Clockwork Futures Read online

  For Mark

  CONTENTS

  PERAMBULATION

  THE MAD, MAD WORLD

  PART ONE

  CHAOS ORDER

  ONE

  THE GOD OF MATHEMATICS

  TWO

  CLOCKWORK BOY AND THE MOTHER MACHINE

  PART TWO

  DARKNESS LIGHT

  THREE

  CATCHING LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE

  FOUR

  INTO DARK COUNTRY

  PART THREE

  PRIVATION INDUSTRY

  FIVE

  THE SCIENTIST AND THE ENGINEER

  SIX

  HE WHO POWERS THE FUTURE

  PART FOUR

  ANARCHY CONTROL

  SEVEN

  A WRENCH IN THE AGE OF MACHINERY

  EIGHT

  OF ACID AND ACCIDENT

  PART FIVE

  DEATH IMMORTALITY

  NINE

  THE SCIENCE OF SHERLOCK

  FINISHING THOUGHTS

  MAD SCIENCE REPRISE

  ENDNOTES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PERAMBULATION

  The Mad, Mad World

  Every good history begins with a story. The best of them build bridges through time where one story’s end is lost in the next one’s beginning, like a dragon swallowing its own tail. This one has its origin in a small book on a high shelf that, through a series of accidents, managed to turn up as the key to a curious set of questions about humans and clockwork, power, steam, and machines. A slim little volume, The New Epoch appeared in 1903, but contains a series of lectures given in the last years of the nineteenth century. Its size and antiquity make it practically invisible today; out of print, far from the well-lit shelves of bookstores or even from the bright screens of online purveyors. I only discovered it through someone else’s discovery—the author’s nephew, Elting Morison, found the book in his uncle’s library and worked up his own little volume in 1966, Men, Machines, and Modern Times, and exactly fifty years later, a colleague recommended it to me.* The chances were slim, the timing contrived, and the general obscurity to which the authors had fallen make the entire episode smack of fantasy and fate. But of course that’s how the best stories often begin.

  The earth is old; there continues to be some disagreement about how old, but far older than mankind, and by extension much, much older than that which mankind makes. Technology arrived on this planet, flung from sparks and driven by heat and curiosity and star dust, with all the old means of time and evolution summarily tossed aside. “Within a period so recent that we are practically in the midst of it,” says The New Epoch, “man has acquired a new capacity, which marks as distinct an epoch in civilization as the earlier achievements made in the savage and barbarous life of primitive society.”1 Once, we sought to control power, to harness the horses, to yoke the oxen, to put the human body to work, In this latest age, humans have learned to manufacture power. We’ve become so used to flipping a light switch that we rarely take a moment to think—really think—about what this meant in our history. But to late Victorians, and particularly late Victorian engineers like George Shattuck Morison, the unassuming author of The New Epoch, this was the stuff of dreams. Consider, he asks us: whatever the power of a single machine, that machine can be used to make a better one. Why, the power generated in a Victorian steamship in a single voyage across the Atlantic was enough, Morison estimated, to raise the great Egyptian pyramids.2 We’d come a long way from the Nile in 1896 (when Morison’s first lecture was given), and I turned the pages greedily; I’d discovered a window into a past world and was eager to hear about his designs for the future we now inhabit. Bright with anticipation, certain of ultimate success, and favoring the engineer and maker over the previous century’s philosophers and thinkers, the little book seemed to offer the germ of what we today call steampunk, that hopeful aesthetic of Victorian future-hunting.

