[ZodWallop]

On the Grimdark thread I was being a bit of a jerk about what I considered silly genres.

I just read an article that did a better job explaining my opinion than I have done: Identity through Consumption - On Steampunk and the Empty Genre Problem of Consumerist Storytelling

If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, I don't blame you. Here's the relevant points:

Dieselpunk. Biopunk. Fantasy of Manners. Noblebright. Cassette Futurism. Steampunk. These terms ostensibly describe genres of imaginative literature – but can you name a Noblebright book? Can you name a story of Cassette Futurism?

These terms don’t really describe genres, they describe hypothetical genres by plucking out a few aesthetic or conceptual guidelines which could theoretically be developed into a genre of story. More accurately, they describe settings.

And the problem with that is:

When an author chooses a setting, it should be because, along with the other elements of the story, it participates in eliciting the particular theme he wants to show. When Raymond Chandler gives you a private eye pounding the streets of Los Angeles in The Big Sleep, the setting supports his efforts to show how a regular guy can stick to a moral code in a society that’s corrupt from top to bottom, and what that code will cost him.

Boneshaker is “a science fiction novel… combining the steampunk genre with zombies in an alternate history.” But why are there zombies, and why is it steampunk? There’s no meaningful thematic connection in the novel between the zombies, the gears, and the story. In other words, the choice to include them is a purely aesthetic one, completely disconnected from any thematic point to the story.

After slagging Boneshaker, the author does point to positive examples: William Gibson’s The Difference Engine, Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman, where the steampunk setting is more than just set dressing.