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PREFACE

• THE ADVENTURE BEGINS •

“The past is a kind of future that has already happened.”

BRUCE STERLING, The User’s Guide to Steampunk

The picture tells it all. Imagine you are standing in any one of a hundred conference centers around the world. All around you is the hustle and bustle of people buying and selling books, toys, games, and music. But it’s not just any group of people. The men may be wearing top hats, elegant waistcoats, and frock coats; the women adorned in bustled gowns created from the rarest materials, their hair coiffured in elaborate ringlets, their figures compressed by the finest corsetry. Yet others dress more soberly in khaki desert suits, complete with pith helmets, carrying strange timepieces or antique weapons. Many wear goggles and sport curious artificial extensions—robotic arms, breathing apparatus, and oddly shaped and decorated masks. Most display weapons of one kind or another—but there is something different about even these. They have chambers lit from within by liquid blue light, or emit puffs of steam from tanks affixed to their owners’ backs.

There is only one place (in this world) where such things—and many more—can regularly be seen, and that is at a Steampunk convention, the likes of which are held around the globe, from the US, the UK, and Australia, to France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Even Brazil has a thriving Steampunk community. Thousands of people attend these events, drawn by the common desire for innovation, for creating a different—and, yes, even a better—world; one that harks back to Victorian and Edwardian values (but turns them on their heads) and exists without the internal combustion engine.

It is a world where steam is king—where the mysterious substance derived from amber and known as “anbaric” power (as coined by Philip Pullman) offers a clean alternative to oil. It is a world where everyone dresses extravagantly and finely, as ladies and gentlemen should. And it is a world of old-fashioned magic and not-so-modern science, where adventurers travel through uncharted wastes, dense jungles, and blistering deserts, in search of ancient temples, underground conurbations, and fog-bound cities. At the end of these journeys lie treasures, access to strange wisdom, and an ever-expanding sense of mystery. It is at once the world of Indiana Jones, the Three Musketeers and Captain Nemo, of the time traveller and the treasure hunter, the mad scientist and the solitary seeker after new knowledge and ancient, timeless wisdom.

The Origins of Steampunk

It could be said that Steampunk has always been with us; it certainly borrows from all periods of time, despite focusing on the nineteenth century for its form and style. For most people it begins in the late twentieth century, with a very loose-knit and uncoordinated movement that involved art, fashion, music, and literature, inspired in particular by the writings of Jules Verne (1828–1905) and H. G. Wells (1866–1946), and by the adventure novels of the previous century by G. A. Henty (1832–1902) and H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925). Similar themes appeared in the early science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), as well as the early novels of Michael Moorcock.

But it was the writer K. W. Jeter who first coined the term “Steampunk,” in an article he wrote for Locus magazine in April 1987. He used it to describe a number of stories then being written by himself, James P. Blaylock, and Tim Powers. At the time Cyberpunk was the latest and most exciting sub-genre of science fiction, widely read and discussed in the pages of sci-fimagazines and even more august literary journals; works like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash dominated the cutting edge of sci-fi. But when Jeter’s book Morlock Night (both a homage and a sequel to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine) appeared in 1979, it began a spate of books which Powers described as being about:

extraordinary gentlemen in capes and top hats scurrying through foggy nighttime London on secret errands that involve infernal devices and wonderful machines with elaborate scrollwork on the gears and levers.

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2011 EDITION OF Morlock Night

But Steampunk is a great deal more than this. The “elaborate scrollwork” mentioned by Powers is a key. Between October 2009 and February 2010, an exhibition described as “the world’s first museum exhibition of Steampunk devices and contraptions extraordinaire” was mounted at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University. It included exhibitors from Canada, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, the United States, and the UK, and it attracted more visitors than any other exhibition staged by the university. In it were indeed many “devices,” varying from sculptures of clockwork spiders by Thomas Willeford and flying men by Stéphane Halleux, to a mechanical womb with a clockwork foetus by Molly Friedrich and a (working) time machine devised by Jos de Vink. There were also a number of steam-powered weapons, clockwork devices, and even a steam-powered mobile phone. All the artifacts were at the same time elegant and utile, elaborate and devastatingly simple. Ingenuity, wonder, imagination, and cleverness dominated, and drew literally hundreds of people to peruse the wonders of this modern temple of science and delight. It was both art exhibition and science exhibition, and, while some might have called it a science-fiction exhibition, it actually showed a universe that was every bit as real as the one in which we (possibly) live.

