Steampunk

Steampunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction that imagines worlds in which the technological course of the nineteenth century followed a different path: steam power, brass machinery, clockwork automata, and elaborate analog computation continue to advance instead of giving way to electricity, internal combustion, and silicon. The genre is usually set in a Victorian or Edwardian milieu — most often a stylized London — but it has expanded to include alternate Wild Wests, second-empire Parises, late-Qing Chinas, and Meiji Japans. Beyond a visual aesthetic of goggles, gears, and airships, steampunk works at its best are interested in the consequences of imagined technological divergence: how an industrial revolution that produced different machines would have produced different empires, different revolutions, and different working lives. Like cyberpunk, with which it shares a suffix and an ancestor, steampunk is a genre about technology and class — but where cyberpunk looks forward to a future of dissolved bodies, steampunk looks sideways to a past of constructed bodies, where the prosthetic is brass instead of carbon fiber.

The term was coined in 1987 by K.W. Jeter to describe a wave of novels (his own Morlock Night, Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates, James Blaylock's Homunculus) that shared a Victorian-fantastic sensibility, and it borrowed its construction directly from cyberpunk. The genre's foundational ancestors include H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Mary Shelley, whose works imagined nineteenth-century futures that already contained much of the genre's imagery. Modern steampunk landmarks include Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, and Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series. The aesthetic crossed into film with Wild Wild West, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky; into video games with BioShock Infinite and Dishonored; and into a global subculture with its own conventions, fashion, and craft maker community.

To write steampunk that lasts beyond its surface, treat the technology as a social fact, not a costume. Decide what your alternate industrial revolution actually changed: who got rich, who got killed, who built the machines, who is being surveilled, who is being colonized. The Victorian setting comes pre-loaded with empire, gendered constraint, and class hierarchy, and a serious steampunk story confronts those inheritances rather than treating them as picturesque background. Pay attention to materials and labor: brass and leather imply mines and tanneries, airships imply hydrogen and helium, clockwork implies precision machining and the workers who do it. The genre is at its strongest when it lets the period speak — its language, its anxieties about new technology, its fights over reform — rather than imposing modern voices into period dress. And do not forget the punk: as with its sibling genres, steampunk's most enduring works tend to side with the outsiders the system grinds beneath its gears.