(A concurrent session delivered at the 2003 Children's Book Council of Australia Conference in Hobart, Tasmania.)

The title for this session is “Steampunk – the new Genre”. I do wonder if it shouldn’t perhaps be called “Steampunk – A new genre”. Or perhaps it’s not a new genre at all, just a slightly different way of looking at genres which already exist.

In the last few years much has been said, written and discussed about the role of fantasy in children’s literature. I really didn’t want to use the HP word, but I do suspect that the use of the words fantasy and children’s literature in the one sentence make it something of an inevitability, so buckle up.

If Harry Potter has taught us one thing, it is that children will begin, devour, complete and re-read a 700 page book if it engages them. Is it the use of magic as a major point of plot which captures the young reader’s attention and makes it so very appealing? Of course, but it’s far more beside. It’s also the fact that the magical powers possessed by the characters allow the child reader to enter a place of vicarious fantasy, where a word or a look or a twitch of a wand can bring about dramatic changes in their world. Or put more simply, the reader is taken into a parallel reality where mystery, skulduggery, bravery and intrigue are de rigueur and banality is to be scorned. The short name for what we’re describing is Adventure, of course, and it will never go out of fashion. Nor should it.

In a SMH article in 2000, Sally Loane wrote rapturously of Rowling’s creation, and strongly criticised what she saw at the time as a welter of “gritty realism” for kids within the Australian children’s scene. She – and others – said that when they were growing up they devoured the works of Enid Blyton and her ilk. She’s not alone in this almost reverential and fawning adoration for Blyton and her post-Kipling egg sandwich and ginger-beer British public school affectations. Although I found Famous Five intolerably twee, I was an avid fan of other adventure literature – Swallows and Amazons, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, the Narnia books, Moby Dick and Treasure Island. These books played an enormously important role in my boyhood interest in story, since I grew up in Fiji, where the entertainment options afforded a pre-adolescent boy were two-fold: read, or play. I recall that one day my father, who was studying children’s literature at the time, received a box from Australia. Across the top was written, in large letters, “Caution: books.” Caution indeed? I subsequently spirited them away to my room and they became my instant library. My friend Shannon and I proceeded to use these books as screenplays for our imaginative play, and this in turn reinforced the power of story for us. It was then, at the age of ten or eleven, that I knew I wanted to be a writer, and that I would not be satisfied until I’d achieved that goal. Adventure books were our staple, and looking back, nothing else would have ever done.

Having said that, I do believe that there is a place for children’s books that deal with the “tougher issues” - I’ve written some of them. But I also understand and whole-heartedly agree that there is a place for unabashed, unapologetic, adventure stories, where the heroes are faced with impossible odds and mostly win, where villians are uncompromising and cunning, and the reader can feel breathlessly excited from the safety of their couch. Escapism? Of course, but what’s so wrong with that? Just so long as we refuse to let ourselves be fooled into thinking that our protaganists have to possess magical powers and wear a cape monogrammed with a big H. There is more to Adventure than Hogwarts. Despite what many children and quite a few adults would lead us to believe, Joanne Rowling didn’t invent Adventure. On the first page of the sample teaser for Ichabod Hart and the Lighthouse Mystery is a pencil drawing of a steam locomotive. The other day a teenager accused me of plaigarising Harry Potter. “That’s the Hogwarts Express,” she said accusingly. It surprised her to discover that Rowling didn’t invent steam trains, and she sure as hell didn’t invent adventure.

So to the topic at hand, which may now be taking on something of a diminished level of importance – Steampunk. Steampunk? What’s Steampunk? I’m so glad you asked. Steampunk is high adventure with a capital H. And whilst the term might be new to most, there’s nothing really all that new in steampunk. Victorian-era speculative fiction, it came out of the role-playing traditions of Cyberpunk and, to a lesser degree, Dungeons and Dragons, and is a sub-genre of fantasy and science fiction. Speculative fiction is often referred to as alternate history, and there’s certainly nothing new in that. I would argue that every work of “real-world” fiction is in its own way an alternate version of history, a recount of events which never actually took place but could have, within the framework of the world we know. And occasionally even the future is implicated – I challenge anyone to look at John Marsden’s Tomorrow series in the context of current world events and try to deny that it’s eerily apt.

