The more Victorian branch of steampunk sometimes also incorporates vaguely Lovecraftian elements, as shown here. Supernatural or paranormal tropes are more frequently included in this approach, in which case the Encyclopedia of Fantasy favors 'Gaslight Romance'. Some writers and fans refer to the 'shiny happy' version as 'Victorian Fantasy', ' Gaslamp Fantasy' or 'Victorian Futurism'. Steampunk's modern incarnation may be considered a reaction to the popular dystopias of that time: the positive power of the imagination and subversion of the New Technology Is Evil trope are common steampunk themes, although recent steampunk is increasingly likely to deal with dystopian societies, sometimes even drawing upon the works of Charles Babbage to theorize humans with mechanical brains and other things rendering them cyberpunk in all but the backdrop and visual trappings.Įlements of steampunk that are set in the American frontier are usually referred to as ' cattlepunk'. Blaylock were writing in the early 1980s in contrast to the cyberpunk stories like Neuromancer that were saturating media. Jeter to describe the speculative fiction stories in a Victorian setting that he, Tim Powers, and James P.

(Some definitions set the start date earlier, though, perhaps as far back as the 1780s, when the Industrial Revolution first began to take off.) The term 'steampunk' was coined by K. Think of The American Civil War and World War I as acceptable bookends: the former is when the technological revolution really started to take off, and the latter when it first started edging into Diesel Punk. While various works may be more chronologically specific, any time from around 1860, through to the 1910s, can be considered fair game. Steampunk may be a modern reflection of the 1930s–40s trope of The Gay '90s, an idealized version of the 1890s. In essence, it's applying the question of 'What if the future happened sooner?'

Sometimes combined with the work of Charles Babbage on mechanical computers to produce a kind of retro cyberpunk set entirely in the Victorian era or a close analogue, with Dickensian exploitation. Largely, steampunk runs on Rule of Cool, with some supposedly 'steam-powered' technology being more advanced than modern electronics. Very often this will be in an Alternate Universe where the internal combustion engine never displaced the steam engine, and as a result, all manner of cool steam-driven technologies have emerged, ranging from Airships to submarines the plausible counterpart to magitek, with a Hollywood Science Hand Wave or The Spark of Genius. What is Steampunk? It is a retro-style Speculative Fiction set in periods where steam power is king. The Doctor, Doctor Who, ' Tooth and Claw'

Steam punk