Who Put the "Punk" in Steampunk? The Roots and Evolution of Steampunk 

We're very lucky to have you and your videos :) Thank you!

Yes, thank you, and for this subject as well!

So glad to have you back mate!

Glad to see you back!

I love your channel and have been dutifully checking back every week. So glad to see you again! 📚✌🏼

That's hilarious! Thanks for sharing it! :D

It’s like a 30 sec clip for 30 min Just going! Going! He must produce a lot of shows for discovery ID

Thanks for sharing that NASA anecdote! I was aware of the existence of the Ada language, but I didn't know of its origins.

In the late 80s/Early 90s the government realized that they had millions of lines of code running all their computer systems, written in P/LC ladder code, to C, to FORTRAN, to Pascal, to COBAL. All this code had to be maintained, which meant that they had to hire programmers familiar with all these languages to maintain and upgrade the code. Hence, the decision to implement the Ada language, which was supposed to cover everything from real-time low level machine code to database management of relational databases. And it was designed by a committee of specialists in each area, without even a base set of code to build upon. And, it was supposed to be Object Oriented, which was the big thing at the time. A language designed by people working for the government - what could go wrong? @@thelibraryladder

It feels very good to be back!

Oh there were plenty of the "attention getters," too.

​@@bpblitz HARLAN ELLISON was a great reader of his own work as is Moorcock. Look on YT for some examples Though it's a poor example of the tour itself (FREDDIE EARLLE was distracted by too many cameras) but it is an example of how carefully MM worked out the whole thing to show how the narrrator was an anti-semite but not the author. I saw the Leeds performance and both MOORCOCK and EARLLE were brilliant. The third book in the _Pyat set THE LAUGH9TER OO0F CARTHAGE. Solved the idea of MM being antusemitic since FE was a perfect Pyat.nMM could read gentle short stories and rich fantasy fiction and do characters as can also be seen on YT.

I've never had a clear picture in my mind of that city. I don't know if it's an older city with a stable core of buildings going back hundreds of years (like many smaller cities in mid-20th century Europe) or if it's a relatively young city that's seen a lot of modern development (which would be consistent with your art deco imagining of it).

Merci! Vous êtes très gentille. (My written French accent is better than my spoken one. It has been more than 30 years since I last had much practice speaking it.)

It's not easy finding an early photo of the man. :)

Steamboy was great fun, as far as I remember. Apparently it came out almost 20 years ago. It was a surprise to see Manchester depicted, in an idealised, less slummy form.

Thanks! I'm working on it (it's another long and wide-ranging one, which multiplies the amount of work involved). I'm frustrated that I haven't been able to finish it yet. A combination of larger than expected work obligations, unexpected family matters, and unfortunately-timed travel has made it hard for me to find significant blocks of time to devote to it. I'll have it finished this month, though.

You and me both!

Thanks! I've been missing them as well.

Thanks! It feels great to be back!

Thanks! I've been away a while, and it feels great to get back to work making videos.

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I don't talk about children's books as much as I'd like to, so I love finding ways to squeeze classic kid books into my videos.

Thanks! I'm very happy to be back!

Thanks, Whitney! This video followed a tortuous path to get made. It started out simply as the next installment in my overview of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion saga, but as I worked on it I found myself discussing the historical significance of the Oswald Bastable trilogy more than the books themselves, so I decided to broaden the video's scope to provide more historical context about the evolution of steampunk.

Thanks! I'm so happy you enjoyed it!

Thank you! I had so much fun making this video. RU-vid is a visual medium, so one of my favorite aspects of making videos is trying to match the visuals in them with the story I'm telling in the narrative portion.

Apparently I have forgotten to look for his books since 2016. Off to to the bookshop on Monday.

You're so welcome! I learn new things every time I make a video.

Thank you! I had to put the channel on the back burner for a couple of months, and it feels great to be back.

Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoy them and that you find my reading suggestions helpful.

Thank you! I'm very glad you enjoyed it. One of the main goals of my channel is to provide more background and context for the evolution of various genres.

Thank you! I'm very glad you enjoyed it.

Thanks! I'm sorry I didn't go into much depth about Oswald Bastable. This video started out focused entirely on the Bastable trilogy, but as I worked on it, I found myself wanting to talk about Moorcock's significance to the development of steampunk, which led me to talk about other early influences on steampunk, which led me to reconsider my overall approach to the video and to give it a different framing and hook. I ended up scaling back my discussion of Moorcock in order to provide more balance with other parts of the video. The first part of Elric's story is up next in my Eternal Champion series. I'm going to try to get to it by late winter/early spring.