Speculative fiction simply takes this idea of fact-rooted make-believe one step further, by asking “what if?” Often this is done by looking not necessarily at the future, but at a different possibilty of the past, very frequently in a political sense,. What if Hitler had succeeded in everything he set out to achieve? What if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if Queen Victoria had had access to an atomic bomb, or an ICBM? What if the American Civil War had ended differently, or the Crimean War, or the first Gulf War? The Crusades? What if George W Bush had done the honourable thing and conceded to Al Gore? What if the redcoats had defeated the rebels? What if Paul Revere couldn’t find his lantern? Or in the case of my new series, what if 1901 Australia had been half English and half French, as agreed in uneasy treaties following the Napoleonic Wars? What if in 1901 the capital of New South Wales was situated at Nelson Bay, and Port Jackson was nothing more than market gardens and a dropping-off point for the convicts, brought here in steamships? What if those convicts had been physically modified to work more efficiently in steel mills and coal mines? What if someone other than the Wright Brothers (a young boy from New South Wales flying a steam-powered Ornithocycle, for example) won the race to powered flight?

I noticed some time ago that whilst steampunk is a recognised fantasy/sci-fig sub-genre for adult readers, the children seemed to be largely missing out. This struck me as incredible. So much scope for adventure! Cool technologies, a dark and sinister setting within a society of enormous class disparity, a glimpse forward to an age of cultural and technological wonder held back only by the physical shortcomings of tools, materials and media. Add that other ubiquitous factor – children left somewhat to their own devices to solve a great mystery – and all the ingredients that made adventure books exciting through the golden age of children’s literature return with interest.

There is one other wonderful bonus to stories told in this open-ended way – the reader is freed from the knowledge of what must ultimately happen in the end if history is to be honoured. The story is no longer a detour from what really happened, but a separate journey with an unknown destination. Was anyone surprised when James Cameron drove the Titanic into an iceberg? Did anyone expect to see a director’s cut where it misses the iceberg by inches and carries on safely to New York? Of course not, because the characters were telling us their own stories against the backdrop of one we already knew. This need not be the case with speculative fiction. Perhaps Queen Victoria will fire that missile. Perhaps James Cook will say “Bugger it, there’s probably nothing there. Besides, Tahiti’s nice – I think I might have another pina colada.” Could it be that Arthur Phillip says to La Perouse, “You were here first – you have it.” Perhaps Charles Lindbergh does survive, and is presently enjoying anonymity in the Maldives with Elvis Presley and Joe DiMaggio. Anything – literally anything – is possible.

Which brings me to my own greatest frustration with science fiction and fantasy, and therefore my greatest personal hurdle to writing in either of those genres until now. It has always seemed to me that by their very definition, both groups of work remain overwhelmingly committed to falling back on the same devices, scenarios and clichés we’ve seen and read a thousand times. Tolkien was entitled to use wizards, sorcerers, elves and orcs – he was the first to really tap into all that cool Norse myth stuff in a popularised way. Likewise Asimov with his robots. But these mental images should not define the genres from which they are taken, and of which they have become definitive icons, even cliches. We are continually reminded that the fiction writer is blessed with the gift of an active and vivid imagination. Do we not therefore have some small obligation to be using them, rather than merely regurgitating the same fantasy and sci-fi stories? For example, consider science fiction, which is fiction with a certain grounding in scientific principles. It is unlikely that most of Jules Verne’s inventions could have worked in reality, and yet they are utterly plausible as we read about them. That is science fiction. And good science fiction, good fantasy, good fiction in all its forms, should really not be that far departed from believable reality. And for the writer of fiction that flirts with the boundaries between reality and utter implausibility the onus is that much the greater to depict that world, that other reality in such a way that the reader is totally drawn into that world. Suspension of disbelief, they call it. And it is this which makes well-written fiction in any genre such a refreshing, exciting and challenging thing to read. And to write, for that matter.

