Steampunk got its name from a joke letter to a magazine in 1987
Science fiction writer K. W. Jeter wanted a collective label for the Victorian fantasies he, Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing. In a letter printed in Locus in April 1987 he half-jokingly offered 'steam-punks', a riff on cyberpunk. The word now covers novels, anime, fashion and even a Paris Metro station.
The genre imagines technology as nineteenth-century people might have pictured it: steam cannons, airships and mechanical computers such as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, usually set in an alternative Victorian Britain, the American frontier or a fantasy world still run on steam. Its roots lie in the scientific romances of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Mary Shelley. Scholars often name Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone (1959) as the first true steampunk novel, though others prefer Michael Moorcock's The Warlord of the Air from 1971.
Jeter's own books, Morlock Night and Infernal Devices, and Powers' The Anubis Gates were among the first to wear the label, but the three authors barely thought about it at the time. Others had already played with the idea; Harry Harrison imagined a 1973 Britain full of atomic locomotives and coal-fired flying boats. Paul Di Filippo's 1995 Steampunk Trilogy may be the first fiction with the word in its title, and one of its short novels pairs Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as lovers.
Japan developed a strong strand of its own. Osamu Tezuka's manga trilogy starting with Lost World (1948) already had steampunk touches, fed by a romantic Japanese vision of old industrial Europe sometimes called the Paris of our dreams. Hayao Miyazaki became its most influential animator; his 1986 Studio Ghibli film Laputa: Castle in the Sky, with air pirates and steam-driven robots, is hailed as an early modern classic and inspired Studio Gainax's Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, which in turn shaped Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
Beyond stories, steampunk is a maker culture. Enthusiasts rebuild keyboards and electric guitars in brass, wood and leather, and unlike William Morris and the Arts and Crafts reformers they embrace machines rather than rejecting them. In 1994 Belgian artist François Schuiten turned the Arts et Métiers Metro station into a brass submarine with cogs overhead, honouring Verne. At Burning Man, the Neverwas Haul, a three-storey Victorian house on wheels, crawled along at up to 5 miles per hour with a crew of ten.
Source: Steampunk