  For aficionados, steampunk needs no introduction—but even then, it might need a definition. Nearly every commentary on the subject begins by saying it cannot be defined, that its shape is amorphous and its origin cloudy. Strangely balanced between a nineteenth century that never was and a future that never will be, it’s the stuff of dreams, of nostalgia, of alternate pasts and futures that entice with the suave of James Bond and the savvy of Sherlock Holmes. If you think of it as a fiction genre, it can be traced to the work of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, or linked to the science fiction and fantasy cross-novels of the 1980s and early ’90s—like Infernal Devices by K. W. Jeter or The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Or to the Brian W. Aldiss’s 1973 novel Frankenstein Unbound, or to Mary Shelley’s actual 1818 Frankenstein, or to Alan Moore’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. By being ill-defined, steampunk isn’t much troubled by boundaries and limits. It turns up in film and television, at least as early as The Wild Wild West, which stirred up an eager following in the 1960s, at about the same time Morison’s nephew published Men, Machines, and Modern Times. And today, steampunk has blockbuster potential with movies like The Golden Compass, Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes, The Prestige, or even Van Helsing, and it likewise turns up in “maker” cultures, among do-it-yourselfers, crafters, and costume designers. We arrive, not at a definition, so much as a composite creature.

  Cynthia Miller and Julie Taddeo (editors of Steaming into a Victorian Future) describe “steampunk” as a tension between past and future, anachronistic in its technology and magical in its whirring gears and golden machines. Cherie Priest, the acknowledged “queen of steampunk,” calls it “an aesthetic movement” based on available tech of the time3—before an oil industry, before advanced plastics, before microchips. And with some exceptions, steampunk tends toward the positive; in fact, it’s almost a celebration of what technology might have been, infused with color and life in a way that coal-bound London never could have been. Pop culture philosopher Professor Henry Jenkins claims that science fiction works by asking questions—probing, prodding “annoying” questions—about the nature of technology. But, he’s keen to remind us, steampunk is not “Victorian Science Fiction,” partly because it doesn’t ask questions about the future at all.4 The point is to look backward, back into that safe past which feels for us like solid ground. Of course, preference for the past has been going around almost as long as there have been pasts to prefer. What qualifies steampunk as a new social experiment, worthy of study? And what makes it important to this unfolding tale of men, machines, science, and power? In the end, it all comes down to the clockwork, and to our often futile attempts to order a mad, mad world.

  Imagine the books of China Miéville come to life, a strange combination of Perdido Street Station and Railsea. Now imagine this redesigned in the vein of Mad Max. The extraordinary result might look something like the Neverwas Haul, a steampunk contraption that skirts the Nevada deserts in advance of Burning Man. Roger Whitson, steampunk and Victorian pop culture scholar, describes the Haul as part diesel, part steamship. Its designer and pilot Shannon O’Hare, aka Major Catastrophe, heads up the “Traveling Academy of UnNatural Science.” Driven by “Track Banshees,” women whose “artisanal skills create vehicles of unsurpassed beauty and power,” the wagons literally bring fantasy to life.5 In an often-cited article by James Schafer and Kate Franklin, “Why Steampunk (Still) Matters,” this creative drive turns up as a kind of heroism in an age of faceless technology, an “inherent rejection of disposable consumerist culture and the dominance of our contemporary society by modern day robber barons.”6 To take technology as it is, they argue, steals the gleaming, golden dream and replaces it with something coldly utilitarian. Technology should be about the discov
ery of a great future, a bold vista, a somewhere-out-there, but it should do so without losing the comforting and familiar vibration of gears we see, rails we laid down, bits and pieces we can get our hands on (and our minds around). Whitson goes on to provide the literary and literal history, in brief, the way “steampunk” was coined by K. W. Jeter in 1987 to describe Victorian fantasies that didn’t fit into existing boxes—that amorphous aesthetic we are still trying to pin down. Plenty of lists describe the “call it like you see it” quality of the genre, but there is one thing that seems to be present in all of them, and also in the tinkers, gear-breakers, and costume-play-makers. Beneath, behind, and infusing the mechanism we have the ever present specter of time. Time travel, to be sure, but also a preoccupation with time, with futures and with pasts, and with the original “machine” in its own shapeless, measureless housing: the natural universe in its millennia, expanding, contracting, and ever moving.