Go do it. Nothing like reading foundational writers. So much of modern fantasy will make so much more sense when you read him.

@@RollingCalf In a way DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME (3 vols +1novellas) is a precursor, so much of it being a kind of tribute to the fin de siecle). It's also VERY funny!!

@@jerrycornelius2261 please remind me. I haven't read moorcock since 2008.

Thank you for your concern! I'm doing fine. I've just had a lot going in recent months that limited my ability to work on new videos (they're time-intensive to produce). I'll be getting back to more frequent video uploads soon. :)

Thank you! I loooove your comment and enthusiasm for the channel. :D

Thank you for your very kind words! I'm not as knowledgeable about Japanese and other Asian literary traditions as I'd like to be, but I'm trying to remedy that. The histories of the various genres fascinates me.

Thanks! My kids think I'm a sheep whenever I wear the fleece sweater I have on in this video. I'm greeted with a chorus of "Baaa!! Baaa!!" from them. :D

Thanks for the kind words (and for your concern for my health)! :D I've never had the cloth tested, and it's certainly the right color for copper arsenic compounds, but according to the University of Chicago, it's unlikely to be arsenic-based (most green books from that era didn't use the chemical, although some did). It's one of the rarest books I own, so I don't handle it much (and I definitely don't spend much time licking it, which is what UC says poses the greatest hazard).

Thank you! I had a lot of fun making it.

Thanks! I'm so glad you found it helpful.

Your preference might end up simply being a matter of which version you read first. I read the revised versions first, which I think made it easier for me to spot the changes in the original books when I read them. Moorcock also prefers the later versions (which is why he wrote them).

@@thelibraryladder I've never read the revised editions, how much difference is there between the two? All my copies of the Champion Eternal books are from the 60's-late 80's, including the Bastable books (DAW editions and a Lancer I think), so I've never bothered to read any of the more recent editions from the 90's onwards.

Thanks and welcome aboard!

Do you mean "A Study In Emerald" ?

That was his Sherlock Holmes story, right?

@@RollingCalf yes.

_The Difference Engine_ is about a bunch of Victorian real and fictional characters accidentally causing The Singularity.

Great timing! I hope you enjoyed the video.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestion! I'm a complete amateur at video production and entirely self-taught, so I'm learning as I go along, experimenting with different techniques to tell stories in my videos and trying to improve with each one. I welcome ideas to improve my approach. :D

@@thelibraryladder thank you so much for taking it the way I intended. your production values are top-rate, imo. this is just one particular trick I think you might employ on occasion with positive results. thanks again for your exquisite channel.

Thank you! Your comment has made my day (week? month?). For many of my videos, it's my hope that they'll find a useful role in a classroom or other instructional setting as a kind of high-level survey of a topic. I like to think of those videos as edutainment. It's gratifying to learn that some of the videos are performing that role.

You are a superb teacher. Your presentations are clear, logically organized so that the ideas and concepts accumulate to support your observations and lead to not only insights along the way but an overarching understanding of the topics you present. I have been a teacher of adults since 1995, and did seven years with younger students in the public schools. I have been blessed in my life with a handful of excellent teachers, and your presentations include so many of those qualities. Never doubt the pedagogical value of this work that you are doing. I am also enjoying your channel because I inherited a huge collection of pulp magazines and paperbacks from my father. They are primarily SF/F, with some horror and thrillers. I am preparing to send the majority of them to my friend James Artemis Owen, an author/illustrator who runs Coppervale Studio/Press and is the master of the Library of the Fantastical Arts. His collection presently weighs heavily on the history of comics and illustration, as those are his forte. The collection I am sending him will provide foundational F/SF texts, including nearly all of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks you surveyed. I will be including links to your relevant videos in my curation statements with each box of books. James and I are hoping to create a research collection for writers, librarians, and historians of American fiction. Your channel has allowed me to add considerable value to the materials I am donating, and my late father and I are both grateful. @@thelibraryladder

That's quite the treasure trove you inherited, and you and Mr. Owen are very fortunate indeed. A research collection sounds like a terrific idea. I'm a preservationist at heart, and it has motivated much of my book collecting and my desire to talk about semi-forgotten books on my channel. As an aside, is he the author of the Imaginarium Geographica series about dragons? I enjoyed reading the first few books in the series about 15 years ago (I must admit I didn't finish the series, because he hadn't completed it at the time, and I have yet to return to it). Thank you again!

