Occasionally I post videos that I think media people would find interesting on Canted under the category of “YouTube Finds.” Some pay homage to classic movies of decades past. Others are contemporary works that are aesthetically impressive as works of media art. The two videos I posted there last week fall under the latter category, and they’re both so good that I had to re-post them here.

The first is “Le Cafe,” a silly (well animated, but silly all the same) video about a man who relies on coffee to get him through the work day. My roommate Steven Bosse, a man who likewise needs his coffee on a regular basis, showed it to me one afternoon and added afterward, “This is why I don’t use our coffee maker”:

The other is a short film that I heard about sometime ago—”The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.” This Australian film by Anthony and Julia Lucas was nominated in 2006 for an Academy Award in the category of Best Animated Short. I’ve been wanting to see it for awhile now, but I only just became aware that the full thing was up on YouTube a few days ago.

When trying to analyze whether a book or film is “steampunk,” it often feels like the term is artificially placed or forced. Not with “Jasper Morello.” It comes chock full of brass, steel, complex machinery, airships, aether rifles—we’re talking full commitment here. Beyond being a prime example of the subgenre that happens to strike my fancy though, the animation style is a work of pure artistry:

A.E. Flint over at Trial By Steam digs into a question that’s been on my mind ever since the first Great Steampunk Debate took place a few months ago: how do we define steampunk?

The overall impression I got from the discussions that I perused on the Great Steampunk Debate (and to be sure, there is a lot of material there and I never got through so much as a quarter of it) was to fall back on defining it purely as an aesthetic.

That doesn’t square with me for the same reason it doesn’t square with Flint: the word “punk” in “steampunk”:

…many participants in the Steampunk subculture view the “Punk” aspect of Steampunk as a powerless suffix. As a member of the Punk movement, it bothers the writer that -punk gets affixed to new and fashionable subgroups without regard for Punk as it’s own set of ideologies. And you know what? It bothers me too.

What’s the difference between Steampunk and Neo-Victorianism? In my view, it’s the Punk in Steampunk that indicates our ability to draw from, but disdain replication of, the past. The Punk in Steampunk allows us to turn all sorts of Victorian conventions on their heads: gender, government and politics, race, culture… it’s all up for redefinition in the Steampunk I love.

Flint is framing this thought specifically as a discussion of cosplayers versus lifestylers (for those curious, here is a primer), but I think this makes a broader point about steampunk.

Defining steampunk purely as an aesthetic means it’s no longer steampunk: it’s just “steam.” The word “punk” has deliberate political connotations. As I touched on in a previous post, how and to what degree this punk element manifests itself in a given work varies widely. In the past it has been any combination of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-mass production, or (in the broadest sense) anti-status quo. There’s an element of the politically incorrect to it, and it’s this element that makes it more than purely an aesthetic.

The League of Extraordinary Writers looks into the question of whether steampunk is inherently dystopian:

Is Steampunk dystopian? Most of the time: no. But, it can be. At the end of THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, we do get a glimpse of the present day world (at least the 1990’s) in this alternate time line. It’s depicted as a dystopia. Other Steampunk writers who extrapolate that past to the future may end up with a dystopia, too. However, most Steampunk—at least that I’ve read—focuses on the alternate past—the past as we wished it had been—and embraces the brash confidence and optimism of the Victorians. It was an age when Brittania ruled its empire, the Wild West was still wild, and technology and reason could solve anything.

There’s no easy way to tackle this question, particularly because steampunk itself is difficult to define. The debate is still raging over whether it’s purely an aesthetic or a genre, or any number of other things. It’s perhaps due to the difficulty of determining what steampunk is in any concrete way that the post on the subject largely dodges the question and instead diverges into talking about the forays steampunk has made into the mainstream.

As a matter of topic, whether steampunk is inherently dystopic hinges on a matter of perspective. An alternate imagining of the world, whether posited as historically in the past or hypothetically in the future, where the British still run their empire may sound like a good setting for an adventure—if you’re a white Anglo. If you were an Irishman or an Indian living under British rule, your perspective would undoubtedly be different. The same goes for the romantic idea of a Wild West that’s still wild. In theory, in the abstract, it sounds fun and exciting. But it probably wouldn’t be if you were the one getting slaughtered at places like Wounded Knee or if you were one of the Chinese workers building the transcontinental railroad.

