Decopunk in Theory and Practice

A Manifesto

Hardcore steampunk afficionados often complain that—in making the transformation from a literary style into an aesthetic—the genre lost most of its political edge. That, of course, is was what the suffix "punk" originally denoted: cyberpunk fiction (the spiritual ancestor of all extant varieties of “punk”, from steampunk to decopunk to bronzepunk) explored the ways in which new technologies could fuel inequality and oppression instead of erasing them. Its protagonists were outsiders in worlds dominated by megacorporations and authoritarian surveillence states. There was no hope of escape or revolution—no plucky band of rebels to take down the evil empire—only dignified survival and the choice between different shades of gray.

There’s nothing about steampunk (or any other form of “punk” lit) that entitles it to sidestep the kind of questions raised in cyberpunk fiction. The Industrial Revolution, after all, was a period of intense social upheaval, unbridled economic exploitation, and brutal colonialism. Silk top hats and monocles were worn only by the haves (or their sycophants), and cogs and gears moved the machines that enriched them. New technologies like railroads and steamships oiled the machinery of global imperialism, allowing the extraction and transportation of grain from rural India or rubber from the Congo. And for those at the very bottom of this new economic order—criminals, coal miners, prostitutes, vagrants, gypsies, Luddites, black slaves, Russian serfs, Congolese plantation workers, Chinese boxers—the Industrial Age was experienced as a crushing dystopia to rival any futuristic corporatocracy.

Fantasy, of course, is fantasy. But steampunk’s gradual transformation into just one more form of nerd kitsch has done the genre no favors. I want to take back what I’ve only just said two sentences ago: Fantasy is never just fantasy. Even The Lord of the Rings, a (mostly¹) unpolitical classic of high fantasy, is deeply rooted in the culture and history of the Early Middle Ages. Tolkien was an expert in medieval languages and the cultures that gave birth to them, which is one of the reasons his world feels so real despite the absence of long passages explaining the economy of the Lonely Mountain² or the political system of Rohan. So steampunk should look to the Revolutions of 1848, or the Meiji Restoration, or the Belgian Congo for inspiration. It need not slavishly recreate these events, but it should be informed by them.³

The same goes for any story that aspires to be “punk.”⁴

Among cyberpunk and steampunk's main derivatives, decopunk is relatively new and obscure. Some consider it a subgenre of dieselpunk,⁵ which covers approximately the same period of history (from the end of the Scramble for Africa to the invention of the atom bomb), but there is an important distinction: the two world wars hang heavy over dieselpunk, and particularly the military aesthetics of the German Empire and the Third Reich. Decopunk, by contrast, draws on the sleek imagery of the Jazz Age as it existed in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, and Berlin.⁶ Its forerunners in the realm of fiction were the pulp magazines⁷ of the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, and their hardboiled tales at the intersection of adventure, science, crime, and the weird. The first masked mysterymen of the pre-WWII era—the Sandman, the Clock, the Bat-man, the Shadow—also form a major source for decopunk fiction, and were themselves an outgrowth of the pulps. Most modern works associated with the decopunk style—Batman: The Animated Series, The Rocketeer, The Goon—exhibit some degree of continuity, whether spiritual or narrative, with the great pulp adventures of the past, in addition to the obvious aesthetic cues they take from the covers of Black Mask magazine or the Art Deco sketches of Hugh Ferriss.

But now it’s time to get theoretical. Much like steampunk, decopunk has no excuse not be deeply informed by the period of history on which it draws. There is, in other words, something that decopunk should be—something that distinguishes it from other forms of speculative fiction. My aim in the following paragraphs is to lay out my own philosophy of decopunk in an unapologetically prescriptivist bent. This, in other words, is what decopunk needs to be to avoid becoming just one more cosplayer aesthetic.

Let’s begin.

Urbanity. Decopunk takes place in the shadow of skyscrapers. Sleek automobiles, elevated trains, lavish penthouses, dark speakeasies, and crumbling tenements are expected, if not required. The protagonist should ideally be at home in this world—they may be a maverick, or a nonconformist, or a social outcast, but they still know and understand the sprawing modern metropolis. The city is an organism—it is alive, and has purposes of its own. The city is diverse, and stratified. It is a home to immigrants, workers, and vagrants as well as old money and the Nouveau riche. Its infrastructure is firmly of the interwar era—telegraph lines, steam heating, pneumatic tubes. It bustles with factories, laboratories, power plants, and freight yards. Everything in it has a history. Secrets are hidden within its walls and below its streets.

