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Steam: Steamboy and China Miéville
May. 30th, 2006 10:52 amGot hold of Steamboy the other day. It's anime steampunk, which is enough of a hook to make me part with my cash. Alas... alas.
Before I get into the specifics, here's the deal with steam. It's a "woo, cool" thing, that's all. Romanticism for engineers. On its own, that's nothing. Zeppelins, steam-enhanced cyborgs, clockwork computers - they're just fancy tat unless you do something with them.
Steamboy, alas, does nothing with them. The story is flat and obvious: the perils of Ultimate Power in a barely-veiled atomic analogy. Give the power to a young boy and let him decide between faceless corporate evil and smiley good, season with some cynicism and dress with the obligatory anime squeaky brat girl and family tension.
It's been done before. It's been done better. The characterisation was disappointing and two-dimensional, and development arcs were both obvious and jerkily done, as if this was a cut-up of a longer, more polished arc. And of course in the end it goes huge and city-flattening in a very, very anime way.
What Steamboy does have is gorgeous visuals. If you have a hardon for sci-fi steam - if, like me, you can sit through Wild Wild West - you'll love the inventiveness. The monowheel, the grab-zeppelin, yummy. The steam tanks piloted by crews in uniforms right out of Zulu. The huge flywheels in the Steam Castle. Mmm, huge flywheels.
But frankly, that's not enough.
On the other hand China Miéville, who knows that we need a hook and so gives us trilobites in paragraph two, takes those ideas and runs with them. Steamborgs? Those poor bastards need fuel, all day, every day. Machines need feeding and the feeders are people with jobs and needs and kinks and politics. Okay, his power-to-weight ratios are as screwed as every other steam-fantasist, and he tends to melancholy, and he can't end a story satisfactorily, but he plays with the ideas and teases them out and sees what sort of place you get with them. They're shiny wallpaper too - but more than that.
So, only shell out for Steamboy if your hardon for clankity-clank is harder than mine.
Before I get into the specifics, here's the deal with steam. It's a "woo, cool" thing, that's all. Romanticism for engineers. On its own, that's nothing. Zeppelins, steam-enhanced cyborgs, clockwork computers - they're just fancy tat unless you do something with them.
Steamboy, alas, does nothing with them. The story is flat and obvious: the perils of Ultimate Power in a barely-veiled atomic analogy. Give the power to a young boy and let him decide between faceless corporate evil and smiley good, season with some cynicism and dress with the obligatory anime squeaky brat girl and family tension.
It's been done before. It's been done better. The characterisation was disappointing and two-dimensional, and development arcs were both obvious and jerkily done, as if this was a cut-up of a longer, more polished arc. And of course in the end it goes huge and city-flattening in a very, very anime way.
What Steamboy does have is gorgeous visuals. If you have a hardon for sci-fi steam - if, like me, you can sit through Wild Wild West - you'll love the inventiveness. The monowheel, the grab-zeppelin, yummy. The steam tanks piloted by crews in uniforms right out of Zulu. The huge flywheels in the Steam Castle. Mmm, huge flywheels.
But frankly, that's not enough.
On the other hand China Miéville, who knows that we need a hook and so gives us trilobites in paragraph two, takes those ideas and runs with them. Steamborgs? Those poor bastards need fuel, all day, every day. Machines need feeding and the feeders are people with jobs and needs and kinks and politics. Okay, his power-to-weight ratios are as screwed as every other steam-fantasist, and he tends to melancholy, and he can't end a story satisfactorily, but he plays with the ideas and teases them out and sees what sort of place you get with them. They're shiny wallpaper too - but more than that.
So, only shell out for Steamboy if your hardon for clankity-clank is harder than mine.
