Silkpunk
Entry updated 3 February 2025. Tagged: Theme.
Item of sf Terminology coined by Ken Liu to describe the aesthetic in his Dandelion Dynasty series, comprising of The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), The Veiled Throne (2021) and Speaking Bones (2022). Silkpunk works blend organic, handcrafted Technologies with speculative engineering, diverging from the industrialized metal-and-steam focus of Steampunk. Technologies are often inspired by natural materials with historical importance to the people of East Asia and the Pacific islands, such as bamboo, shells, coral, paper, silk, feathers, and sinew. Furthermore, the grammar of the language puts emphasis on biomimetics. The Dandelion Dynasty depicts Airships which regulate their lift by analogy with the swim bladders of fish, and the submarines move like whales through the water. Engineers are celebrated as great artists who transform the existing language and evolve it toward ever more beautiful forms.
Liu calls silkpunk a "meditation on modernity" (February 2025 Utopia Science Fiction Magazine) – the sense of modernity which comes as a by-product of the European Renaissance becoming the world's default as a consequence of colonialism. Silkpunk is therefore a reaction to the exclusion of indigenous traditions and world views from what is considered modern, qualifying its "punk" aspect; and only perhaps if it is deemed in any way disruptive to other modes of modern Fantastika should it be thought of as "punk", beyond the use of that term to convey a sense of coherent energy. He elaborates that "The Renaissance smashed apart the recovered ideals of Greco-Roman antiquity and re-appropriated them into the building blocks of modernity." Dandelion Dynasty imagines a world in which the roots of Classical East Asian antiquity are similarly re-purposed into the building blocks of modernity.
Works by authors other than Liu have been referred to as silkpunk, including Neon Yang's The Black Tides of Heaven (2017), Yangsze Choo's The Night Tiger (2019) and Zen Cho's Black Water Sister (2021). Some, such as R F Kuang's The Poppy War (2018), which draws influence from the Opium and Second Sino-Japanese Wars, are termed silkpunk-adjacent. The commonality between these works is that they all draw on East Asian history and are written by authors of East Asian descent. This creates the danger of lumping works together without the precise demarcations of Cyberpunk. It is more appropriate to use the word as an adjective rather than a genre to describe the degree to which they reinvent the Western perspective of modernity by incorporating of the philosophies and technologies of East Asia. [JM]
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