Infernal Devices (34 page)

  Upon making my return to London, I found my reputation to be irreparably blackened. The Paganinicon, passing itself off as me, had gone berserk during a concert attended by all of English society's loftiest members. This breakdown, unexplainable by those who witnessed it, I believe to have been caused by those same actions on the part of myself and Miss McThane, that overrode the earth-destroying device's regulatory mechanism. The Paganinicon's basic nature, already inclined to romantic conquests, was thus further stimulated by the temporary alteration to its adjunct brain. I must leave vague the details of the ensuing events – they are too indelicate to transcribe; I could scarce credit them when they were told to me – but it should be noted that Mrs Wroth and several other ladies of quality retired after the fateful concert to the seclusion of a convent. They are still there.

  Due to the harassment of the crowds attracted by the scandals generated by the Paganinicon, I was unable to resume life and business in my shop as before. Fortunately, Sir Charles Wroth, perhaps to make amends for his earlier attempt to take my life (albeit in a good cause), arranged for the august scientific body of the Royal Society to purchase all the other devices left by my father in his workshop. The resultant sum of money was enough for me to go into seclusion in this little-trafficked district of London, accompanied by the loyal Creff, who had so patiently and faithfully awaited my return.

  Another touching example of faith presented itself as Creff and I were loading my baggage into a carriage. Limping down the street came a bedraggled figure, its ribs protruding from the rigours of its journey, still scarred from the crash of the flying machine, scarcely recognisable. It was the dog Abel, who – as animals have been reported to do – had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.

  My own reward will be to lay down this pen, and pick it up no more. My apologia is finished, for all the good it will do.

  Reports have reached my ears, of a lame man with tinted spectacles, in company with a woman, travelling from village to village in the North of England and Scotland. They are said to exhibit a few crude music playing automata, but are soon chased away by the town constables when various gambling and confidence games come to light.

  Though I myself have come to this safe harbour – if safety can be found in this life – yet I mourn my former simple days. I have lost my Innocence, in more ways than one. I have seen the gears and furious machinery of the world that lies unreckoned beneath our feet. No longer can I note, as other men do, the passing hours upon the heavens' gilded face, without a vision of a hidden master-spring uncoiling to its final silence. I await the day when all clocks shall stop, including the one that ticks within my breast. Do thou the same, Reader, and profit from my example.

 
 

 
 

K. W. Jeter attended college at California State University, Fullerton where he became friends with James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, and through them, Philip K. Dick.

  Jeter wrote an early Cyberpunk novel,
Dr. Adder,
which was enthusiastically recommended by Philip K. Dick. Jeter was also the first to coin the term "steampunk," in a letter to
Locus
magazine in April 1987, to describe the retro-technology, alternate-history works that he published along with his friends, Blaylock and Powers.

  As well as his own original novels, K. W. Jeter has written a number of authorized
Blade Runner
sequels.

  He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, Geri.

 

 

It's rare indeed for any writer to coin a term that results in hundreds of thousands of people over a quarter century participating in a multi-media entertainment experiment centered around outdated technology. Yet that's exactly what K. W. Jeter accomplished when he, half-jokingly, offered up the term "Steampunk" in a letter to the editor in
Locus
Magazine
, the
Variety
of the genre fiction world: "Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term… Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like 'steampunks', perhaps." Jeter was attempting to identify, with no little amount of satire, the kind of alt-history, Industrial Age Victoriana being written not just by him but his fellow writers Tim Powers and James Blaylock. Powers' major contribution to the subgenre would be
The Anubis Gates
, while Blaylock would write a short story, "Lord Kelvin's Machine" that he later turned into a Steampunk novel. All three were to some extent influenced by Henry Mayhew's book
London
Labour and the London Poor.

  What is Steampunk? Modern steampunk fiction derives at least in part from the influence of novels by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the 1800s and early 1900s that featured wildly imaginative steam-powered inventions, or even just inventions based on technology from the time that no one uses anymore. Even when wildly romantic, the work of Verne and Wells tended to also be somewhat cautionary in nature, with a healthy unwillingness to accept "progress" as always inevitable and good. The American Edisonades of the 1800s, meanwhile, used steam inventions as a way of visualizing Manifest Destiny through simplistic wild west adventures. These adventures, as might be expected, have not dated well and have not.

  The general gist of proto-Steampunk fictions and even later full-on Steampunk like
Infernal Devices
or William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's
The Difference Engine
(1990) can be boiled down to a general equation:
Mad inventor
+ invention (steam x airship or metal person/robot) x [pseudo]
Victorian setting) + progressive, reactionary, or neutral politics
x adventure plot.
(The supernatural also plays a part in many such adventures.)

  Since then, Steampunk has by fits and starts entered the mainstream. Kit Stolen created the first Steampunk looks in the 1990s which led to a thriving fashion/cultural scene. In parallel, Steampunk-related pseudo-Victorian settings infiltrated movies and comics, including anime and manga, along with a parallel rise in the art and tinker/maker involvement.

  The result? A slow burn leading to an explosion of interest. Since about 2008, Steampunk has been
hot.
Steampunk's popularity – its incredible, almost viral rate of growth – has been widely documented in, and fed by, national and international media, from newspapers like the
The New York Times
to such high-profile publications as
Newsweek
,
Wired
,
Popular Science
, and the journal
Nature
. Each of these media outlets has chosen to highlight different aspects of the Steampunk community, typically those that relate most closely to the publication's or journalist's specialty.
The New York
Times Style Section
, for instance, focused primarily on the fashion aspects of Steampunk. Technology oriented publications have focused on the efforts to remake and modify technology in the Victorian mode, while the journal
Nature
related Steampunk to science and education.

