INVENTED WORLDS · -PUNK MODULE · 02

STEAMPUNK

A future that runs on coal, and never asks who shovels it.

01 — WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
THE MACHINEbrass, iron, glass; every moving part left visible
THE SURFACErivets, gauges, polished wood, engraved plate
THE POWERsteam, springs, clockwork; nothing is invisible
THE DRESSVictorian, tailored, with goggles that rarely do anything
THE PLACEan empire at its loudest, seen from the drawing room
THE FEELINGenormous machines you can still understand by looking
The Nautilus engine room, riveted plate, pipes, gearing, two small figures before an enormous machine.
The Nautilus engine room. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870. Engraving by Alphonse de Neuville. Public domain.
Captain Nemo at the wheel on the bridge of the Nautilus.
Captain Nemo aboard the Nautilus, 1870. Alphonse de Neuville. Public domain.

Both engravings are from 1870. The word "steampunk" would not exist for another hundred and seventeen years.

02 — WHERE THE WORD CAME FROM

It was a joke.

K.W. Jeter wrote a letter to Locus magazine, printed in the April 1987 issue, half-seriously proposing "steampunk" for the Victorian-set novels he, Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing — Jeter's own Morlock Night (1979) and Infernal Devices (1987), Powers' The Anubis Gates (1983), Blaylock's Homunculus (1986). The three had been classmates at California State University, Fullerton.

The word was built by swapping one word in "cyberpunk," which was two years old at the time. Nobody expected it to stick.

03 — THE THREE QUESTIONS
Which machine rulessteam, brass, clockwork; industry made visible
Who holds powerempire, industry, and the class system underneath both
Who fights backinventors, adventurers, airship crews. The gifted amateur

Cyberpunk's protagonist is disposable; steampunk's is usually a gentleman with a workshop. That difference is the whole gap between the two.

04 — THE FIRST DERIVATIVE

CYBERPUNK— 1984 —the machine you cannot see

STEAMPUNK— 1987 —the machine you can take apart

Steampunk was the first genre to borrow the -punk suffix, and in doing so it turned the suffix into a template — pick a technology, build a world on it, add "punk." Every later -punk follows the shape Jeter made as a joke.

05 — IT WAS REAL FIRST

Steampunk's inventory is not invented.

It is nineteenth-century engineering, remembered fondly. Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer in the 1820s and 1830s that was never completed in his lifetime.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 filled a building of iron and glass with the machinery of an industrial empire and invited the public in to admire it.

Jules Verne's Nautilus, engraved by Alphonse de Neuville in 1870, gave the genre its interiors before the genre existed.

Drawing of Babbage's Difference Engine, columns and register plates in mechanical detail.
Drawing of Babbage's Difference Engine. Public domain.
Photograph of the Great Exhibition hall in Hyde Park, 1851, filled with machinery and displays.
The Great Exhibition, London, 1851. Photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot. Public domain.

The Victorians did not need a retrofuture. They already believed the machines were the future.

06 — THE PART IT LEAVES OUT

The Victorian era steampunk borrows from was also the era of empire, colonial extraction, and child labour in the mills that made the brass. The aesthetic keeps the drawing room, the airship, and the polished instrument, and quietly leaves out who was shovelling. This is the standard and fair criticism of the genre; some later writers have deliberately worked against it.

07 — WHY IT LOOKS THE WAY IT DOES

Steampunk is the only -punk whose technology is legible: you can see every gear, follow every pipe, understand the machine by looking at it. That is the appeal, and it is nostalgia for comprehension rather than for the nineteenth century.

Captain Nemo standing on top of the Nautilus, playing a violin, seabirds overhead.
Captain Nemo on the Nautilus, 1870. Alphonse de Neuville. Public domain.

A joke in a letter, and now it is the second-largest world in the family.