This week has been dominated by one major thing for me, an that's been booking the Asylum. The Asylum is Europe's, if not the World's, biggest Steampunk convention held every year for the past four years in Lincoln, UK. We wanted to go last year but missed out, mostly because of being unable to afford it and going to see Owl City instead, but this year we've decided to save up and go, at the expense of a holiday.
I should probably back up a bit here, as some of you may have got confused the moment I said 'Steampunk'... It's a hard concept to explain, especially when the word contains the word 'punk', but I shall try my best to explain my view on this rapidly growing subculture. The way I see it, punk means going against society's expectations, which in the 70s meant anarchy and destroying symbols of authority, but today society seems to expect this sort of behaviour whether it's due to chavs vandalising local amenities or country-wide riots, so the central ethos of steampunk is the old British motto of 'keep calm and have a cup of tea', therefore defying society's expectations in a different way. Once the punk part has been explained, only then do I get asked what steam has to do with it, and the simple answer is because we glorify the age of steam. Of course, it's not as clear cut as that either- steam engines don't need to be involved for something to be steampunk. It would be more correct to say it's a glorification of mechanics over electric, for something to be steampunk it needs to have mechanisms rather than buttons.
Many people try to explain steampunk as being a victorian aesthetic with gears and cogs, and if you search for steampunk on etsy then you'll find plenty of examples of 'stick a cog on it and call it steampunk', but that just doesn't work- yes, put cogs and gears on it but they have to create the illusion of functionality at the very least. It should also be said that not all steampunks believe things should be exactly as they were back before the invention of electricity (though that is the style I'm attempting with my 'past' blog), instead it is very much a case of how would things be today if electricity wasn't invented. This leads to the image of Zeppelins in the sky, and all sorts of contraptions based on modern inventions but steam-powered, like variations on automobiles, though there's also an element of the fantastic and things that aren't quite possible, which is why Jules Verne and H.G Wells are considered the grandfathers of steampunk. It must also be said that another central aspect of steampunk is the plausibility of something working- for instance, that we could replace airplanes with Zeppelins- but the limitation of if such things were created they would be wildly impractical and often outright dangerous- for instance, the Hindenburg.
So all of that being said, what is the Asylum? It's a place where several hundred like-minded people can gather together, dress in whatever style they deem appropriate and fits whatever the individual prefers best; which to me is a Dickensian attire and to my girlfriend is like a desert explorer similar to Indiana Jones, but to others could involve golem-esque suits, brass angel wings, colonial military costume, or even pirates. Once there then there are various workshops on how to make things, probably modifying nerf guns and the like (something we are working on ourselves), a grand market usually inside the prison with each cell containing a stall, and book signings by up and coming steampunk authors hopefully including Robert Rankin, culminating in a ball and other musical entertainment in the evening, even with a bit of adult cabaret (which we probably won't get involved in) and a zombie survival game utilising said nerf guns. All of this is contained within the castle at Lincoln, and suffice to say we are very much looking forward to it and being a part of what will hopefully become the modern equivalent of the goth movement of the 80s, though without those pesky emos sullying our good image.
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