The Steampunk Explosion

Steampunk is now, literally, everywhere. In fiction, it flourishes in the writings of Mark Hodder, Gail Carriger, and George Mann; in film, it appears in the new Sherlock Holmes movies (2009–11), in the most recent version of The Three Musketeers (2011), in the 2003 version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and in the wonderful Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). In music, bands such as Abney Park, ArcAttack, The Dresden Dolls, and Dr. Steel push the envelope into the wildest reaches of steam-powered imaginings.

This has been—and continues to be—Steampunk’s raison d’être. Though reworking themes from earlier times, it reflects the modern and future world, holding up a mirror to everything, which it views from its own particular perspective. In this world the most ordinary things become imbued with strangeness and wonder, and the bringing together of wildly disparate objects creates new and astonishing things.

Nor does Steampunk turn its back entirely on the world we think we know, as evidenced by fine examples of Steampunk cases and decorations created for computers and laptops (none of them steam-driven). It is as though, by looking to the past, the contemporary Steampunkers have discovered things we missed when they first appeared.

Why a Steampunk Tarot?

All three of the devisers of the pack you hold in your hands share an interest in things wonderful, outlandish, and strange. We are all avid readers of alternative fiction that suggests new directions, new possibilities, and extraordinary opportunities. Moving more at the fringes of the Steampunk movement over the past few years (though now we have embraced it more thoroughly through the “steamsonas” we have created within its rapidly expanding universe), we noticed that there was one element that, if not actually missing, was seen less often: the sacred and metaphysical arts. Oddly, it seems that few (if any) of the leaders within the movement have sought to re-envision the parallel developments in spiritualism, magical orders, theosophy, and the burgeoning esotericism that marked the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which explored the metaphysical side of reality at a time when science was making its own breakthroughs, although there are certainly riffs on all of these in the welter of Steampunk literature which has poured forth in the last decade.

It could be said that there is no place for such things in the Steampunk universe, but in fact it is already there. The Gods of the Machine were not thought up by us (though we did choose their archetypal forms for this deck), having been present in Western hermetic lore since Classical times and then reawakened during the Renaissance. The awakening and divine embodiment of statues is taught by Hermes Trismegistus as early as the Corpus Hermeticum, while the ingenuity of automata was explored by Athanasius Kircher and others. The rich creativity and wonder of life on the other side of reality is everywhere celebrated in the history of our universe.

And since, above all else, Steampunk is about adventure—wherever, whenever, and whoever it features—it seemed high time that there should be a way of looking into and through the strange distorting glass of this new-old world, and to explore its vitality and wonder, and its wisdom. Just as we may turn to the tarot to aid us in navigating the shoals of uncertainty which surround us, so, in the alternative world of the Steampunk Imperium, it opens vistas that help us to see things in a new way.

Nor did we have to look far to manifest this deck. Even the most cursory glimpse into the Steampunk world shows a fascination with ancient wisdom, future possibilities, and the elemental qualities that are central to every tarot. Thus we arrived at the Four Leagues (the suits in traditional tarot) and the archetypes of the Gods of the Machine (the Major Arcana).

So, get ready to cross the threshold of the Imperium, where everything is just a little bit different, but draws upon the familiar as well as the unfamiliar. Beyond this page, we, as creators, will vanish entirely, to be replaced by our steamsonas, or alter egos: the bold adventurer Major Jack Squares, the wise Madame Hypatia Tetraktys, the devilishly clever artificer 124C (say it out loud)—and the voice of the Imperium itself. Join us, then, and prepare to be thrilled, astonished, and enlightened by the Gods of the Machine, as we enter the world of The Steampunk Tarot.

John Matthews, Caitlín Matthews, and Wil Kinghan

Oxford, 2012 – Year of Steampunk Dreams