Ah, of course! Children of the Sun!  I completely forgot! How silly of me.

Well, if the comments here are anything to go by, it would seem that there’s no reason why the diesel aesthetic and good old-fashioned high fantasy cannot coexist happily.  Still, there does seem to be a somewhat tenser relationship between the two than exists between fantasy and steampunk.  In the case of Weird War IIs, we have magic appearing solely as a weapon to be wielded by the Third Reich (or the Soviet Union, in certain contexts) in an effort to dominate the world, with the Allies scrambling for a counter.  In Swanwick’s books, the juxtaposition of modern and fantastic creates a sort of jarring dissonance that only reinforces the artificiality of the fantasy realm.

Personally, I would say that this relationship is due to the fact that in the case of steampunk, despite the focus on the “bourgeois” figure of the inventor/explorer/what have you, the world is still thought to be a very traditional place, with the type of class structure and mental environments that would complement the typical medieval Europe-based fantasy realm.  With dieselpunk, by contrast, the aristocracy is a dying relic, industry and popular philosophy have supplanted the old gods no one worships anymore, the countryside has vanished in favor of the metropolis, and anyone can buy a map of the world for two dollars in a corner bookshop.  Fantasy can exist, but only under duress.

Remember too the passion for spots not on the maps at all: hidden Tibetan kingdoms, Hollow Earth, Jungle bases in Brazil, Nazi fortresses in the North Pole etc. The difference perhaps is that dieselpunk fantasy has far more emphasis on total horror as a reflection of total war.

Many of the elements you identify as being dieselpunkian such as the death of the aristocracy, gods and the countryside etc. are rather more popular culture than historical truth. Certainly the aristocracy was dying but in WW2 that old chestnut, the OSS, was almost entirely run by American aristocrats with their tweeds and pipes. The countryside didn't so much die as evolve into an uneasy relationship with science and god or at least gods, were stunningly popular with many groups holding up their utopias (Fascism, Communism etc. might not have a god as such but they have religious structures: Original preacher, chosen people, chosen enemy, final end when the chosen are elevated and the enemy destroyed). It was the Soviet seizure of Poland in 1945 that led to the streak of extreme religion amongst the Poles. It was the Nazis who kick-started Zionism again and led to the creation of Israel. And so on.

A firm belief that there is no such as thing as unnecessary information and that information that would be categorized as such is often far more interesting then that categorized as "necessary"? At least that's why I remember things like that.

xeoran wrote:

Many of the elements you identify as being dieselpunkian such as the death of the aristocracy, gods and the countryside etc. are rather more popular culture than historical truth. Certainly the aristocracy was dying but in WW2 that old chestnut, the OSS, was almost entirely run by American aristocrats with their tweeds and pipes. The countryside didn't so much die as evolve into an uneasy relationship with science and god or at least gods, were stunningly popular with many groups holding up their utopias (Fascism, Communism etc. might not have a god as such but they have religious structures: Original preacher, chosen people, chosen enemy, final end when the chosen are elevated and the enemy destroyed). It was the Soviet seizure of Poland in 1945 that led to the streak of extreme religion amongst the Poles. It was the Nazis who kick-started Zionism again and led to the creation of Israel. And so on.

Oh, absolutely.  Just about everything I mentioned in that list was not unique or universal to the interwar period.  In many ways those trends were just another step in the direction Western culture had (and has) been evolving since the Enlightenment.  Certainly there were plenty of intellectuals, political reformers, and what have you who were arguing throughout the 19th century that the “traditional” way of doing things was no longer valid.  I would also agree that many of these traditions were able to persist through the period and into the present day.  Still, I would suggest that the trends I listed would be useful to categorize dieselpunk, if I may be allowed to oversimplify, because by the time WWI ended, pretty much everyone in Europe had come to realize that the old ways had been irrevocably altered, and there was no going back.

Mind you, I am a cultural-history nerd that takes the theories of Oswald Spengler a little more seriously that I ought to, so I do like to reduce periods of history to little eras that manifest a certain set of trends.  Given how steampunk does do something akin to this with the Victorian/Edwardian/Gilded Ages, it seems natural to do the same thing to the interwar period for dieselpunk.  Your mileage may vary, of course.

I wonder about that willingness to forsake tradition... One of the major messages of the Universal Studios Monster movies (how's that for the supernatural in 1930's movies?) is not to ignore the wisdom of tradition. If you don't heed the gypsies, ancient scrolls and arcane professors, you'll end up dead. Or worse. And then there's deMille's introduction to the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, in which he asserts that the progress of modernism died in the fires of WWI.