Ticking: a thousand clocks echoing into endless dark, the motion of a million gears grinding and churning, a morass of straining forces clashing against shaped metal, a finely tuned symphony of coordinated motion, culminating in a single tick — repetitive, deafening, implacable.
The mind of Grandfather Clock.
- Title: Whitechapel Gods
- Author: S.M. Peters
- Genre: Victorian Steampunk
- Year: 2008
The simplest definition of steampunk to my mind is ‘a work of technological fantasy’ because, no matter what other elements may be deemed essential for the classification of something as steampunk, it’s the fantasy of impossible machines that define the heart of this increasingly popular sub-genre. From the alternate history style steampunk of Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine, to the otherworldly steampunk of Mieville’s Bas Lag trilogy, the infusion of the mechanical alongside the magical (or as, itself, a kind of magic) seems a clear and lasting trend in today’s fantastic fiction.
Victorian London is the de rigueur setting for many steampunk tales; the great, foggy metropolis, at once the center of industry and empire, has captured the imaginations of a new generation of writers. But the London of steampunk is a London that never was, part Dickens at his darkest, and part fever dream of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I sometimes think that science fiction has come so close to the future that it’s only natural now to look back, not so much at the past, but at futures that never were. Steampunk is a sub-genre that really traces its origins to the Victorian Science Fiction of Wells and Verne, and looks back at the possibilities of that age.
Whitechapel Gods, S.M. Peters’ first novel, is set wholly in a nightmare London undergoing an industrial revolution to the nth degree. But the guiding lights in such a transformation are not captains of industry, but the vast mechanical powers — essentially gods on earth — of Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine. The Baron Hume, the man responsible for calling these gods into being in the first place, rules as something like their secular representative with his powerful army of Boiler Men; but it soon becomes apparent that he, and the gods themselves, have somewhat divergent motivations.
The story revolves around Oliver Sumner, one-time leader of a failed uprising against the Baron, and his small band of revolutionaries. Only the oldest member of this group can remember a London that wasn’t a totalitarian machine state ruled by strange gods, but the ideal of this better London is a stark contrast to the world of furnaces and factories and the seeking eye of Grandfather Clock — who watches from every clockface and timepiece in the city. The plot moves at a cinematic pace despite a few fumbles, and there’s enough action and wow-factor to excuse a few missteps in scene setting or some vagueness when it comes to relationships among the characters or the nature of the world as a whole.
But the most striking and laudable aspect of Whitechapel Gods is its celebration of the steampunk aesthetic. The book isn’t about an extrapolation of plausible inventions, a ‘what could have been’ approach that crops up in much of the genre, nor is it about creating an authentic period London grappling with elements of invented history. Instead, it’s about the sooty, ticking, grinding look and feel of malignant industry — and in this baroque evocation of dark mechanica it succeeds admirably. Peters, taking a page from the cyberpunk book, doesn’t just stop at factoryscapes and steam-powered machines either, but goes full out for a man-machine integration in the form of the clacks, a disease that literally replaces flesh and bone with mechanical parts of steel and iron. The infected, oil-bleeding dregs of Peter’s London, sprouting iron spikes, brass bulbs, and whirring gears from their skin, recall the plight of the real urban industrial poor of this era, whose humanity was subjugated to the dictates of the factory machine.
It’s strange, haunting images such as that that are the real pay-off in Whitechapel Gods, and the inventive and creepy combinations of the mechanical and the biological on display are the strongest aspect of this novel. Whether Peters continues to write in this vein, or if his next project is wholly different, he is certainly a new writer to keep and eye on, and Whitechapel Gods is a strong contribution to the ever-expanding steampunk sub-genre — one that unapologetically melds action and aesthetic to create an original and accessible novel.
