So…I would like to sometimes write posts about art that I think is super awesome, because there are so many super-awesome things, and we should shout about them when we think of them so that more people can know about these awesome things!  Unfortunately, this will not be one of those posts (though I will try to balance things out a little with some shout-outs).  This post, unfortunately, is going to be more plaintive.

Why don’t I love steampunk?

Really.  I don’t think I even really like it, and I Do. Not. get it. 

I was reminded of this fact again this week when I read a rave review of a recent steampunk novel that I myself have read and thought was…fine.  But I’m pretty sure I’m an outlier on this one.  I’m pretty sure the novel’s actually quite great and I’ve just got this weird meh filter on when it comes to steampunk.

Which makes no sense!  I should adore steampunk.  I love whimsical things.  I love intricate, beautiful things.  I love playing dress-up in elaborate, pretty costumes.  And furthermore, steampunk as a genre is adjacent to several other genres that I do definitely love, sometimes to a baffling, ridiculous degree.

I love dramas that feature gorgeous costumes and sets!

For example, Hotel del Luna (I almost want to decorate my walls with pictures of those walls),  Sleepy Hollow (the villain has a gown that looks like a spiderweb, and it’s lovely), Gigi (salon scenes so lush!), A Little Princess (the magic so perfectly embodied by set).

And I super love jungle adventure stories!  Especially if they have some ridiculous ancient-city giant-booby-trap sort of thing going on.

Indiana Jones is the obvious one here of course, but there’s also: Romancing the Stone (no booby-trap cities, but alligator obstacles), The Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel (it should have been corny, but those tropes are just so dear to my heart), the Dora-the-Explorer movie (seriously an excellent movie, in part because it so faithfully hews to the genre), Vibes (okay, not in a jungle, but I am still going to count it because it’s awesome!). Note: Of course, jungle-adventure stories, even if they aren’t explicit about it (sometimes they completely are), have distinct roots in Victorian- and Jules-Verne-esque sensibilities.

And…I’m really trying to come up with a solid third thing, here. 

But they all keep wiggling around on me and not quite matching the brief.  (What do A Room with a View, and The Fifth Element have in common?). But all of it really circles around exploration and imagination and wit!  Things that seem like they should click-in with Steam Punk perfectly.

So I really still don’t get it.

Now, I’ve been naming dramas, and to be clear it’s usually steampunk books that I find myself bafflingly bored by.  And books are not super visual.  They can be, but this is one place my own quirks may be sabotaging me.  I think in words.  I love super-cool visuals, and have been told at least once that color is my super-power.  But viewing cool visuals is super way easier for me than conjuring them in my head.  Conjuring pictures in my head is work.  And then it’s even more work if the picture in my head is supposed to be moving.  I do not think in pictures.

This comes out in my writing.  Sometimes people will read something I wrote and say, ‘I can feel the humidity in this scene, but I can’t see anything.’  And, yep, that’s because neither can I.  I’m much better with tactile than visual in my writing.  But it also translates to other people’s books.  Sometimes I’ll read something and I can tell that I’m just not getting something from the story, and it’s probably because it was written by someone super-visual, and the story is rich in visuals (but not so much in tactiles) and so it’s flat for me.  Maybe that’s what’s happening with me and Steampunk?  Maybe most of the Steampunk stuff I’ve read so far has been too visually weighted for me to access it well?

But I feel like there’s a statistical-probability issue with that argument.  I read and enjoy lots of books, in a pretty darned wide variety of genres.  It seems unlikely that all the authors who write steampunk happen to fall into this too-high-a-ratio-of-visuals-to-other-for-Anna-to-grok category of writing style.

Which I suppose brings up the possibility that there is something else central to the Steampunk genre that I don’t grok.  Something that’s important for Steampunk but that I don’t value and, furthermore, can’t even quite see that it’s there.  For the record, my husband is not surprised that I don’t like Steampunk, and the elusive question for him is: Why I should care.  Well…I like enjoying cool, nifty things.  I’d like to be able to enjoy Steampunk.

As a parting thought, if airships can be considered sufficient to Steampunk, then I can say I love The Goblin Emperor and the rest of that series so far, by Kathrine Addison.  And I love The Fall of Ile-Rien series by Martha Wells.  But the super lovely thing about both those series is the characters and character interactions, and the airships, to me, are pretty darned incidental.  (To put that another way, both series could have replaced their airships with transport-via-giant-land-frogs, and I would have found the stories equally riveting.). (Also note: the Fall of Ile-Rien does have some lovely jungle-ish adventure – I still definitely love that!)

Ooooh, I just remembered how much I love Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – but that really ought to be a post for another day.