Aug

The Origins of Steampunk

I’m fascinated by the Steampunk & Clockpunk subcultures & their influence can be plainly seen in several pieces of my artwork (as well as the design of this website). Here are a few examples & a quick introduction to the origins of Steampunk.

Traveler

Steampunk science fiction revolves around a retro-futuristic world where steam power is still in wide use, where elaborate clockwork contraptions, pipes, valves & boilers power amazing machines. Zeppelins & dirigibles fill the skies carrying men & women dressed in Victorian era fashions – bustle skirts, corsets, tweed coats & bowler hats. Soot covered, goggle-wearing mechanics & engineers are the heroes of the day, configuring complicated machinery with ratchets & spanners.

Flight of Fancy

Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of cyberpunk. It seems to have been coined by the science fiction author K. W. Jeter, who was trying to find a general term for works by Tim Powers (author of The Anubis Gates, 1983), James Blaylock (Homunculus, 1986) and himself (Morlock Night, 1979 and Infernal Devices, 1987) which took place in a 19th-century (usually Victorian) setting and imitated conventions of actual Victorian speculative fiction such as The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

Clockwork Edison

Other infuences on the Steampunk genre include the works of Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and Mark Twain. Since the 1990s, the steampunk label has expanded beyond works set in recognizable historical periods (usually the 19th century) to works set in fantasy worlds that rely heavily on steam- or spring-powered technology.

We Just Clicked

John Clute and John Grant have introduced another category: gaslight romance. According to them, “steampunk stories are most commonly set in a romanticized, smoky, 19th-century London, as are Gaslight Romances. But the latter category focuses nostalgically on icons from the late years of that century and the early years of the 20th century — on Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and even Tarzan — and can normally be understood as combining supernatural fiction and recursive fantasy, though some gaslight romances can be read as fantasies of history.

Extraordinary Gentlemen

Another setting is Western steampunk, which overlaps with both the Weird West and Science fiction Western subgenres. The term steamgoth, coined by author and artist James Richardson-Brown, emphasizes a far darker view of Steampunk’s anachronisms. Several other categories have arisen sharing similar naming structures. The best known of these is dieselpunk, but also includes clockpunk and many others. Most of these terms were invented as part of the GURPS roleplaying game, and are not used in other contexts.