This sentiment hints at often unmentioned aspect of the steampunk… err, subgenre: that it’s politically incorrect. It romanticizes a past filled with all the prejudices, injustices, and racism that inevitably arises in an imperialist system and which were exacerbated specifically because, not in spite, of the “brash confidence and optimism” of the Victorians. These issues are not always dealt with substantively. Actually, I find that steampunk works usually ignore them altogether. I don’t say this to damn steampunk. It’s fiction and it’s fantasy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with indulging in fantasy as long as we recognize it as such. I do think it’s important though to acknowledge this fact when tackling the question of whether it’s dystopic.

The post concludes with this distinction:

In a dystopia, the characters fight against the world—whether it’s an oppressive government or a post-apocalyptic landscape. In Steampunk, the characters (in general) revel in their world, using technology, ingenuity, a bit of whimsy, and attitude to conquer it.

As a matter of tone, I think many works that are categorized as steampunk do feature protagonists with plucky optimism and a can-do attitude about technology. That, however, doesn’t necessarily disqualify it as dystopic. With that thought in mind, it’s interesting that it concludes with this thought when in the course of discussing the topic it went out of its way to lionize Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan.

For those not familiar with the work, Leviathan is an alternate history adventure story taking place in Europe at the outbreak of World War I. The two main characters are from opposite sides of the conflict, and they are both indeed optimistic—particularly about the odds of their respective sides winning the war quickly and decisively. This very optimism, however, belies just how horrific the state of their world is in. They’re both soldiers hurtling headlong into a bloody conflict that neither of them can either avoid or prevent. They’re coming to grasps with just how little control over the world they have and what (if anything) they can do about it. It’s too early to judge whether that makes it genuinely dystopic, not least of all because Leviathan is the first novel in a trilogy and we don’t yet know how the story will end.

I happen to agree that steampunk isn’t inherently dystopic. At the same time, I wouldn’t write off the question with such a definitively “no” answer. There’s a darker strain underlying steampunk works in how they depict their alternate worlds. It’s not always acknowledged or grappled with head-on, but it’s there in one form or another.

Ladies and gentleman, today I have heard the saddest piece of steampunk-related news imaginable. While the genre as a whole been on the up-and-up, with more enthusiasts at Comic Con this summer than ever before (setting a Guinness World Record in the process), a critical fact is quietly doing the rounds in the scientific community.

Simply put, the world is running out of helium.

Yes, that all important lifting gas that we all hoped to put in our zeppelins one day is running out–possibly being depleted within a decade. TIME has a video with a scientist telling bad jokes that explains it all (click here to watch).

This affects more than just zeppelins and party balloons, of course. According to an article from Washington University’s website, it’s used in “nuclear magnetic resonance, mass spectroscopy, welding, fiber optics and computer microchip production, among other technological applications.” NASA also uses it to pressurize fuel tanks on the space shuttle.

Although it’s the second most abundant element in the universe, it’s rare on Earth. Most of it rises into the atmosphere and out into space, and nobody has developed a way to extract it from the air. Because it’s a Noble Gas, it doesn’t bond with other elements in the way that elements like hydrogen do. Most of the helium reserves are underground, created as a result of the natural decay of elements like uranium and thorium. Much of it is lost during drilling for oil and natural gas. Few companies try to collect it during the process because it’s not as valuable.

Helium has long been a crucial component of making dirigibles feasible. Although it doesn’t possess as much lifting capacity as hydrogen, it’s much safer because it’s nonflammable. To wit: the American USS Los Angeles was filled with helium. The German Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen. If you’ve never heard of the former, it’s probably because it didn’t burst into flames one day like the latter did.