China Mieville, the critically acclaimed steampunk writer who wrote the brilliant The Scar, has this to say on the topic of fantasy:

Two untrue things are commonly claimed about fantasy. The first is that fantasy and science fiction are fundamentally different genres. The second is that fantasy is crap.

It's usually those who claim the first who also claim the second. The idea is that where SF is radical, exploratory and intellectually adventurous, fantasy is badly written, clichéd and obsessed with backwards-looking dreams of the past - feudal daydreams of Good Kings and Fair Maidens.

It's easy enough to distinguish the writers at the far edges of the spectrum - Asimov versus Eddings, for example. But the problem with the 'sharp divide' argument is the number of writers - often very brilliant ones - who fall in the middle, who blur the lines. These are writers for whom the 'fantastic' is not ethereal and wispy but tough and real, where 'magic' operates like science or science magic, and where the sense of subversion, of alienation, of sheer strangeness that saturates their work defies easy categorisation as SF or fantasy.

That's the tradition that I'm interested in - I see myself as writing Weird Fiction. And as soon as you see that as your foundations, then the idea that fantasy is crap disappears.

When people dis fantasy - mainstream readers and SF readers alike - they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps - via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on - the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine - that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it - Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters?

Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge.

The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.

(China Mieville)

I may attract a certain amount of flak for what I say next, but I must confess that I find Tolkien practically unreadable. I’m sorry if that sounds heretical, but it’s how it is. The father of fantasy and all those claims are true enough, but that doesn’t make it easy to read. For all his historical kudos, Tolkien the author should not be excused from the first rule of creative writing – hook your reader early. He doesn’t hook me. I find it hard going. I don’t care enough for his characters, and for me, character is everything.

But for all that, and despite what Mieville says, and despite what I’ve just said, I still believe that Tolkien is worthy of considerable respect. Why? Because of the world he created. He understood better than most that time spent creating a world complete with geography, history, cultures, languages would be a worthwhile investment. A lot of that groundwork would never be openly exposed within his narrative, and yet like a teabag in hot water, the flavour suffused through the work and lent it a certain legitimacy. On the surface of it, Lord of the Rings is little more than a good vs evil scenario played out over three very long books. But what does make it clever and great is the world the author creates.

Rowling is a similar deal. Harry Potter is appealing not for the characters within the stories – for character development Holden Caulfield, Ponyboy and Piggy each individually make an embarrassment of Harry, Hermione and friends – but for the world she creates. The reader can sink back into another reality, and it is this which keeps bringing the reader back. It is this which gives the reader a tingle. Narnia is yet another example of this, a fairly bog-standard good v evil fantasy tale on the face of it, but the world Lewis created lives within all of us.

I spend more time on character than plot when I write, and my characters do what characters do, there are good ones, bad ones, characters the reader’s not sure about, characters the reader accepts reluctantly, gleefully, wholeheartedly. But what sets Steampunk apart is the world, which at first glance seems no different from our own. The Victorian airs and graces, the class disparity, the Imperial system of honour and undying allegiance. But then come the technologies. And the smog.

Let’s talk about those technologies. Simply put, simplistically put, everything is steam-powered. Computers, aircraft, rocket-ships, submarines, practically everything. So how is that so different from any work of realist fiction set in 1900, since steam was all they had anyway? Because knowledge and philosophy should be considered technologies as well. It is as if the characters within the story have a certain predictive capability. Inventors living in the nineteenth century invented devices to better enable them to perform tasks they were already performing, or that they could see themselves performing if only a small problem could be overcome. The telegraph, for example. The zeppelin. The automobile. Each of these inventions solved an existing problem, but without knowing what the endpoint would or could be – how to communicate more quickly, how to travel more quickly, or in the case of the first locomotive service, how to transport coal more quickly. If they could have seen forward to a grander endpoint, their technologies would surely have developed differently. Perhaps not faster, just differently.

