The third issue of the Steampunk Magazine’s just hit the ‘net. Full of great stuff as always.
The Q’n'A with Alan Moore’s been my favourite so far. Especially this part:
Do you have any thoughts about steampunk as an aesthetic or its potential as a culture?
Well I think that steampunk, if I’m reading it rightly, is a kind of a manifestation of an ethos that is becoming more prevalent in culture today. It seems to me that at this juncture of the 21st century we are more aware of ourselves—we are more aware of our past—than culture has ever been before. Because of the internet, because of our tremendous archives that we’ve accrued, the culture of the past is open to us. And as we look at it, we can see that it’s a fabulous junkyard of ideas that may have been incredibly beautiful—and may have had an awful lot of life left in them—that have been discarded by the relentless forward rolling of culture and our insistence upon new things every day. I think that we’re now in a position where we can look back at the wonderful, glorious remains of our previous cultures—our previous mindsets—and we can use elements from that treasure trove to actually craft things that are appropriate to our future.
I think that in many respects that is the definition of “decadence” as it was given by the decadent writer Théophile Gautier who said that the decadent writer should feel free to borrow from the most gorgeous and sumptuous of ancient legends, and at the same time should borrow from technical vocabularies—from the most up-to-date pieces of writing—to be able to bring the past and the future and the present all into a kind of glorious stew. And I think that at its best, that is perhaps what steampunk is attempting. It is taking these abandoned elements that probably got nothing wrong with them at all and were perfectly functional but had simply been left by the wayside, from our previous culture, and putting them together in a new way in order to create ideas that will help us to extend ourselves into the future. I mean that seems to me to be what steampunk, whether consciously or not, is doing.
I think that that art, technology, media, this is all changing the basic way in which we see time. I think that until fairly recently we’ve seen the progress of time as a kind of conveyor belt where we are dragged through it from the past into the future; there’s nothing we can do about it, and the landscape of our past—once the conveyor belt has left it behind—is gone forever. Whereas that’s not true at all: all of the ideas of the past, which are the most precious commodities of the past, are all still entirely within reach. And I think that some people, like perhaps the steampunk writers, are realizing that it’s possible to embrace the past as a means of progressing into the future. It is not simple nostalgia. That would get tired really quickly. It’s essential that there be some progressive, forward-looking aspect to the way that we utilize these bright fragments of previous culture. Looked at from my perspective, where I’m not consciously a steampunk, I would think that that is probably what it’s about.