"A game designer needed a word. It ended up naming thirty years of the twentieth century."
The years between the two world wars, redrawn with more machinery than they actually had.
Both of these posters were selling admission to a fair.
In 2001 the game designer Lewis Pollak coined "dieselpunk" for his tabletop roleplaying game Children of the Sun, published by Misguided Games in 2002. He wanted a name for a world running on combustion, and the word he built described the whole span from the First World War to the early 1950s.
The family, in order of arrival:
This is the point in the family history where the suffix starts working as a product label.
Antonio Sant'Elia, an Italian architect, drew La Città Nuova in 1914: a city of power stations with cathedral proportions, terminals combining aircraft and railways, apartment blocks stepped back from streets stacked in layers, external lifts climbing the outside of everything. He signed a Futurist manifesto of architecture in the same year. He was killed at the front in 1916, aged twenty-eight, having built almost nothing.
The visual grammar dieselpunk uses — massive stepped concrete, exposed machinery treated as ornament, transport as the organising idea of a city — was complete in those sheets, decades before the war that supplies dieselpunk its costumes.
Everyday Science and Mechanics, November 1931, edited by Hugo Gernsback. The cover shows a finned passenger rocket over a coastline and the line "Berlin to New York in One Hour — See Page 648." Elsewhere on the same cover: Money Making Inventions, Radio Kinks, Wood and Metal Crafts.
Most people met the diesel-age future in practical magazines that presented it as a timetable, priced at a quarter, shelved beside instructions for building furniture.
Dieselpunk's hero is a competent individual working inside a machine far larger than they are, which is close to the shape cyberpunk would use fifty years later with different hardware.
In July 2008 the online magazine Gatehouse Gazette published an article called "Discovering Dieselpunk," which set down two modes that had been identified by another online magazine, The Flying Fortress. Each was named after the writer who argued for it:
Jean Carlu's 1941 poster belongs squarely to the second reading: a hand, a spanner, and a single word.
A genre whose own readers formally divided it in two and named the halves after two people from a forum, one of them writing under a pen name.
Metropolis in 1927 and Things to Come in 1936 supplied the pictures long before the label existed. The modern examples are largely games and game-shaped films: Command & Conquer: Red Alert in 1996, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in 2004, BioShock in 2007.
The medium carrying it now is the medium it was named in.
"The era closed in 1945. The word for it arrived fifty-six years later, out of a small-press game, and has long outlasted the game."