Steampunk Shenanigans, Part One

Eeegads, Sherlock! It's been nearly a month since Miss Gray has posted anything! Whatever happened to her?

The end of the semester, gentlemen. That's what has happened. My life is slowly circling a drain right now. Not a whole lot of time for writing blogs, especially when you're working on really hard-core awesome writing projects.

Early on in the semster, my Contemporary Liturature Professor made us begin thinking about a two-fold final project: read a work of contemporary literature and produce a peice of our own contemporary literature incorporating ideas or contemporary elements from the book we read. Ideas and books read included flash fiction, experimental text,  a lot of David Sedaris (he visited our campus in November) and, of course, that most contemporary of offerings, the mash-up. One of the girls in my class read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies while I tackled Android Karenina, the steampunk mash-up of Leo Tolstoy's well-loved Anna Karenina.

Oh. My. Stars. It was FANTASTIC! As someone who couldn’t stand the original Anna Karenina, I give Ben Winters a lot of credit for not only allowing me read the story again but also for making me thoroughly enjoy it the second time through. What had previously seemed like an unapproachable ‘high art’ novel, one of those books whose meaning will never be fully understood except by the chosen few, was now a book with messages and undertones I could wrap my head around. Robots were the exploited lower classes. One day they might be the authors of their own revolt and no one was expecting that. Technology is a mixed blessing and we have to be careful how we use it. And, of course, even if Tolstoy’s characters now have personal robots to comfort them, even if they travel around the country in gravity trains and take vacations to the moon, misfunctioning families are still all alike.


Android Karenina starts in the same way Anna Karenina does – “Functioning robots are all alike; each robot malfunctions in its own way.” The lovely Anna Karenina has just arrived in Moscow to help with one such misfunction – her brother, Stiva Oblonsky, was recently caught sleeping around with the family’s mechanicienne, the woman employed to keep their household robots running. Upon Anna’s arrival, she meets Count Alexei Vronsky, a handsome and very single captain in the Guards who has recently returned a hero from the Border Wars. Their attempts to find happiness are constantly opposed by Anna’s husband, the cold and unapproachable Alexei Karenin. Meanwhile, Konstantin Levin, a landowner and proprietor of a groznium mine, (the miracle metal that makes the world these characters live in possible,) is trying to win the affections of the young and lovely Kitty Shcherbatskya and come to terms with the conditions of his own existence. It should sound very similar to the original until this point; there is love, class issues between characters, and – here is the twist – all of the main characters have a personal robot, a Class III, who accompanies them throughout their day, gives advice and functions a sort of externalized source for many of Tolstoy’s originally internal monologues. (The only exception to this rule is Karenin, whose Class III is a menacing facial implant who only speaks in capital letters and is trying to take over its owner’s brain. Creepy, and it works.)

Where in Tolstoy there are strong religious sympathies in some of the characters, Winters uses a belief in the pending arrival of an alien race called “The Honored Guests” and where the threat t of the coming Marxist revolution looms large in Tolstoy, Winters uses instead a group of rogue scientists called UnConSciya, a group that Levin and Vronsky later learn are trying to help the world prepare for an impending sea change in Class Three robots and the alien invasion of the flesh-eating Honored Guests. Technology makes appearances inside Android Karenina in surprising ways – instead of attending a ball, Kitty makes her debutante appearance at a Float, a dance at which the dancers are vaulted into the air by means of jet powered air timed to the music and piped through the floor. The mood is no less magical than the original, however:

“Kitty turned her attention to her fellow dancers, as the music slowed from triple time to a common four-four and the air slowed with it, transforming from the swift, giddy puff-puff-puff of waltzfloating to a controlled series of magisterial gusts…Down below, in the seating area, Kitty caught sight of Stiva, and beside him the exquisite figure and head of Anna, with Android Karenina beside her, glowing not lilac, but purest black” (Tolstoy/Winters 93).

It is only in the past five years that authors have even started to think about bastardizing some of the world’s best beloved works of literature. But the reasons for this are equally contemporary as well – these authors want to make what is assumed by many young readers (like myself) to be old, boring and staid into something fun, exciting and adventurous. They want them to read, and in order to do that they appeal to what is hip and current in the world of movies, creating books that are practically cinematic in description (Android Karenina also has a picture every fifty pages or so) and which use common tropes from recent popular movies for the teen demographic. (Examples include vampires (Jane Slayre, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter , Mr. Darcy, Vampyre) zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), creatures from the deeps (Sense and Sensibility and Sea monsters), and the steampunk aesthetic used in Android by Winters, a movement in science fiction that attempts to reimagine a victorian past with some of the technology of the distant future. ) 

On a side-note, I was a steampunk airship officer for Halloween. It was awesome.

By getting people to read Anna Karenina with a few robots and some futuristic technology thrown in, students and casual readers alike are still receiving many of Tolstoy’s original messages and themes about social justice, Marxism, the nature of love and how technology can corrupt our world. It is for this reason that Android Karenina succeeds in my mind where some of the other recent mashups on the market have failed. Winters’ additions help bring readers to the key themes in the story, while the addition of flesh eating zombies to the Netherfield Ball is just a bit of silly fun and doesn’t contribute to a greater understanding of the source text or its original intended meaning.

Whatever the additions, mash-ups are still a kind of hybrid literature, using the text from the past with a trend or taste from the present to create an old story told in a new way. And at the same time that they are considered new, they may also be considered old as well – literary theorists have long pointed out that when we tell stories we are merely following old forms and constructs to tell what amounts to the same story over and over again. “In primitive societies,” writes noted French Theorist Roland Barthes in his essay “The Death of The Author,” “Narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman, or speaker, whose performance may be admired (his mastery of the narrative code) but not his "genius." The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as…it discovered the prestige of the individual.” (Barthes) The recent mash-up craze is merely being obvious about this recycling of forms and modes, and the authors who write mash-ups are sacrificing and at the same time exploiting this ‘prestige of the individual’ by using the text of an already prestigious canon author and merely adding to it.

So, moral of the story -- the folks at Quirk Books are awesome and they publish some damn entertaining literature. You should support thier noble cause of bringing high art literature to the low-brow masses and buy some books from them! (They're also sending me a copy of P&P&Z for blogging purposes, but it hasn't come yet...so QB PR types, we should email again soon. Just sayin'.)


Thus concludes Part One of my Steampunk Shenanigans. Tune in next time for Part Two -- my own foray into writing mash-up literature!