  History tends to work only one way, and most of the time, we don’t know when we are “making history.” But when George Morison stood at the edge of his century, he was deeply impressed by the movement of the gears beneath him, what they would require, and even something of what they would cost us. The “inanimate manufactured power,” as he called it in The New Epoch, “is absolutely without sense.”7 It is not moral. This power would “destroy as well as build,” and the new civilization would “wipe out the conditions which preceded it.”8 But this destruction was not, in Morison’s estimation, “right” or “wrong.” It was simply a risk worth taking. I read his words with a growing sense of unease—the little book had started to nag with something like dread. Losses, he concedes, must come. Tribes and cultures and nations may be swept away, in favor of a single over-culture of technology. We must, Morison explains, sacrifice the hardy independence of more “savage” ages for something else—for better food, better clothes, happier individuals, and a time of great peace. Certainly, men may take ill advantage of these new powers, but “the future good of our race lies in utilizing them to the utmost possible extent, and not in trying to retain the good features of conditions which are passing away.”9 The stuff of dreams, all right, but of nightmares too. In fact, this story of technology, clockwork, and power exists precisely at that intersection. On one hand is life and light and possibility—and on the other, death, darkness, dread.

  The bubble of Morison’s golden dreams casts a long shadow over our time. In his sanguine and optimistic predictions, he reminds us of just how much we can’t know about the future. The same shadow of doubt is cast by the words of another man, international, accomplished, and far better known: the eminent French chemist Marcellin Berthelot, in 1894. In April of that year, as guest of honor at the annual banquet of the Chambre Syndicale des Produits Chimiques (Chemical Products Association), he offered a vision of the distant “year 2000.” The digression is worthwhile. “The day will come,” Berthelot predicted, “when everyone will carry for nourishment his little nitrogen pill, his little portion of fats, his little lump of starch or sugar, his small phial of aromatic spices adjusted to his personal taste—all of this inexpensively produced in inexhaustible quantities by our factories.” Chemistry, having solved once and for all the problem of food supply, will have created a utopian world where “mankind will gain in kindness and morality, because he will cease living on the slaughter and destruction of living creatures.” The earth will have become “one vast garden, moistened by the effusion of subterranean springs, where the human race will live in the abundance and happiness of the legendary Golden Age.”10 The irony of these words, just decades before World War I, canker our consciousness of technology’s “triumph”—cheap goods, better food, and the invention of destruction on a scale our ancestors could scarcely imagine outside of an act of God. Not to worry, say these men of vision: “It is premature to say where the compensation for the loss [. . .] will be found, but we may be sure that such compensation will come.”11 Put more simply: these achievements will be better than we can imagine, and they are happening anyway, so why waste time guessing?12 But these technologies ushered in death, not life; war, not peace. A failure of imagination at best, and a devastating lack of ethical consideration at its worst. Today, we stand at the launch pad of technological change that Morison and Berthelot couldn’t have imagined, and we look over the same radical abyss. We are hunting the future, but the past offers a warning and maybe, just maybe, a chance to redirect. What we need, as the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass suggests, is a memory that works both ways.† We want to look backward and forward at once, and this is precisely what steampunk fiction attempts to do. (It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Alice in Wonderland has been so thoroughly “steampunked.”)

