On the steampunk panel at BristolCon we had to make a point of saying that the fiction we wrote critiqued the class system rather than taking it as a given. I figured that was an end to it. But today Jeff VanderMeer tweeted a link to this HuffPo article on steampunk by his Steampunk User’s Manual collaborator, Desirina Boskovich. The article is titled, “7 Reasons Why Steampunk Is Totally ‘Now'”, which sounds horribly Buzzfeed-like but I read it. When I got to point 5 I had a *headsmack* moment.

You see, point 5 is “It’s class conscious”. That’s important. I’m as fond of settings such as The Culture as the next SF reader, but the thing about The Culture is that it is supposedly classless. Now there’s a long conversation to be had about how a post-scarcity society will simply find a means other than wealth to indicate social class. Even in today’s Britain, wealth is no guarantee of status. But the point is that if you set your science fiction in a far future that has a classless society then your books can’t critique the idea of social class. However, because steampunk is set in an era in which massive class distinctions existed, it is very easy to write stories that critique such a set-up.

So there’s your argument: if you want to write science fiction that critiques a massively unequal society (and Goddess knows we need that right now), choose a setting that has such a society; choose steampunk.