Renaissance steampunk... renpunk?
May. 8th, 2009 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI slept most of today, since yesterday was Very Long, and that results in me thinking a lot of random stuff, recombining all the recent input. And after a semester on the Renaissance a lot of that random is about Elizabethan England and associated cultural threads. But I'm trying to write something SF lately, so: Renaissance styled cyberpunk. Steampunk with ruffs. I do not know what to call it. Springpunk? They had springs. But I'm not talking retrotech so much as style. I was thinking slashed sleeves would be great for getting access to input ports, and all those jewels and elaborate miniatures could be memory sticks or LED readouts or shiny little pieces of technological miniaturisation. I saw in an article about Hamlet and the tradition of young men holding skulls that one shape for the casing of a pocket watch was a little silver skull. Imagine your pocket computer in one of them. Or your pocket dead friend brain in a jar equivalent. Kind of like Dresden Files TV Bob, but theoretically non magical. Only if you don't tell people how it works you've got weirdly unbalanced sets of knowledge so for most people it would be in the any-sufficiently-advanced-technology bracket and plenty magic enough.
Also, creepy.
You could sneak up on cybermen that way. Not sure I want to do that. Or have Terminators, who are kind of inside out cybermen. Don't reckon I want that either. So I'm left wondering where I want the balance. Maybe we have a human civilization avoiding tech and unbeknownst to most citizens being between a cyberman civ and a Terminator style civilisation. Balanced between two ways tech can go too far. And that's just the ways with a humanoid shape. The shipbrains will be a total shock to them. Brainships? Lots of brains.
... I kind of like brains in jars.
... and we're back to creepy.
At the center of it all you'd have Gloriana, the untainted, virgin, icon of a supreme ruler. Servalan, but more like the older Queen Elizabeth I, all official pomp and crafted symbolism. Not old yet, but youth with a lot of work gone into it.
And it's not just the look. The renaissance world offers some fascinating ingredients to a dystopia. Highly stratified and status conscious but with the possibility of your children moving up through better education. Everything focuses on the court. The central authority isn't just the head of defence, they're the moral arbiter, the ultimate authority on good and evil. I wouldn't want to make monotheism the enemy, but the idea of omniscient authority that watches your every move comes back around to making sense in a panopticon society. Eyes everywhere, everything known. Elizabeth I had a strong spy service, as well as the kind of internal tensions that require it. The idea of confession is interesting, combined with law enforcement instead of religion. Perhaps the point of public trials and rehabilitation being to get a confession, repentance, the wish to be free of sin... I was already thinking of halos and saints, with the 360 head cam being a hoop shape and the saying attached being any security worker has to be a saint. But without religion what would that mean? Sane+T; t for transit, so nobody watches their own. Sane as in having the mind that all the books say you should, the state deciding what that is, of course. There's an interesting formation of sound alikes around saint sane sanity sanitary sanitation sanitarium. Start with healthy and end up meaning clean. Clean mind. And I just found 'sapient' listed on the thesaurus to mean sane, which has SF pedigree with other meanings. Plus of course the temptation to ship lunatics to the moon when treatment fails. Gets everyone on a ship together. But that wouldn't be very original any way around. Not that original was a renaissance concern. Take the ingredients and use them to express something.
Of central concern in the renaissance was the whole predestination vs free will problem. Is there any time that isn't of central concern? Particular forms involved trying to figure out if the devil ruled your soul, if you were of the elect or if you were damned, or if the whole thing depended on your actions. Translate that a little to biotech, to genetics and planned people, and you have a bit of Gattacca added to the Equilibrium world. Nature and nurture would both be pushing into a particular form, but what if you didn't like which way that was going? And what about the people the state decided were no good from the start? Put it together with the culture that Watches and everyone would be looking for signs all the time: am I sane? Is my neighbour? Have we slipped?
One of the audios I listened to lately had a world of programmed people who reported to their Conscience. I like the way it sounds a bit like science. I also like the way it makes everything a bit medieval morality play, where Conscience is an external person trying to tell you to do stuff, and between you and your Conscience doesn't mean private and internal it means kind of public.
The most important change in Renaissance thinking came from the change in their cosmology, the change from Earth centered to Sun centered thinking. It might not seem relevant to daily life, but it's a whole different universe they're living in once they accept that. Mephistopheles can tell Doctor Faustus about the whole of his reality, from a known hell to a known heaven with a set and known number of spheres in between. He can take a tour of the outer planets and know everything. The universe is fundamentally knowable. But once that turns out to be wrong, once the stars are not just lights on a ceiling but other suns, you have to get your head around the idea the universe is just too big to know, that there is always an unknown out there, a frontier, something to discover. Of course then someone decides that means something to conquer, because humans are frustrating like that. But imagine if we've gone so far we start getting the idea that once again the universe is known, in total, edge to edge and each and all of it. Once again the ordered chain of being of the Elizabethans, with a place for everything and everything in its place, makes sense. You can know all those places, you can predict and number them, you can map them and write a guide book. The ultimate in an ordered universe, restored. A Cosmos again, based in order, chaos banished. One hell of a basis for tyranny. And it's interesting, because there's a feeling now of living in a known world, edge to edge and all in all, that wouldn't have been possible before satellite television and broadband and the rest. The temptation of imposing a single idea structure on the lot and calling it Order has become strong again. What we don't know seems to be rushing away, shrinking.
