Assessing Steampunk’s Future: The Test Case of The Gaslight Dogs

• Authors: Terri Doughty

Title variants

PL

Przyszłość steampunku? Casus The Gaslight Dogs

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Steampunk as a literary genre is at a key point in its evolution. There is disagreement on the definition of the genre, with prescriptivists insisting that the genre must remain true to its roots in neo-Victorian technological retrofuturism, thereby locating it primarily in the Transatlantic industrial world dominated by imperial Britain, and descriptivists wanting to open up the definition to create space for steampunk to move beyond the boundaries of the nineteenth-century, Europe, and the Industrial Revolution. This paper explores how Canadian author Karin Lowachee’s The Gaslight Dogs (2010), a novel that appears not to contain many of the tropes of steampunk, can be classified as such if the understanding of steampunk technology as technofantasy is permitted to be more fantastic than technical in a Western, scientific sense. This redefinition has significant implications in terms of creating space within the genre for fictions to be set among and articulate the worldview of Indigenous cultures that have developed their own technologies, not industrialised technologies. If steampunk is to continue to be a vital genre rather than becoming stale and formulaic, development of more multicultural steampunk books, like The Gaslight Dogs, is necessary to continue pushing the boundaries of the genre. Multicultural steampunk fiction also continues the genre’s interrogation of imperial power relations by decentring Western imperial powers with their industrialised technologies.

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego
• Journal: Literatura i Kultura Popularna
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 20
• Pages: 39 - 48

Contributors

author

Terri Doughty

• Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo (Canada)