Yes, this is the James Owen of the Imaginarium Geographica series. It is now nine books long. James has had an interesting ride with the traditional publishing industry, and has managed to reclaim control of much of his intellectual property. He runs Coppervale International -- their new website is under construction -- and produces books of beauty and quality. His big compendium of his illustration work has just finished a Kickstarter campaign and is in the last stages of production. His Library for the Fantastical Arts is housed in a huge refurbished church in Arizona. He has enough space to include illustrations, books, paintings, and even Harlan Ellison's classic Studebaker. He was a friend of Mr. Ellison's, and his widow reached out to James with this gift when she had to downsize her household. As James' career started when he was very young he had the opportunity to meet so many of that generation now gone: Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and so many of the pioneers of American comic books. My writing community recently lost Eric Flint, the grand master of alternative history and a generous mentor and teacher. My background as both an historian of science and an artist/writer means that I value research collections highly. I have been studying the evolution of the genres I read. We are in the midst of a sea change in American publishing with the perilous situation in traditional houses and the rise of independent authors and hybrid authors. I fear that much that is superb will be lost for lack of a traditional imprint on the spine, but on the other hand, that same superb work coming from a debut author cannot break into the corporate, profit-driven traditional channels which are at a choke point. New, small publishers are germinating, dedicated to particular slices of the genre market, and they are doing a great service to readers and authors though their budgets are small. These authors sell well but will never appear on the traditional bestseller lists. They are, however, starting to nudge their way into the major awards. In particular, the short fiction published in the e-zines [pro and semi-pro] are getting critical attention. Uncanny, Apex, Pulp Literature, and Lightspeed are introducing readers to marvelous new voices, for instance. As readers, we choose from a buffet of delicious offerings, including stories from voices previously missing from the lists. What a time to be a reader! What a time to be a writer! And what a time to be a collector ;-) @@thelibraryladder

Thank you! One of my hopes when I started the channel was that teachers and librarians might use some of my videos as instructional aids. I've been gratified to hear from a few teachers and university professors that they've incorporated some (including this video) into their lesson plans.

Perfectly balanced, a video that delves into the subject without overwhelming you. Not a minute wasted, just the right amount of a summary that points at the roots of an idea. It simply leaves the viewer wanting to pick up a previously overlooked title. I'm really fond of literary classics and accidentally the algorithm sometimes does something right. So glad that I discovered this great channel. Thanks for recommending some of those gems.

Thanks for the helpful feedback! It sounds like I got the balance right in this video. My intent is to provide enough information in my videos to build awareness of and interest in a topic so that viewers might become motivated to explore it in more depth on their own. I'm the opposite of a 'fan service' channel, because I'm primarily interested in reaching viewers who _aren't_ already very familiar with a topic. I want to build new audiences for books and authors rather than cater to their existing superfans.

Thank you! I had a lot of fun making it.

Thanks! It's great to be back. I gave Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines a brief callout in the children's book montage at the end of the video (in a blink and you'll miss it moment). It's hard to believe it's been more than 20 years since it was published (I remember all the fanfare and hype around it at the time -- it wasn't at a J.K. Rowling level, but it was still substantial). I'd give it a lot of credit for sparking the YA steampunk boom a few years later. Gene Wolfe is very much on my list of future videos. He's tentatively penciled in for sometime next year, if I can get back to a more regular video production schedule.

Thank you for your kind comment! I try to approach genre discussions in a circumspect way, recognizing that genres tend to have very fluid and subjective definitions that serve the needs of the persons defining them. They don't really fit within a binary, 'right-or-wrong' framework.

@@thelibraryladder Worth noting that MM claims to be very well-versed in late Victorian and Edwardian literature -- I believe he gives 1895 as the 'birth' of the one volume novel -- Almayer's Folly, Time Machine etc -- and I suspect with full irony gives us two 3 volume novels as a demonstration! WARLORD/DANCERS. THE STEEL TSAR has an extra 20,000 words, by the way, written in Oxford in 1989,

Thanks! I'd love to see it that copy of Declare. I participate in a few Discord servers (e.g., The Grimoire) that have dedicated channels for users to post their book collection shelfies.

Thanks! When I first encountered Hodder's Burton & Swinburne series, I was intrigued, but more than a little skeptical. I ended up being very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed reading about Spring-Heeled Jack.

Thanks! I had to catch myself at one point while editing the video. As I was compiling the montage of steampunk books for kids & YA near the end of the video, I included the first book in Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes series in the bunch. Its cover art has Enola decked out in Victorian garb while pedaling a bicycle furiously, which fits the steampunk aesthetic. However, as I thought about it, I realized I was making the same mistake others do by ascribing a steampunk theme to a book that merely happens to be set in the late Victorian era. It's a historical mystery, not steampunk.

