentary Vintage Tomorrows, and since the camera crew is based in Portland, we somehow managed to wrangle some time for an interview. Martha Swetkoff, whom I met at Nova Albion and Steampunk World's Fair, was also out and about collecting material for her documentary on Maker culture, and got me and Magpie to have a conversation with each other.

I like taking pictures of people taking pictures of me.
This would be Glen Bledsoe, who is also an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician.

My panels were fairly well-attended. I'd say about thirty for Steam Around the World, and I counted another thirty for the Envisioning a Better Steam Society roundtable. Stephen was very kind and gave me two hours each, which I find is just about perfect for such panels, especially since they have such complicated topics. Thanks everybody for coming out and being patient! That was an interesting range of topics we covered, moving from overt/covert bigotry, to definitions of technology and progress, to science fundamentalists. It was so fun, despite folks having to step out before it ended because there were so many other cool panels, and of course a ballroom dancing lesson, although I'd initially planned to kick everyone out after the one-and-a-half hour mark, we went the full two hours anyway.

And I felt bad about that because the vendors had been waiting for about an hour to get into the room so they could store stuff. Meep!

Here are some more pictures from the convention:

Mikel Sauve of the Vulcania Volunteers talking to Erica Unwoman Mulkey

A closer look at Tony Hicks' shelf of curiousities

Baby-lovin'

Brad Russell rocking a non-Victorian look. And Filipino self.

Didn't get this dude's name, but I liked the way this traveler's outfit was put together.
Jeanette Ng might well call this ricepunk, but I could see it more as silkpunk.

My cousin Andrea earlier in the day before her full Marie Antoinette costume.
Because nothing says steampunk like wearing your underwear on the outside.
Did I mention she made this outfit herself?
Yeah, my family is full of cool people.

Myself with the lovely Airship Ambassador Kevin Steil

So I did do the groupie thing and got a picture with awesome musicians: Josh Pfeiffer and Erica Mulkey.
You shush your envious selves.

Handsome dapper gentlemen of Out from Behind the Curtain

Since I took it so darn easy in terms of con stuff, I did do a lot of non-con things! I managed to do the following:

- Get out to one of Phineas' little Out get-togethers in the hotel lounge. Have I mentioned how lovely Phineas is? No? Well, he is.

- Host a little wine-and-cheese in the hotel room I shared with Kevin Steil. Martha, Andrea and Jaime provided some foods, like chips, and pita breads, and cheeses. I particularly liked the lavender-flavoured goat cheese. Andrea and Kevin also provided some libations, and I bought in two bottles of ice wine from Canada. It was very cosy and well-attended, and I'm looking forward to hosting another such tiny party like it in the future. Do you know how nifty it is to have famous people like Erica and Cherie chilling out in your room? I do now.

- Hang out after the Saturday night show with various folks. And then with Peter and Martin (and other company) of Vernian Process after the show on Saturday at one of Portland's late-night foodcarts, courtesy of Andrea and Jaime.

- Nap in that courtyard, on Sunday afternoon.

So, despite the smallness of the con, and some unfortunate incidents, GearCon was lovely. Again, thanks, Stephen, for helping me get out there and inviting me; thanks Kevin for letting me room with him; and thanks audience members for being patient and coming out! Hope to see you next year!

Thanks, PDX!

2011-07-26T06:18:00.000-04:00

There will be a con report forthcoming, but just to say, GearCon was quite fantastic, the chillest con I've been to thus far, even with the horrible hiccups at the beginning. Thanks to the folks who came to the wine and cheese Kevin Steil and I hosted, thanks to Kevin for letting me stay with him, thanks to Stephen for inviting me (and for not looking too annoyed when the first words out of my mouth upon seeing him for the first time were "so do I get a projector?") and thanks generally to Portland for being nifty despite being Whitelandia. I wasn't supposed to do any shopping but I totally did. Also, PDX, you have some very nice food! Thanks to my cousin Andrea for taking me around and thanks everybody else for making her first nerdy-ass con experience an excellent one!

