Jess Nevins‘ “The Nineteenth Century Roots of Steampunk” (a version of which introduced the VanderMeers’ Steampunk) is a cover story in the January 2009 issue of NYRSF. It discusses the dime novel fad for “Boy Inventor Conquers the Redskins” style colonialist fiction towards the turn of the previous century, which matured into the less morally reprehensible “Adult Inventor” stories typified by Verne and Wells and “Juvenile Inventor” stories typified by the Tom Swift novels (the second series of which includes “Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron”, my personal favourite if only for its title).

Nevin suggests that “first-generation” modern Steampunk was consciously opposed to the “white boys using advanced technology to kill nonwhite men and loot their treasure” ideals of stories like “Frank Reade and his Steam Man of the Plains” (”Steampunk is well aware of the Boy Inventor,” he says, “and kills him, as villains must be killed, by the end of the story”). But, Nevin claims, “much or most second-generation steampunk is not true steampunk”; the subgenre has abandoned ideology and “returned to its roots” he feels, paralleling Cyberpunk’s slide from “dystopic critique of multinational capitalism” to “fashion statement and literary cliché”.

I would argue that the effect is more dilutory than transformatory. Diversity of viewpoint is an inevitable consequence of popularisation. While Steampunk remains what Nevins calls “an excellent mirror for the modern period”, it’s likely to remain an equally fertile medium for social commentary and political critique.