Steampunk
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, especially in a setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th century. Therefore, steampunk works are often set in an alternate history of the 19th century's British Victorian era or American "Wild West", in a post-apocalyptic future during which steam power has regained mainstream usage, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power. Steampunk perhaps most recognizably features anachronistic technologies or retro-futuristic inventions as people in the 19th century might have envisioned them, and is likewise rooted in the era's perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art. Such technology may include fictional machines like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or the modern authors Philip Pullman and China Mieville. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of such technology as lighter-than-air airships, analog computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's Analytical Engine.
Steampunk may also, though not necessarily, incorporate additional elements from the genres of fantasy, horror, historical fiction, alternate history, or other branches of speculative fiction, making it often a hybrid genre. The term steampunk originated during the 1980s and early 1990s, though now retroactively refers to many works of fiction created even as far back as the 19th century itself.
Steampunk also refers to any of the artistic styles, clothing fashions, or subcultures, that have developed from the aesthetics of steampunk fiction. Various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by individual artisans into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical "steampunk" style, and a number of visual and musical artists have been described as steampunk.
Precursors
Although the term “steampunk” was not coined until 1987, several works of fiction significant to the development of the genre were produced before that. Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake, published in 1959, anticipated many of the tropes of steampunk.
Steampunk was particularly influenced by, and often adopts the style of the scientific romances and fantasies of the 19th century. Notably influential authors are:
- G. K. Chesterton
- Charles Dickens
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- George Griffith
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Albert Robida
- Mary Shelley.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Bram Stoker
- Mark Twain
- Jules Verne
- H. G. Wells
Early adaptations of this scientific romance literature genre to film, particularly those from the 1950s and 1960s, are notable precursors of steampunk cinema:
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954, film)
- From the Earth to the Moon (1958, film)
- The Time Machine (1960, film)
- Master of the World (1961, film)
- Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969, film)
See also
- Francois Schuiten
- Dieselpunk
- List of steampunk works
- Retro-futurism
- Retrotronics
- Tik-Tok (Oz)
- Pythonesque
- Science fiction Western
- "Maison tournante aérienne" (aerial rotating house) by Albert Robida for his book Le Vingtième Siècle, a 19th-century conception of life in the 20th century|alt=black and white drawing of small house of complex design raised above the surrounding buildings on a turntable.