If Bill Gates were to return to the Victorian age now, would he be satisfied with slide-rule and pencil? Certainly not – he’d immediately pour all of his resources, mental and fiscal, into developing something which could perform mathematical calculations quickly, accurately and easily. And one that wouldn’t have to be rebooted every five minutes, if possible please, Mr Gates. Any half-decent high school physics student transported back in time could show the Wright Brothers how it was done in a couple of afternoons, because they’ve seen what would be ultimately achievable. The dambusters would have had that valley flooded in no time, had they known that a skipping bomb was the solution they needed at the very beginning. After that first idea, it’s just about physics. Imagine how different our world would be if some kid in ancient Greece had thought to develop an explosive black powder capable of ejecting a missile from a barrel at deadly speed. Or if some Spaniard had known enough to think laterally about a ship that could sail underwater. And once you know what that final technological destination is, getting there using only contemporary resources is the key, and that is what makes steampunk so cool. I’ve drifted away from the Victorian era somewhat, but I’ve done that deliberately, because steampunk isn’t really just about steam. Sometimes it’s not about steam at all. What it’s about is technologies and forward-thinking knowledge, and not just by the good guys. And all of this adds colour and legitimacy to the world, which in turn provides the reader with the drug that keeps them coming back to fiction – that familiar feeling of slipping away into a different reality.

I became interested in steampunk some time ago, but unlike most other fans, I didn’t come to it from a deep understanding and knowledge of fantasy. I’ve never been a big fantasy reader, mostly because of the frustrations I described earlier. Perhaps this has been an advantage, in the light of my earlier assertion that cliché is the bane of fantasy. People claim you have to know the rules before you can break them. Perhaps, but you know what? I don’t really care. I never set out to write a work of fantasy or of sci-fi, or of any specific classification at all, except fiction, and fiction that kids could access. I simply did what I always do – I had a certain feel for a place and people in my head, and started telling their story, not at all sure where they would take me. The mood and the flavour, the RM Ballantyne voice, the structure, the setting each came out of … I’m not really sure where. I never am. What I do know is that I didn’t plan to write a book falling somewhere between this author and that author. I simply related a story I liked in a style I felt comfortable using.

My real interest in steampunk began with a name, I suppose. Lots of names, in fact, after I became quite interested in the American Civil War. And those guys all had such cool names – Ulysses, and Artemis, and Shyler and Colfax. And Ichabod. Ichabod Crane, of Sleepy Hollow fame, played in the movie by that ultimate gothic innocent, Johnny Depp. And other names, also from movies – Emmett Brown from the Back To The Future movies, the third of which was Western Steampunk, yet another sub-genre. Yes, I am unashamed to admit that I came to fantasy through movies, chiefly because I found fantasy literature pretty damned inaccessible.

I originally wanted to use the name Artemis, but Eoin Colfer beat me to the punch with that one, so I settled for Ichabod. Ichabod Hayes Hart – all the great Wild West heroes seem to have three names. Clementine Arabella Oakes, Ichabod’s sidekick; Shyler Colfax Bowman, the rail millionaire; and the Major Ulysses Rutherford Marshall, who from memory borrows his names from a Civil War General and two American railroad tycoons.

And that whole world of tycoons and the American rail wars across the desert was where steam began to leak into my imagination. Steam was grand, steam was power, steam was fickle, steam was about patiently coaxing along a volatile collection of metal and high-pressure vapour. Until steam came along, mankind was reliant on organic means of transport – oxen, horses, our own legs. Then came this remarkable harnessing of science, and suddenly we were able to travel at genuinely dangerous speeds, we could place our lives in the hands of strangers while they conveyed us through the countryside at a ridiculous and patently insane pace.

The fascination in trains in general, steam in particular, has not vanished. What is that fascination? Where does the “romance” come from? I think it’s about destiny. Once you board a train you’re somewhat locked into the destination you’ve chosen. It’s then up to you as the passenger to sit back and contemplate the journey, without responsibility, nor an escape route from the destination you’ve selected for yourself.

I didn’t understand this until I started researching steam. But by then I was hooked. And I saw a tremendous opportunity to scratch out another world, where the characters weren’t bound by conventional technologies, but could explore new branches of science within the reasonable bounds of the era.