With a dearth supply of helium on the horizon, bringing the zeppelin back as a major form of transportation will be even more difficult than before. One of the biggest obstacles to that end was making a zeppelin, which cannot carry the same number of passengers as a large airplane, cost effective. That’ll be even more of a problem when what little helium remains goes up in price. Without it, steampunk enthusiasts everywhere will have to look to other ways to inflate their airships. Thermal airships, created by heating the air, are still a possibility. The very first dirigible ever created was steam-powered. But an apparatus that can heat the air hot enough to provide an equal amount of lift as helium remains a problem. Perhaps a new gas will be developed or discovered to take helium’s place.

Until then, we need to get the word out about the present helium crisis. Inform your steampunk oriented friends, call up the S.T.E.A.M. Team, and e-mail your favorite steampunk online journalist (or steam blogger, if you prefer). The faster we take action on this, the better we will be prepared for a world with little or no reserves of this precious element.

I have an affinity for the steampunk aesthetic and, in particular, airships. They were big in the early twentieth century and I think they have the potential to become big once again. Although the price of oil has dropped through the floor recently (last I checked it was down to $64 a barrel, roughly 50% lower than it’s all-time high over the summer), that doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to rely on it forever for powering mass transportation–especially for jets and airplanes.

The airship is one potential solution. Their large size means they have plenty of surface area for solar panels that could power them. Energy efficient, zero carbon emissions, and filled with non-flammable helium, the airship has the potential to one day overtake the airplane as the main method of aerial travel. The reason why it hasn’t yet is because it isn’t as fast as an airplane, although you could still make a trip across the Atlantic in under twenty hours.

They have other benefits as well. For starters, they don’t need runways, which means you can bus a lot of people in and out without extensive networks of asphalt (a problem for rural areas and poorer developing countries). They also afford a panoramic view of everything around you, providing a much more relaxing, less turbulent flying experience.

As is the case with most ideas I have, people often right me off as crazy for thinking that airplanes might one day be replaced by airships.

This weekend, however, I came across this article on CNN’s website:

Zeppelins return to the skies in San Francisco

A new company called Airship Ventures is providing aerial tours of San Francisco from a zepplin–not a blimp, mind you, but a true dirigible with a solid internal frame. They’ve already ordered two more to start offering aerial tours on the east coast. At $495 per ticket for a ride that only lasts an hour, it’s not for thrifty thrill seekers.

It is a start though.

It is only through the power of Wikipedia that I am able to discover just how badass largely unknown and mostly forgotten people are. One of them is unquestionably my new hero: Alberto Santos-Dumont.

Dumont was a pioneer of airship design. Born in Brazil in 1873 he was fascinated by machinery, read everything by Jules Verne, and drove his father’s steam-powered tractors around his father’s plantation. He moved to Paris in the 1890′s with his family after his father suffered a vicious horse-related injury. He began to design, build, and fly his own dirigibles (that is, steerable balloons), the first being the Brésil in 1898. His fascination with airships made him a well-known figure around Paris. He’d often fly his personal aircraft to cafes for lunch and to and from his apartment building.

On October 19, 1901 he was awarded the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize for flying his cleverly named airship, Number 6, from the Parc Saint Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in under thirty minutes. At right is a photo of Number 6 making its way around the Eiffel Tower. Along with the prestige of winning the Deutsch de la Meurthe Dumont was awarded 100,000 francs, which I can only assume that given the time period and the number of zeros involved was an ungodly amount of money. He donated half to the poor of Paris and gave the other half to his workmen (lucky guys).

This historic flight made headlines. Dumont was transformed into a celebrity and became friends with all the big names of the age–including President Theodore Roosevelt. He was so greatly admired that in Paris it became fashionable to dress like him.

Dumont continued his enthusiasm for flight with heavier-than-air models, releasing the drawings for his Demoiselle airplane for free to the public. He believed that the innovations in flying machines would begin a glorious new era for mankind. He remains a prominent Brazilian folklore hero, and the Brazilian Air Force awards the Santos Dumont Medal of Merit to noteworthy people in the field of aeronautics.

More than a founding father of airships, he was steampunk before steampunk was even a word. He defined what it means to be steampunk and lives on as a legendary (albeit obscure) sportsman of the air.