  All of this attention has sparked new energy and diversity in a sprawling community that ranges from the involvement of neo-Victorians to sites like Beyond Victoriana and a burgeoning scene in places like Brazil, from the anarchist/DIY
SteamPunk Magazine
to those who casually dress up and have tea parties at conventions. Many Steampunks seek to reject the conformity of the modern, soulless, featureless design of technology – and all that implies. They also seek DIY solutions to the damage caused by industrialisation. This isn't simply an impulse to whitewash the bad parts of the Victorian era – it is instead a progressive impulse to reclaim the dead past in a positive and affirmative way.

  Gradually, too, Steampunk has circled back to the literature, even though many of those who participate in the subculture may not know the original fiction, beyond those pre-Steampunk influences of Verne and Wells. But even when Jake von Slatt of the Steampunk Workshop creates some elegant machine with cogs and wheels and tubes, he is in a sense not just emulating the craftspeople of the Victorian era – he's also pulling from the zeitgeist of images and approaches found in the fiction. Mike Libby's clockwork beetles have at least as much in common with the automata in
Infernal De
vices
as with anything actually produced during the Victorian era. Reality and fiction, imagination and making feed off of each other.

  Within that context, it's not surprising that Jeter says that a good deal of his initial inspiration for
Infernal
Devices
"came from a visit to London and discovering a shop [near Covent Garden] that specialised in old scientific gear…. You knew that real people living in a real time had created them, and that they weren't just stamped out of plastic in some hellhole factory in China."

  Inspiration also came from closer to home: "The advantage of growing up in Southern California in the fifties and early sixties was that there was still some evidence of that sort of machine-age handcraftsmanship, such as the now-vanished Angels Flight tram in Los Angeles, the old steamship modern Pan Pacific Auditorium (now gone as well), the Craftsman bungalows in the old neighborhoods of Pasadena and Glendale, etc. So to some degree the whole Victorian craftsperson period seemed like a glorious tide that had once washed over the world, and left a few shining bits behind in odd places."

  However,
Infernal Devices
is not so much a love song to London by an American as it is an ironical tribute, permeated by elements of dark humor and social critique. A Ladies Union for Suppression of Carnal Vice is both hilarious and all too true to the spirit of the age. A Royal Anti-Society almost enters Monty Python territory. From the first pages, too, Jeter deploys the drunkard Creff not just for comedy but to pointed effect, juxtaposing him with the "Ethiope" who comes to George Dower's shop. While Creff claims the Ethiope is "maddened with some heathen liquor, and prepared for murder," Dower knows that "Intoxication was indeed a possibility" – on Creff's part.

  The Victorian era overlapped the rise and fall of the Decadents, who had a fascination with pushing limits, including views on drugs, sex, and disease. So it's perhaps no surprise that the humor and absurdity veer into the, well, decadent, with much verbiage devoted to depraved habits and even more depraved acts. Readers easily turned off by such things may find solace in placing certain passages in the context of the stylised outrages of Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud, and the like.

  But wherever it originates, this healthy sense of humor – Scape: "You turkey!" – is perhaps best exemplified by the absurdism of a "Saint Monkfish" and the seamless way in which Jeter combines fish-men and brilliant descriptions of clockwork devices. Indeed, there's an entire subset of Steampunk fictions that indulge in a mecha-organic aesthetic, presaged by the gooey/clockwork back-and-forth of
Infernal Devices
. (The most notable example may be Paul Di Filippo in his 1990s
Steampunk Trilogy
.) Jeter seems as invested in weird biology as in clockwork contraptions, and this tends to humanise and soften what might otherwise be simply a gleaming recitation of the contents of the chest cavities of various automata.

  In terms of authenticity, the clever insertion of what appears to be contemporary American vernacular through the speech of Scape and his assistant contributes, by way of contrast, to the believability of the English settings and characters, and helps to make the narrative more fluid, with very little period piece stiffness. Scape as rogue has both those elements of likeability and cruelty that make the reader question their enjoyment of him… even as you're enjoying him.

  Jeter may be an American writing about London, but the quality of his descriptions does an excellent job of conveying action and place, as in the aftermath of a most chaotic encounter: "In the midst of the fishing tackle strewn about, and the copies of Izaak Walton that had been flung from the hands of the panicking Wetwick residents, the choristers lay tangled as though in the aftermath of some juvenile battlefield. Their shrill piping voices were silent now; the porcelain faces, those that were still intact, gazed with rosy-cheeked serenity at the ceiling."

  Stories within stories also delight, as when the Paganinicon spins a yarn that includes "sympathetic vibrations" and decidedly eccentric methods of animation. The final revelations concerning the "Brown Leather Man" are appropriately bizarre and yet make sense. Even chapter and section titles are used to maximum effect, my favorite being "The Complete Destruction of the Earth."

  There's a sense of playfulness in this narrative that works well even when events turn serious, and Jeter imbues his narrator with the kind of sardonic sincerity that both undercuts his account and supports it. You're left with the feeling you've been sold a bill of goods by novel's end, and yet you don't mind at all.

 

Mostly because of the spark and inspiration provided by the existence of the subculture, more and more writers are once again writing steampunk fiction. However, it's very different from what came before. The books that form the core of the canon from the first wave of steampunk – Jeter, Powers, Sterling, Gibson – are generally a small part of the influence on this next wave of steampunk, except through secondary associations. (It's somewhat ironic that some of the newer steampunk fictioneers are going to read Infernal Devices for the first time in this edition.)