This was before I’d ever heard the word steampunk, although I should be clear that I am not claiming to have discovered or invented the genre. I guess I simply stumbled into it. I told a friend what I was planning, all full of excitement and fervour, and he said, “Yeah, there’s a name for that. It’s called steampunk.” But was anyone writing it for kids? No, not as far as I could tell.

And just as is the case with any genre, there are gradations and shades within steampunk. The steampunk I write is not that far removed from the world of the real 1900. There’s no magic, no weird chemistry, just a political tweak here and there, and a couple of machines that could almost work in real life, given the budget and the desire. Some steampunk writers, however, dive headlong into magic and spells within the context of the Victorian age, with ships made from anti-gravity wood hewn from secret Martian forests, and half man-half crustacean he-crays. For some writers it’s about the physical technologies, for others it’s the political landscape. Some writers write the darkest of dark, so dark it brings nightmares to the minds of his readers, too dark for any children’s book. And again, in yet another way, that diversity within the genre ensures that steampunk is not really different at all. Or if it is, it’s little more than a momentary blip on the radar of variety in literature today. It’s just another face in the crowd, momentarily catching the attention before it blends in with all the others.

All things considered, then, this steampunk caper isn’t really that much of a departure from any of the forms which have traditionally made children’s books exciting and adventuresome. This is pure and simple adventure, featuring kids who should really know better taking on nasty grownups who definitely should know better. Except this time around there’s no Nurse to tuck them in after supper, just pickpockets and ne’er-do-wells. This is Biggles in a steam train, Famous Five in the Rocks, Edward Scissorhands skulking around after Beattie Bow.

Is this a blending of too many genres into one “new” one? Perhaps, but anyone who doesn’t like it doesn’t have to rea it. I think that children these days are truly blessed. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to speak about boys and books, and the number of times (roughly the same number) the conclusion has been reached that reluctant male readers are entitled to books which hit them in the chest and give them something they can latch onto. Name a genre, name a sub-genre, and there’ll be something out there for practically every reader. The breadth and diversity of themes, styles and characters is ever-expanding. I can’t keep up, and as a writer, every new fiction sub-genre strikes me as a new opportunity. It’s exciting and it’s daunting. Was a time when a bookshop was intimidating to a writer simply on the basis of volume. Now it’s on the basis of what people are writing about. Look at the children’s scene alone: the CBC has even added another category to the awards just to loosen the log-jam! Historical fiction, historical fantasy fiction, high fantasy, medieval fantasy, science fiction fantasy, magical fantasy, time-warp fantasy, outer-space exploration, inner-space exploration, futuristic realism, historical realism, John Marsden, war books, books about wartime, books about peacetime, sex issues, bullying issues, what Bill Condon calls “baked-bean books,” Lemony Snicket, John Larkin, JK Rowling, the hundreds of people who I suspect write as RL Stine, Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High, Ghost High, verse novels, verse collections, classic re-releases, picture books for youger readers, older readers, intermediate readers, books for established readers, reluctant readers, readers gaining confidence, readers needing confidence, books about teen pregnancies, teen abortions, teen mothers, kids hooked on drugs, kids dying from drugs, suicide, attempted suicide, books about multiculturalism, books about sport, books about multiculturalism through sport, books by Aboriginal writers about Aboriginality, books by non-Aboriginal writers about Aboriginality, books that use the word bum several thousand times, books that would never dream of featuring the word bum at all, books that take themselves too seriously, books that don’t, collections of short stories written for profit, collections of short stories written for charity, books that challenge, books that don’t, and Gary Crew. And that’s just a very small sample, and we haven’t even started on the non-fiction.

So in the context of all that, is steampunk really a new genre at all? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll let you decide how much importance we should lend it. Besides which, in this age of diversity, this new golden age of children’s literature, isn’t it all rather academic in the light of the ultimate test, which is this: will the kids read it? My answer is that if they do, it was important enough.

(Special note: Big word-up to Shannon Roy for his contribution to the planning of this address. His insight into fiction in general, SF in particular, was, as ever, invaluable. Cheers, mate.

(c) James Roy 2003