Benjamin's Reviews > Infernal Devices

If you need to fake your way through a Steampunk cocktail party, here's what you need to know about Infernal Devices and K. W. Jeter:

a) Jeter jokingly coined the term "steampunk" in a 1987 letter to Locus to describe "Victorian fantasies," which he predicted were going to be the next big thing (unclear whether that prediction was a joke);
b) this book involves the mechanically inept son of a clockwork inventor, who has inherited dear old dead dad's London shop, full of mysterious clockwork pieces; and those clockwork pieces lead him into a clandestine war between secret societies and mad inventors;
c) there is a clockwork automaton, which fits what we think of as steampunk;
d) and there are human-fishmen hybrids and hints of other Lovecraftian beasties (or possibly hoaxes), which does not fit what we usually think of as steampunk (with some notable exceptions, like The Steampunk Trilogy).

When I think "steampunk," I think of something very much like the formula Vandermeer gives in the afterword to this book:

mad inventor + invention (steam x airship or metal person/robot) x [pseudo]Victorian setting + progressive/reactionary/neutral politics x adventure plot

What's curious about this older steampunk novel how closely it fits that formula... And also how it includes many other elements that don't fit into that formula but do fit in very well with the idea of it being (pace the subtitle) "A Mad Victorian Fantasy." For instance, and most obviously, the fishmen sure seem Lovecraftian, but we could also see them in the lineage of animal-people (Wells/Moreau) or lost-race stories (Haggard). Also, while secret societies aren't rare in today's steampunk (I think), Jeter comes close to the feverish Victorian interest in social organizations, from public anti-vice society to secret scientific society. (And as Vandermeer notes, it's easy to put the fishmen-hybrid slavery/prostitution ring into conversation with certain "decadent" writers, like Wilde--easy to imagine Dorian Gray patronizing one of these establishments.)

It's interesting to see what this book gave to other writers (and the makers who enjoy steampunk material culture) and what those later workers in the genre didn't take. That's all blah blah historical growth of the genre stuff that I love to think about and you--I don't know how much you care about it. But if nothing else, take this away: there may be interesting steampunk work being done now that expands beyond the white male main character/Anglo-imperial setting--but this isn't it.

Jeter's most interesting thematic doesn't have to do with race or gender, but with the inevitable march of time--the death of a species due to technological progress, the loss of sexual and economic innocence in two characters who have absorbed future moral-stances, the replacement of hand-made artifice by the loss of work. Jeter kind of indicates this in his new foreword, talking about how today's technological design is meant to look smooth, whereas Victorian technology is an irruption, impossible to mistake for the mass-made and the human.

But I have to be honest, as fun as the story is, and as much as a point Jeter may have (eh, maybe, so-so), Jeter makes a couple of strange choices that hold this novel back from being great. The main character narrates the story, and his voice is great; but he's also an unimaginative and uneducated, so doesn't really understand most of what's going on around him. Which means that he spends a great deal of this book being lectured to about what's really going on. On top of that, the book is very episodic, with characters changing sides in ways that make sense, but don't necessarily help the pacing.