Technofantasy, Military, Westerfeld's Leviathan, Lowachee's Gaslight Dogs

2011-07-10T19:58:00.000-04:00

A’ight, so, I’m starting revisions on my MRP, and whilewriting my analysis on Gaslight Dogs, I was struck by how relevant Heideggar’slogic on technology is (which I read in Steve Garlic’s “What Is A Man?”available on JSTOR). The idea is this: technology is a manifestation of ourrelationship to nature. How we view nature, how we treat it... we will buildand make shit to reflect this. His thesis runs like this: in Europe before the18^th century, we largely saw our relationship to nature as one wherewe adapted to nature, because nature is its own entity, which we’re a part of.There came a shift in how we viewed nature: rather than seeing it as it is,something to adapt to, we started seeing it as a resource, and considering waysto make it adapt to us. This was right before the Industrial Revolution. Somodern technology, what we think of as technology, is a reflection of aphilosophy in which we see nature as something to be conquered, something to beovercome, something to use. If we don’t like something? We blast it to hell andbuild what we want on it.

Let me tell you how I came to thinking really seriouslyabout this: Gaslight Dogs. Among the many comments my fabulous supervisor madeon my first draft is her comment on something I said: that Sjenn and Keeley arethe true steampunks of the GLD world, because they reject modernity.... yet themodernity they reject is a modernity we are familiar with, a modernity which isinformed by warfare, technology, and more importantly, how we view the use oftechnology. Sjenn’s relationship to nature is thus: she’s in it. She’s a partof it. She doesn’t really see herself as separate from nature, just in adifferent form of it.

And that’s why Jarrett doesn’t get her. Jarrett by the verynature of his work has to see the world in binary forms: The People You ~~DoShoot~~ Protect and the People You ~~Shoot At~~ Fight. There’s a scenewhere she tries to explain to him, “what does it matter what form I’m in? Thebirds, the cats, the dogs.... it’s all different forms of the same thing.” Andhe doesn’t grok this, because he needs to see his enemy as Not Like Him. (Youcan’t really justify, with any sense of decency, otherwise when you areshooting down people. Kids, too.) Jarrett’s world is the world in which natureis being reshaped and reformed at the hands of the settlers. This is a world inwhich people come in, and change the landscape, without the permission of thepeople who were already there. Then you’ve got General Fawle.

Unlike Jarrett, General Fawle gets Sjenn. He can see she hasa relationship to nature that allows her to harness a certain kind ofknowledge, a certain kind of strength, a certain kind of power. Sjenn doesn’tsee her Dog as power. Her Dog is her ancestor, a source of wisdom, a way ofknowing and mediating the world with. Her Dog, essentially, is thetechnofantasy of the GLD world. General Fawle’s understanding of technology,however, is our understanding of technology: it is a way to harness nature forour uses. And him being a military man, he is going to harness it as a form ofpower (not as a way to understand the world) so he can beat people with it.Consider the fact that so much of our modern technology came out of militaryuses, how the concept of modernity itself, civilization itself, was a justificationfor colonization and imperialism. There is a certain way you must be, and ifyou refuse it, you will be overcome, or erased. And this is the choice Sjennfaces, and the choice she rejects.

So, what is the place of technology is steampunk? What is itwe do with tech in steampunk? Often, this is what we do: we take a piece ofmodern technology, or rather, a more recent understanding of technology (andkeep in mind, technology is our manifestation of our relationship to nature),and we plonk this in the midst of some other time period where thisunderstanding didn’t exist, just to see what happens. And what happens? Allsorts of cool things, of course: we get to ask questions like, what becomes thefunction of this technology in this society? Who does it belong to? How doesthe configuration of society change with the introduction of this form oftechnology, of this kind of relationship with nature? Think about Marx’s thingabout commodity fetishism, where workers are now completely detached from thestuff they made, because they’re not making it for themselves, they’reproducing it for the consumption of others. We no longer know what it is we’reproducing, even as there is a huge pressure to be productive in our society.And how does it affect our social relationships? How does this affect how wesee each other, and how we see ourselves? Steve Garlic pointed out that becauseof the change in how we view nature, suddenly, we saw things as, well, things,with a specific function. Different things, for different functions. And now,different people, for different functions. What used to be flexible, adaptable,now became fixed in form and function, and this extended to how we see genderrelations. But that’s another issue entirely.

