It's an aesthetic, not a literary genre. At a stretch, I *might* allow it as a sub-genre of fantasy (not sci-fi, although I guess sci-fi and fantasy can have a lot of overlap). But even then it's closer to steam-fantasy (or steamsnob) than steampunk. If you're gonna call something "punk", then there's gotta be punk in it.

I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS SUBJECT.

(but in short: I don't mind people who like it as an aesthetic, but don't try and peddle your books as steampunk unless they actually are. That said, Rococopunk is a better aesthetic anyway. AND it's more punk.)

What I always found interesting about steampunk was that it was a geek fandom with hardly any source material -- it was like people wanted the nerd street-cred of dressing up in costumes and going to conventions and stuff but without the hassle of actually reading a lot of books first. Sure, it seems like there are plenty of steampunk books now, but it seems like most of them came out in response to the hipsters in top hats and googles crowd, rather than being the inspiration for them in the first place.

I suppose another version of that phenomenon would be the "sexy vampire" kids of the 90s; they only had a couple of Anne Rice novels and Vampire: the Masquerade (i.e., Anne Rice: the RPG) to inspire them, but once they'd been around for a while you started to see an explosion of "sexy vampire" novels.

I think steampunk has always been more about the costumes than anything else. A bunch of nerds without a genre who wanted something that was easy to put together (top hats! corsets! googles! fingerless gloves! funny moustaches!) but could look "cool" without having to be true to a source material.

It's really the fandom for unimaginative people. They just take old ideas, add some sort of weird clockwork gears, reference Tesla and Victorian England and show some cleavage and bam! steampunk.

It's a pretty worthless genre, if you ask me, and it was totally ruined before it ever got a chance to be good by the same kind of people that wear hemp pants, bead necklaces and sandals. i.e. white people with dreads.

I always took it as retro-futurism-parody.

Kind of like the original airship in final fantasy

Generally, parody requires that you have some insight into your subject matter and a little nod and a wink that what you are doing is taking the piss. There's no way people that like steampunk cosplay are anything but dead serious.

You're probably right about that. I tend to steer clear of those kind of events

Well, you're not wrong.

I was a big fan of Wild Wild West as a kid. The real one with Robert Conrad from the late 60s, not the so-so movie remake from the 90s. With an 1880s Secret Service James Bond (West, James West) with lots of Q-esque gadgets and evil mastermind weapons that attempted to be somewhat period technology compliant, I thought it was wonderful.

My early fantasies of a kick-ass conversion van were based on James' and Artimus' awesome custom train car.

Thing with the 1890s and steampunk... I always got the impression that electricity was the cool thing back then. Vernes Nautilus had an electric engine for instance. I always wanted it to be called electropunk.

Verne called himself a futurist though.

Yeah. It´s kind of hard to make a twist on a past that is your present.

Didn't this all start with "The Difference Engine" by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson? (And Charles Babbidge)

I think infernal devices was the first book actually called steampunk g. The glass hammer was, but they called it cyberpunk. Gibson/Sterling called theirs stamping too, but it was. I feel, more as a nod to Jeter than anything.

Incidentally, those two books (along with Gibson/sterlings) are actual steampunk. that is, they're cyberpunk set in a steam age.

My phone doesn't even recognise the word steampunk. I'm so proud.

See my reply below about Robert Conrad as James West in the late 60s. That's the first fetishy 1800's, steam and electricity fantasy I can think of.

Yes and no? From what I've read, the term originated a couple years before The Difference Engine came out, but didn't really gain traction until later. I know when I first read it in (probably) 1992, I don't remember anyone actually using the word "steampunk" to describe it, we just said stuff like, "cyberpunk, but in the 1800s."

I think of The Difference Engine as basically a cyberpunk novel with a twist to the presentation, like when a rock band does an acoustic version or dance remix of one of their songs: it's the same riffs, just put into a different context. The steampunk that came later (I don't think the whole steampunk "movement", with the costumes and everything, started until something like ten years after Difference Engine) didn't really have those same cyberpunk themes going on -- which only makes sense, given that by then we were already living in a cyberpunk future.