Decadence. Decopunk depicts the rule of a hedonistic, complacent elite who think the good times will never end. Its antagonists are the rich and powerful—they play the stock market, wear fur coats, drink expensive cocktails, and congratulate themselves on their own success. When the hero is wealthy—say a Lamont Cranston or a Bruce Wayne—they are alienated from the other members of their social class and oppose them from the shadows (if you’ll pardon the pun). No one who comes in contact with power comes away uncorrupted. The police should be ineffectual at best—more likely, they will be corrupt, nefarious, and petty. The politicians must be worse. And organized crime thrives in the atmosphere of hedonism and moral rot. Power, wealth, and privilege, once won, are jealously guarded.

Weirdness. Decopunk depicts an age of imagination and invention. Electricity and chemistry can work miracles. Monsters and machines alike threaten mankind from the dark fringes of society and science. That some men should—through the power of science or of the mind—become more than men is taken for granted.⁸ Strange creatures, weird plants, and deadly poisons from faraway lands are merely science waiting to be explained. Yet—and this is essential—none of this is magic. Even Lovecraftian horrors (which occasionally make an appearance in decopunk works) are not “magical.” They may be beyond science—and beyond rational comprehension—but they are still natural, not supernatural.

Deconstruction. Decopunk is written by modern people with postmodern values. It therefore casts the critical eye upon the assumptions and tropes of the Jazz Age and its fiction. It does not feature shifty-eyed Chinamen or sinister Russian communists as its antagonists. It does not assume black characters will defer to their white betters. It does not preach the rugged individualism of Ayn Rand (or, for that matter, any brand of 20th-century utopianism). Its villains may well be the heroes of yesteryear—police, industrialists, crusading politicians, rich playboys. Its heroes may be even more unexpected, and the problems they face will be too complex to be solve with a bullet or a punch—though old-fashioned pulp violence will still have its place. Fundamentally, decopunk acknowledges that we can see things that Damon Runyon and Dashiell Hammett and Walter B. Gibson could not—and we cannot unsee them.

Reconstruction. Decopunk is a celebration of an extraordinary period in modern history and a golden age in speculative fiction. It does not apologize for this, and does not need to. Art Deco architecture may symbolize exploitation and decadence while still being beautiful. The jazz nightclub can still be thrilling and glamorous—perhaps even moreso. Decopunk is not thoroughly dystopian or cynical—there are good guys, and they can win. The masked adventurer may be reimagined, but she still captures our imaginations. She still has exciting gadgets and colorful allies. Her enemies are still larger-than-life. There may be gorillas involved. The great heroes of the Art Deco Age—Batman, Doc Savage, Sam Spade, the Shadow—may wear new masks and fight evil under new names, but they are still with us.

Anachronism. Decopunk, finally, is tension between past, present, and future. It is a mobster in a pinstripe suit checking the crypto market his smartphone. It is a malignant AI taking over a zeppelin. It’s a masked adventurer with a social media account. It is neither now nor then—it’s somewhere in the middle. The world as it could have been, or a future that never was, where the Internet coexists with the radio and the daily newspaper, or airships still cruise the sky alongside jet liners. It is, fundamentally, a world where the 1920s and 1930s were the most significant period in modern history, and its technologies, challenges, failures, and triumphs are very much alive in the 21st century and beyond.

1. Tolkien obviously disdained both industrialization and the modern nation-state, and once wrote that in his ideal anarcho-monarchist society, even mentioning “the State” would be a capital offense.

2. One can infer quite a bit about the economic system of the Lonely Mountain, but Gloin’s explanation to Frodo of its workings is (mercifully) glossed over by the narrator.

3. Steampunk writers should, at the very least, read Dickens, Gaskell, and Engels to familiarize themselves with the class relations that underlay the industrial system in Britain.

4. I know there’s been significant controversy about the role of politics in “punk” fiction over the past few years, but I think much of it misses the point. It’s okay for something just be bad for being tacky without it also having to be racist or fascist or cultural appropriation. Tacky is enough. Tacky is what we’re trying to avoid.

5. Dieselpunk’s name seems to be a punning reference to the use of diesel to power locomotives, just as steam was used in the 1800s. However, it also gives the false impression that diesel was widely used in the 1920s-1950s, which is wasn’t.

6. Some more imaginative artists and authors even look to cities like Shanghai and Cairo.

7. Named for the cheap paper they used (and the supposedly low quality of the storytelling within), pulps were magazines sold for 10 or 15 cents and featured several short stories and novellas each issue—some of which (for example, The Maltese Falcon) later became celebrated novels in their own right.

8. Belief in what we now call “parapsychology” was—if not quite mainstream—hardly fringe in the early 20th century, even among scientists. This was also the age of eugenics, when scientists openly fantasized about engineering the superman of tomorrow.