But we don't live in such a small place. So how would this Cosmos be established in the minds of its citizens? And what happens to the whole setup when you go off the map and Here Be Monsters?
I think I want to play with that. That moment where discovery and exploration and, yeah, conquest, they cease to have the old known limits. But also that moment when you look out across the water and realise they're coming, and they're stronger than you.
Renaissance preoccupations and our own are different but I think a lot of the tensions are still there, and can be played out in big space battles.
Also, in my head, it's all really pretty. Specially the outfits with the silver or gold edges, the fabric cut up so they're basically wearing ribbons, and the tiny flashy clever tech holding it all together.
Also, creepy.
You could sneak up on cybermen that way. Not sure I want to do that. Or have Terminators, who are kind of inside out cybermen. Don't reckon I want that either. So I'm left wondering where I want the balance. Maybe we have a human civilization avoiding tech and unbeknownst to most citizens being between a cyberman civ and a Terminator style civilisation. Balanced between two ways tech can go too far. And that's just the ways with a humanoid shape. The shipbrains will be a total shock to them. Brainships? Lots of brains.
... I kind of like brains in jars.
... and we're back to creepy.
At the center of it all you'd have Gloriana, the untainted, virgin, icon of a supreme ruler. Servalan, but more like the older Queen Elizabeth I, all official pomp and crafted symbolism. Not old yet, but youth with a lot of work gone into it.
And it's not just the look. The renaissance world offers some fascinating ingredients to a dystopia. Highly stratified and status conscious but with the possibility of your children moving up through better education. Everything focuses on the court. The central authority isn't just the head of defence, they're the moral arbiter, the ultimate authority on good and evil. I wouldn't want to make monotheism the enemy, but the idea of omniscient authority that watches your every move comes back around to making sense in a panopticon society. Eyes everywhere, everything known. Elizabeth I had a strong spy service, as well as the kind of internal tensions that require it. The idea of confession is interesting, combined with law enforcement instead of religion. Perhaps the point of public trials and rehabilitation being to get a confession, repentance, the wish to be free of sin... I was already thinking of halos and saints, with the 360 head cam being a hoop shape and the saying attached being any security worker has to be a saint. But without religion what would that mean? Sane+T; t for transit, so nobody watches their own. Sane as in having the mind that all the books say you should, the state deciding what that is, of course. There's an interesting formation of sound alikes around saint sane sanity sanitary sanitation sanitarium. Start with healthy and end up meaning clean. Clean mind. And I just found 'sapient' listed on the thesaurus to mean sane, which has SF pedigree with other meanings. Plus of course the temptation to ship lunatics to the moon when treatment fails. Gets everyone on a ship together. But that wouldn't be very original any way around. Not that original was a renaissance concern. Take the ingredients and use them to express something.
Of central concern in the renaissance was the whole predestination vs free will problem. Is there any time that isn't of central concern? Particular forms involved trying to figure out if the devil ruled your soul, if you were of the elect or if you were damned, or if the whole thing depended on your actions. Translate that a little to biotech, to genetics and planned people, and you have a bit of Gattacca added to the Equilibrium world. Nature and nurture would both be pushing into a particular form, but what if you didn't like which way that was going? And what about the people the state decided were no good from the start? Put it together with the culture that Watches and everyone would be looking for signs all the time: am I sane? Is my neighbour? Have we slipped?
One of the audios I listened to lately had a world of programmed people who reported to their Conscience. I like the way it sounds a bit like science. I also like the way it makes everything a bit medieval morality play, where Conscience is an external person trying to tell you to do stuff, and between you and your Conscience doesn't mean private and internal it means kind of public.
The most important change in Renaissance thinking came from the change in their cosmology, the change from Earth centered to Sun centered thinking. It might not seem relevant to daily life, but it's a whole different universe they're living in once they accept that. Mephistopheles can tell Doctor Faustus about the whole of his reality, from a known hell to a known heaven with a set and known number of spheres in between. He can take a tour of the outer planets and know everything. The universe is fundamentally knowable. But once that turns out to be wrong, once the stars are not just lights on a ceiling but other suns, you have to get your head around the idea the universe is just too big to know, that there is always an unknown out there, a frontier, something to discover. Of course then someone decides that means something to conquer, because humans are frustrating like that. But imagine if we've gone so far we start getting the idea that once again the universe is known, in total, edge to edge and each and all of it. Once again the ordered chain of being of the Elizabethans, with a place for everything and everything in its place, makes sense. You can know all those places, you can predict and number them, you can map them and write a guide book. The ultimate in an ordered universe, restored. A Cosmos again, based in order, chaos banished. One hell of a basis for tyranny. And it's interesting, because there's a feeling now of living in a known world, edge to edge and all in all, that wouldn't have been possible before satellite television and broadband and the rest. The temptation of imposing a single idea structure on the lot and calling it Order has become strong again. What we don't know seems to be rushing away, shrinking.
But we don't live in such a small place. So how would this Cosmos be established in the minds of its citizens? And what happens to the whole setup when you go off the map and Here Be Monsters?
I think I want to play with that. That moment where discovery and exploration and, yeah, conquest, they cease to have the old known limits. But also that moment when you look out across the water and realise they're coming, and they're stronger than you.
Renaissance preoccupations and our own are different but I think a lot of the tensions are still there, and can be played out in big space battles.
Also, in my head, it's all really pretty. Specially the outfits with the silver or gold edges, the fabric cut up so they're basically wearing ribbons, and the tiny flashy clever tech holding it all together.