The Black God's Drums

"When I was first doing steampunk, we had just come through a thing called RaceFail in the science fiction community, where there was this recognition that there weren’t enough people of colour writing characters, and there weren’t enough protagonists who were people of colour. And there were discussions regularly in steampunk circles about how incredibly white it was, which is when I began to think, this Victorian thing has got to go. If we keep describing it as Victorian, then we’re stuck in a rut; you change that to ‘vintage’, and it gives you the opportunity to open the gates. Not that you needed that necessarily, because even before that whole conversation, there had been Western steampunk with the Wild Wild West film… I think the most interesting steampunk that’s been written in the last ten years has been from writers of colour. It’s been absolutely fantastic. And that’s not in some tokenist move, or me representing any one group; I’ve just noticed it. I put The Black God’s Drums on here because it’s an incredibly fun book that’s doing a lot. It checks a lot of the boxes that we would normally associate with steampunk. We’ve got the street urchin, the waif, in the character of Creeper. When people were trying to break down ‘punk’ and what it meant, they said, it needs to be somebody who’s pushing against the system. I still think that’s not really what K.W. Jeter meant, and this compound word doesn’t mean those individual things… But there was an expectation that you would have characters like this. You see them in Etiquette and Espionage down on the lower deck, but they’re not the main character; and you see the one character in Leviathan , the young woman masquerading as a boy who comes from a family that is of lower means. But she’s not a Dickensian street urchin or orphan. P Djèlí Clark gives us Creeper the street urchin, and that’s a steampunk type (I don’t want to say archetype – I don’t like that word.) We’re in New Orleans , so it’s not Victorian, but it’s still the 19th century. It’s playing with the 19th century in a way that is still technofantastic, though there are other elements too. The technology alone would be fantastic, even without including the fact that Creeper has a relationship with a powerful divine spirit from the Yoruba religion, an orisha. So there are fantasy elements in an alt-history setting, and in any other situation I’d call that steampunk. It’s a really, really fun short read. I haven’t read anything by P. Djèlí Clark that I didn’t enjoy. He’s great. But this book… It’s a novella, so it’s super short, and it just rolls along. It does something with social retrofuturism: it reimagines the 19th century, where the Haitian slave revolt worked out well and the Civil War is at a standstill. And that allows him to talk about race and class and gender, but he’s just so good that he never gets heavy handed. It’s all there, and it comes in like a stealth bomb, but at the same time you’re just enjoying this rollicking good story. Alternate history is saying, ‘What if there was a moment of break at some point in our world’s history?’ Not all steampunk takes place in our world. Steampunk is always playing with history, but there are lots of instances where people have gone beyond a moment of break to fully invent a secondary world and not make it cohere with ours, save by association. We might look at something in Marjorie Liu’s Monstress , for example, and say, ‘That resembles this culture.’ But it’s not that culture. It’s her own invention. Whereas alternate history is going to say, these are the Confederates; this is the Union; these are the free isles, a conglomerate of the Caribbean nations. And we know what those things are, because those are real – so it’s about a break in our own timeline. Sometimes the break is utterly fantastical. There was a steampunk book by Jay Lake called Mainspring , and the break ostensibly happens at the creation of the world, so the entire planet is a clockwork device. That’s a huge difference, right at the cusp of moving us over into a secondary world. So that’s the distinction that I would make. My frustration with the immediate equation of alternate history and steampunk is that if you look at something like Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines , he’s not imagining the past. He’s imagining a future. So what do we do with that? Does that make all science fiction that imagines the future alternate history? I don’t think so!"