"This is the first dedicated steampunk convention in the world," says Richard Bottoms, a former web designer deeply involved in promoting steampunk. "I'll be ecstatic if we break even. If we get a thousand people, I'll be ecstatic, but I'm very conservative and won't start celebrating until it's over." Bottoms and Ariane Wolfe, Bottoms' business partner, conceived of the convention less than a half-year ago. Wolfe, a high-tech veteran now fully devoted to promoting steampunk, says she had been a longtime historical re-creator at the Renaissance Faire and the Dickens Faire. She matched these two interests with her love for science fiction, which dated from a class she took in high school. "Steampunk brought both of these interests together."
Wolfe's chosen avatar is a rather more adult character than the Dickens world usually countenanced (saying that, I realize the adult reader knows what line of work Nancy in Oliver Twist was in if you read between the lines). Wolfe explains that "'Miss Skittles' is based on Catherine Walters, a Victorian-era courtesan and 'pretty horse-breaker'" (that is, a high-level courtesan most often seen riding in London's Rotten Row, such as might have caught the eye of Sir Harry Flashman).
Wolfe explains that the imagined history of steampunk is elastic. "It could range from 1830 to 1930 and could include the worlds of Tesla and Edison; different people pick different times. It's a very aesthetic movement, of leather and polished wood and brass fittings, of candles and gaslight. It's opulent."
Boss Tweeds
There have been rooms and entertainments for steampunkers within the circuit of sci-fi and comics conventions, but this first steampunk convention is the breakout for the movement. It's a chance for those who love costumes to reinvent themselves, to wrap themselves in tweed, waistcoats and ankle-length gowns.
At the convention, there will be writing contests, previews of Codemasters' new game Damnation ("Powered by steam, fueled by vengeance"). Everywhere, the beautiful machinery will reanimate boring everyday electronic devices with brass jacketing, polished wood and wiring. The website Boingboing.net serves as an online invention exchange, usually with Jake von Slatt's jewel-box-like modification of common electronic devices.
One of the scheduled guests, Chris Garcia, will discuss the Babbage engine, Charles Babbage's pioneering Victorian computer, finally constructed in 2002 from his plans and currently on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The 5-ton, 7-foot-high "difference engine" is one of the most beautiful machines ever made, although it never got off the drawing board in Babbage's lifetime. Its gears and servos calculate sums with helices of metal, glittering as they turn, like columns of sparkling water. Never completed, this machine was considered a vast and expensive failure in its day; the inventor is obscure because he was, as the museum claims, "a rotten publicist" as well as being the very image of the cranky, suspicious inventor....
