Illustration by J.K. Potter for Subterranean Press
By Mary Platt
Photo illustration by Ryan Tolentino
Chapman English professor Jim Blaylock co-created a literary genre that has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon. im Blaylock’s tiny office in the basement of Wilkinson Hall, bedecked with quirky art and barely large enough to contain his desk and packed bookshelves, is one of the more modest professorial abodes on campus. The tall English professor welcomes you into his lair with a friendly twinkle in his eye, and in a moment you’re swept up in his tale: a creation myth that’s no myth at all; an origin legend that is completely true; a story of places, people and machines that never existed and yet, to his readers, are as real as the floor they stand on and the air they breathe. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Blaylock — along with his friends and fellow writers K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers — invented the “steampunk” literary genre that has become a worldwide cultural, fashion and music movement. If you’ve seen the 1999 movie Wild Wild West, or the recent Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies, or the films The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Van Helsing, you’ve experienced steampunk: It’s fantasy or speculative fiction that postulates an alternate past (usually a Victorian setting) in which anachronistic machines are powered by the technology available in that era, usually clockwork gears and steam. Blaylock, Jeter and Powers met while they were students at Cal State Fullerton, all
in the orbit of the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who taught at CSUF. Jeter’s Morlock Night (1979), Powers’ The Anubis Gates (1983) and Blaylock’s Homunculus (1986) pioneered steampunk before the genre even had a name. It was Jeter, in a letter to the science fiction and fantasy magazine Locus in 1987, who coined the term: “Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps ...”
Blaylock’s novels and stories have garnered a legion of fans and much praise. His first steampunk novel, Homunculus, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his second, Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992), was a World Fantasy Award finalist. Several of his other short stories and books have also been nominees or winners of the World Fantasy Awards, Mythopoeic Awards and other honors. Interest in his work has skyrocketed in recent years with the growing popularity of the steampunk movement worldwide. Continued on next page
The 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Rachel McAdams, advances steampunk as a cultural and fashion movement.
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