THE Bastable books are still in print from Titan Books.

Thanks! I'm so glad you enjoyed the video. I hope you enjoy the books at least as much as I do.

Thanks! It's always a challenge trying to find images that convey the tone or substance of what I'm saying in my videos. The words come first; the images get filled in after.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. As you said, it seems likely that future literary punks will have plenty to rebel against.

Thanks! I've missed making these videos. As to audiobooks, I've recorded a few classic short stories, some of which can be found in a playlist here on my channel. I might do more in the future.

Beckett's a great comparison!

@@thelibraryladder I agree, though Peake was i believe unfamiliar with BECKETT. What he WAS familiar with was surrealism and British absurdism (Firbank, for instance). Maurice Richardson's ENGELBRECHT is worth checking out.

Thanks! I try to maintain eye contact so that it feels like I'm talking directly to viewers rather than simply engaging in a monologue with the camera running. It helps that I've had a lot of experience with public speaking over the course of my life and career, but the reality is that I do break eye contact with the camera frequently. I've taught myself how to hide those breaks in the video editing process, though.

Thanks! The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack really surprised me (in a good way) when I read it several years ago. Pavane is outstanding and deserves to be better known.

Recently read on The Many Worlds of Michael Moorcock fb page that Moorcock and Hodder are COLLABORATING ON A STEAMPUNK novel featuring an avatar of Elric, THE ALBINO'S SECRET! They are planning more Metatemporal Detective novels and have already published a prewar SEXTON BLAKE book CARIBBEAN CRISIS/VOODOO ISLAND set in the 1930s. They have more steampunk/Elric adventures in the works!

Rebellion published the SEXTON BLAKE and SIMON & SCHUSTER will do THE ALBINO'S SECRET!

Have you had any thoughts about King Arthur or the downfall of the Roman empire recently? [not-very-subtle channel foreshadowing...] :D

@@thelibraryladder Damn it Library Ladder, I already have to read Pavane now! ...but I am also interested in that and will be watching.

I just conferred with my daughter, and she agrees with you. (I haven’t watched the show.) Thanks!

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the video!

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed my Dunsany efforts. I'll post a couple more of his short stories on my channel in the next few days. They won't be posted as public videos (because they confuse YT's algorithm), so you'll have to go to my channel's Audiobooks playlist to access them.

@@thelibraryladder Groovy.

Thanks! I wanted to showcase some of the lesser-known steampunk influences in this video. I agree that Pavane deserves to be read and discussed far more widely.

Thanks! My goal is to make videos that are both educational and entertaining.

It's coming. I have a few other videos to finish before I'll get to it, though.

Thanks! Hmmm . . . interesting experiment. I can say from experience that it seems to have an effect on kittens (who are now full-grown and follow me around everywhere begging for attention).

@@thelibraryladder love it, well I just thought of 101 dalmatians listening in rapt attention to an old radio programme.. on steampunk. You mentioned a lot of proto-steam authors of the early 20th century, very interesting, and still being echoed. Also, I should have known Moorcock was at ground zero of proper steam.

Hi, and thanks for checking on me! It's not an ending; just an unexpected and somewhat involuntary pause caused by a lot of competing obligations and time commitments in recent months. I have several videos in various stages of development, and I hope to start uploading again in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks! I'll try to do better at accomplishing both in the future. :D

Thanks for sharing your experience with Dunsany! I'm glad you enjoyed many of his stories. As I mentioned in that video, I think his short fiction was what he did best. His novels are beautifully written, but somewhat lacking narratively, in my opinion. You'll probably find plenty in Morris' works that remind you of Tolkien too. The House of the Wolfings is one of my favorites by him. Its structure is unique (the narrative portions are written in regular, if somewhat archaic, prose, while the dialogue portions are written in poetic verse -- amazingly it works), and the central love story might ring some Tolkien bells for you.

I agree with your assessment of Hodder's series. I was very pleasantly surprised when I read Spring-Heeled Jack. I went in with relatively low expectations that were significantly exceeded.

I thought Hodder's books had more of the feel of Jeter's Infernal Devices and Power's Anubis Gates than Gibson. Which is a compliment for me.

@@pattheplanter HODDER is collaborating with Moorcock on some somewhat substantial 'steampunk' books (The Metatemporal Detective) at presence . They have done a lighter SEXTON BLAKE book recently publizhed by Rebellion.

@@jerrycornelius2261 Oh my gosh, that is interesting news. Thanks.