This means when we start plonking recent tech into the past,we need to think on the ethical ramifications, and what it says about us thatthere are certain kinds of stories we tell (or at least, value). Think aboutScott Westerfeld’s Leviathan. Darwinists have figured out DNA! They know how tocreate whole ecologies, and figured out how to create whole ecologies in whichhumans live alongside what we consider organic. The Darwinists consider thisnatural; we would consider it organic biotechnology and, decidedly not natural.But it’s cool anyway. The Clankers, however, don’t consider natural. Nature isnot for them to harness. Yet what are you doing when you mine the earth foriron to make the steel for marching Stormwalkers? This is considering nature asa resources, and what is more familiar to us. And then consider what theDarwinists use their relationship with nature for: warfare.

What are the ethical implications of harnessing nature forwarfare? What does it say about how we relate to nature and how we relate toother people, who are Not Like Us? Remember, Darwinists call their organiccreations beasties. Naming them is not cool. Because what happens when you namea creature? When you create a pet out of a creature? You make it part of the human world. This is how we’vebeen taught to see animals: there are animals which are pets, part of the humanworld, and then there are animals which are not pets, part of the wild, part ofnature. And the divide is huge, okay! Pets are cool! We love pets! We invest alot of emotional energy in our pets! Pets make our life better! Wild animals,though, fuck them, they’re probably rabid and dirty and will thus make yousick. And since they’re not domesticated at all they’ll probably bite you andscratch you and give you an infection. Shoo them away!

Now, the Darwinists don’t take our extreme view towardsnot-pet organic beings, of course. But the Darwinists’ world is still a worldin which humans and nature are separate. Bovril? You named the perspicacious lorisBovril? You can’t do that, it’s a beastie! It’s not a pet! It’s a functionalanimal, a thing that does stuff for youso your life is, uh, easier, I guess, and therefore Not To Be Named And Become AttachedTo.

What kind of society is this that does this to organicbeings? Why, ours of course. Do you know the people who constructed yourcomputer? Have you said hello to the janitor recently? Unless you’ve beenbrought up to be extraordinarily nice, probably not! Even I have to make aneffort to say hello to my floor’s janitor, and people say I'm nice. Because we learn that differentpeople have different functions in society, and we learn very quickly to keepthe functions separate, which, in a world where we are defined by our work, wetranslate to learning how to keep people separate.

So what are the ethical implications of the Darwinistsociety which harnesses a relationship with nature for warfare? You know, thatthing where you fight people, and kill them? What is our relationship withnature, a relationship in which we separate ourselves from nature? (Thanks,Bev, for this articulation.) What is this relationship in which we considerourselves superior to nature that we have the right to shape and mould it toourselves, without any adaptation on our part to return the favour? And whatdoes this separation mean, when it translates itself so easily, to separatingourselves, from our fellow human beings?

What are the ethical implications of General Fawle’sexperimentation program, where he exploits the relationship between janna andthe Dog, for military purposes? In fact, what then does this say about theconcept of military warfare in the first place? What does this say about ourworld, then, where we maintain soldiers and military institutions under theguise of protecting ourselves? Whatis our relationship to others, whether part of the wild, of nature, or justother groups of human beings, that we need to keep this contingent of this kindof power to change (by hurting) others, in order to keep ourselves safe?

.... OK I didn’t actually get to say other things I’m prettysure I wanted to say, re: the concept of science and who gets to decide what’smodern science and who doesn’t, and what ramifications this has for us. But Ican talk about this another day.

But the point is! Technology is the manifestation of our relationship to nature. It is part of our articulation on how we see ourselves in relation to nature. What kind of tech we use says a great deal about how we relate to nature and to each other. It deserves analysis, both on a personal and a systemic level. It deserves analysis even as you're just creating props to mess around with. It tells us what kind of stories we value over others. There is a huge amount of tech, or some sort of gobbledygook that passes as tech, in steampunk, and we need to think about what kind of tech we're looking at, to see whether we're really talking about alternate history, or just recreating history on a fuckton more epic scale, and what the ramifications of that is.

Silver Goggles

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Steampunk POC Interviews

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Conversations Steampunks Are Not Immune To

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Quote of Interest

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Happy Blogiversary

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Thanks, PDX!

Technofantasy, Military, Westerfeld's Leviathan, Lowachee's Gaslight Dogs