Clockpunk
Named inside another genre's rulebook, for a world that runs on springs.
What it looks like
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment redrawn as an age of mechanism, with gears, springs and automata doing the work engines would later do.
The machine in the first plate is a reading device. It holds several books open at once and keeps every shelf level as the wheel turns, using an epicyclic gear train — the same arrangement that keeps a clock running true.
The word was named inside another genre's rulebook
"Clockpunk" was coined by the GURPS roleplaying system, in the sourcebook GURPS Steampunk — written by William H. Stoddard, published by Steve Jackson Games in 2000, and winner that year of the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement.
Clockpunk has no book of its own. It was defined as a section inside its larger sibling's manual, and it has been carried by that definition ever since. The common shorthand is that clockpunk is steampunk with the steam taken out.
One year later, in 2001, a game designer named Lewis Pollak coined "dieselpunk" for his own tabletop game. Two of this family's terms arrived twelve months apart, both out of the tabletop trade, both invented because a product needed describing.
The drawings
Leonardo da Vinci spent much of his working life as a military engineer — for Ludovico Sforza in Milan, and later for Cesare Borgia. The notebooks are full of what he was paid to design and what he designed for himself: flying machines with articulated wings, multi-barrelled guns, revolving cranes, a mechanical lion.
Almost none of it was built. The pages were bound, dispersed, catalogued and studied for four centuries, and the machines stayed on paper — which turns out to be the ordinary fate of an imagined future's hardware.
Ramelli's book is the same story at volume: 195 engraved plates of pumps, mills, bridges and hoists, presented as a working catalogue, most of them never made.
Some of them were actually built
This is where clockpunk separates from every other world of this kind: a number of its impossible machines existed, and people queued to see them.
Jacques de Vaucanson, 1739 — the Digesting Duck. It flapped its wings, took grain from an outstretched hand, swallowed, and produced a pellet at the other end. The digestion was staged; the mechanism was not.
Pierre Jaquet-Droz, between 1768 and 1774 — three automata built in Switzerland, among them a boy who dips a quill and writes. The text he writes can be changed by resetting a wheel of cams. All three still work.
Wolfgang von Kempelen, 1770 — a chess-playing automaton in a turban, seated at a cabinet full of gears.
The three questions
Clockpunk's protagonist is the maker. Leonardo drew fortifications for the men who employed him, and the person who understood the machine was also the person the machine belonged to.
Where you meet it
Games carry this one, which suits a word that came out of a game. The Clockwork Mansion in Dishonored 2 (2016) is a house that rearranges itself by lever. Leonardo appears as a character in Assassin's Creed II (2009). Thief: The Dark Project (1998) and Syberia (2002) both build worlds out of mechanism. On television, Da Vinci's Demons (2013). In print, Jay Lake's Mainspring (2007), where the Earth turns on a visible brass gear.
The Turk
Kempelen's automaton toured Europe and America for decades under two owners. It beat Napoleon at Schönbrunn in 1809. Benjamin Franklin played it in Paris. Edgar Allan Poe published an essay in 1836 arguing at length that the machine had to contain a living operator.
It did. A skilled chess player sat folded inside the cabinet, moving on a sliding seat as each door was opened for the audience, and working the Turk's arm through a pantograph by candlelight. Joseph Friedrich Racknitz published his guess at the arrangement in 1789 — wrong in the details, right in the only respect that mattered.
The most famous clockwork machine in history had a person inside it.