  At its most positive, then, steampunk rebels against the hegemony we’ve come to associate with technology (the ubiquity of identical cell phones, for instance). It also allows room for stretching imaginative muscle, for looking back and considering whether we may have done otherwise and better. We live in an age of “smart” phones and 3-D printers, where organ tissue may be grown in jars from stem cells, and where some have thought it prudent to attempt a resurrection of mammoth DNA.‡ We’ve engineered our cities and reverse-engineered our food (presently, there are plans to begin “growing” plant-based eggs).13 At the same time, we’ve arrived at an economic, political, and environmental crisis over our use of oil to fuel this future. The number of articles, books, and programs addressing the horrors of this dependence may only be outstripped by the proliferation of fiction featuring an alternative history: one wherein the combustion engine never reigned at all. Steampunk exists at the intersection of past and present, a playground where steam still powers civilization, but without dampening technological progress. Fabulous fashion, gentlemanly assumptions, and a Victorian style (without the reality of cholera, soot, inequality, and malnutrition that plagued the actual nineteenth century) offer a kind of utopian hope—couldn’t we have done just as well, the genre asks, if we’d never succumbed to a petroleum economy at all? Or perhaps we might reconsider and reimagine the steps that brought us to the Internet, or to mass transit, or remote control weaponry? The Victorian world charms the postmodern reader and seems far less damaged and damaging than the future upon which these destructive technologies have been unleashed. But a “world war” would never have been possible if not for the very devices, networks, and empires built in the nineteenth century. The American engineer and the French chemist weren’t the only ones looking to the future from the cusp of the Victorian Age—others from within it were asking questions, too, and of a piercing and particular kind. Retro-future, a way of looking back to look forward, might just shed light on the juggernaut of the now.

  Jules Verne, the French novelist who brought us Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, Around the World in Eighty Days, and voyages to the moon and the center of the earth, had a profound influence on science fiction. He just as frequently serves as a kind of steampunk forefather, and Verne happens to be Berthelot’s exact contemporary. Historian Alan J. Rocke remarks on the parallels: in addition to being countrymen and roughly the same age, both achieved their earliest major career success in the same year, 1863, when Verne published the first of his hugely popular “Fantastic Voyages” and Berthelot was appointed to his major professorship, a chair specially created for him at the Collège de France. But at a time when the chemist toasted the end of poverty and the regeneration of the earth through science, Verne wrote his only truly dystopian novel—Paris in the 20th Century (Paris au XXe siècle). In it, Verne imagines “engines of war” and other machines for replacing humans. Meanwhile, humans themselves have become machinelike; the cruel tycoon Stanislas Boutardin moves “like a piston” through a future that crackles with electricity and clanks with gears. Verne’s heroes do not rise like zeppelins through the wreck of this mechanized and unfeeling world. They vanish, crushed under the weight of machinery and left to wander a snowy wasteland, lost poets in a world where the humanities (and the hu
man) no longer have meaning. Verne penned it in the early 1860s, but the publishers refused it; forgotten, it only appeared in print in 1994, but his dark reckoning should serve as a stark reminder that even the nineteenth century was not all tea tables and top hats.

  Grim and gritty, without the benefit of child labor laws to protect the innocent or environmental controls to keep us from polluting air and water, the Victorian city housed dark factories and sooty windows. From a medical standpoint, it was a terrifying time of disease and operating theaters that stunk from the offal of dissection, amputation, gangrene. The world, once the province of farmer and field, bounced and clanged on the rails of industrial change. Steam engines, boilers, automatic looms, pump stations, and automobiles brought about radical changes in record time, and human bodies really were crushed under the wheels. If the scientists missed it, the fiction writers did not. In Hard Times, English novelist and playwright Charles Dickens describes some of technology’s abuses: “It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys [. . .] It had a black canal in it and a river that ran purple with ill smelling dye and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.”14 Machinery smacks of chaos and doom. And this fear of technology’s advance reflects backward, causing us to reevaluate those earlier devices that once seemed benign. H. Bruce Franklin, editor of Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century, describes how this occurs. The Industrial Revolution sees the introduction of bizarre and dangerous creations, and increasing numbers of fictional automata too. By 1874, mechanical men were commonplace in novels, as were “vehicles of terror, like the robot in H. D. Jenkins’s ‘Automaton of Dobello’” of 1872.15 And in real factories, as in fictional ones, the danger of worker replacement and human injury were very real; the “Luddites” break automatic looms, and fatalities and injuries from boiler explosions and train catastrophes rise. Charles Dickens himself nearly perishes when a train catapults into a ravine; in the days and months that follow, he loses his voice—or, as he put it, “[I] brought someone else’s [voice] out of that terrible scene.”16 The Victorian age saw the proliferation of science and technology, but by its terminus had to leave behind the belief that all would go on in good order.