I've been thinking about dieselpunk for a bit now, previously without realizing that was what I was thinking about and recently for a couple of projects that I have been working on (gaming and otherwise). Wikipedia, which is rarely helpful, was even less so on this topic:
Dieselpunk is based on the aesthetics of the interbellum period through World War II (c. 1920-1945). The genre combines pop surrealist art with postmodern technology and sensibilities. First coined in 2001 as a marketing term by game designer Lewis Pollak to describe his role-playing game Children of the Sun, dieselpunk has grown to describe a distinct style of visual art, music, motion pictures, fiction, and engineering.
Having read
Children of the Sun, I have to first say that I have never seen anything that less fits what has become its definition, unless of course you thought
Velvet Goldmine featured those from the Lost Generation. Using Google to nose around the corners of the internet, I have to say I find the more dogmatic elements of some online communities to be a bit saddening, and puzzling when talking about music.
This is a first post on this topic, because I feel that I need give this some headspace while I develop
Crimebusters, my period role-playing game. I think that a part of my problem is that dieselpunk is such an ugly term, and frankly I don't think that the -punk suffix has been properly applied to anything since the
Splatterpunk horror writers. There are a number of those in the geek communities who think adding that -punk suffix makes edgier than their outdated black outfits and mish-mash of occult principles makes them in real life. So, while I like the
idea of
dieselpunk, I think the name leaves much to be desired, outside of a quick short-hand for a group of stereotypes that are popping up in memetic fashion around the label. I guess that my other problem is that the -punk suffix has been done to death (literally in the case of the old gothic-punk worlds of the
Vampire games of the 90s) and I would like to see/use a name that doesn't primarily sound like an offshoot of other genres/labels/movements like
steampunk,
cypberunk or the above mentioned
splatterpunk. With
steampunk more and more entering the public consciousness (movies like
Sherlock Holmes or even this week's episode of the television show
Castle), I think that these ideas need its own name. That's why I'm using
mythic jazz age to describe what I like from this "genre" and what I plan to do with it.
Do I care if websites change their name from
dieselpunk to
mythic jazz age once this post is published and goes wild onto the internet? No. Frankly, as I have been for many, many years now, I am a movement of one. If people want to use terms or ideas that I come up with...I am happy. If people want to keep on keeping on...that makes me happy too. In a way, it comes down to the one part of the -punk suffix that I do subscribe to:
do-it-yourself.
