Gearing Up

A new magazine, the Gatehouse Gazette, has just published its first issue. It features steampunk and dieselpunk-related articles, fiction and photos by the members of the Smoking Lounge MB. I happen to have an article in there myself. I recommend you check it out!

I recently saw the new Get Smart movie. On its own, it was amusing, but more than that it made me a bit nostalgic for the original TV show. Watching Max answer his shoe phone, I began thinking about how the ridiculous technology of the spy genre seems like a natural progression from the dieselpunk era.

I mentioned this to my friend Xandra and she suggested we call it spypunk.

So how would I define this theoretical spypunk genre? It shares the penchant for gadgetry that the other punks show, in this case focusing on small gadgets that mimic harmless items. Rather than dieselpunk’s usual Nazi enemies, the Cold War is all the rage, and thus there is some obvious overlap with what has been named atomicpunk.

The key difference, in my mind, is that spypunk focuses on the efforts of individuals, almost like a throwback to the Victorian era’s detectives and gentlemen adventurers. Both era’s heroes work on their own, but often in concert with a greater organization and have a patriotism that is often lacking in dieselpunk outside of the narrow WWII window.

As examples of the genre, I would cite the aforementioned Get Smart, the ubiquitous James Bond in virtually all of his iterations, and the classic Avengers series out of Britain. Austin Powers might also fit snugly in this genre. What do you think?

Some people have complained that the motorcycle styling in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was incorrect, though it was built for the film. Personally, I think it’s just evidence that Indiana Jones takes place in an alternate universe with advanced motorcycle technology.

The original three Indiana Jones films are some of the finest pieces of dieselpunk out there, even if they were made well before the term was coined. They are absolute love letters to the pulp adventures of the 30s, well-made and exciting, with a great mix of real archaeology, myth, and technology.

Varying critical opinions on the new Indy film notwithstanding, (hey, I loved it) it does raise an interesting question. Considerable time has passed since the first three films, and not just for those of us watching the movies — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is set in 1957, a pretty late date for dieselpunk.

It is an unfortunate fact of time that it passes, and since we’re dealing with genres that are rooted in specific times (even if they don’t necessarily take place in those times) we must take into account the passage of time. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen eventually ran into this problem in The Black Dossier: given a long enough story, you will run out of Victorian era to adventure in. But does this make The Black Dossier dieselpunk?

How much does any -punk genre depend strictly on the calendar, and how much on the feel of the piece? Crystal Skull still has all the pulp feel of the first three Indy movies, despite the overhanging threat of atomic war, and the Communists as villains still feel very much like the Nazis in the first three films. I would say that all four Indiana Jones films fit firmly in the dieselpunk genre because of their feel. Indy’s can-do spirit and the sense that an adventure is always a good idea still pervade the film, and I think that says more about a genre than a date does.