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Pax Omega by Al Ewing (Abaddon Books, 2012, 266p, £7.99) Reviewed by Richard Howard
As scholars of science fiction it is often our approach to incite people to think of our chosen genre as one that radically embraces the future. Following Frederick Pohl's assertion that 'science fiction is the literature of change', we emphasise those elements in any given text that drop tantalising hints about technological advances, novel philosophical perspectives, fresh approaches to gender politics or potential shifts in social structures. So whither steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction that seems so enamoured of the past, so enraptured by the thought of stasis? In a review of the novel Aurorarama by Jean Christophe-Valtat for Strange Horizons, Adam Roberts proposes the subgenre as one 'embroiled in reactionary ideologies of class superiority.' In The Steampunk Bible however, Jeff Vandermeer points to a more diverse genre tradition. Vandermeer describes two opposing tendencies: one of nostalgia typified by the Californian authors K.W. Jeter, James Blaylock and Tim Powers, and a counter tendency that rejects nostalgia and attempts to articulate a critique of empire, represented by the proto-steampunk of Michael Moorcock, and the strain of fiction with its origin in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine.
If we accept Raymond Williams's definition of a reactionary attitude as one having 'a strong sense of wishing to re-establish a pre-revolutionary state of affairs', then there is a strong case to be made that Jonathan Green's Pax Britannia universe exemplifies all that is reactionary in the subgenre of steampunk. Green depicts a twentieth century world still dominated by the British Empire, a technologically preserved Queen Victoria maintaining a status quo at a historical juncture when rumblings within the countries that had been positioned as its peripheries, such as Ireland and India, were strongly indicating that fracture was inevitable. Green's hero, Ulysses Quicksilver, represents a dandified version of British Imperialism, an agent of the crown putting down threats to the hegemony of the Empire with espionage, physical force and witty asides. This is not to say that Green's novels are not self-aware. Indeed, at the climax to Unnatural History Quicksilver quips "...the status quo is maintained. Everything is as it should be." But considering that Moorcock describes his own contributions to the...