Steam Punk - Television Tropes & Idioms

Water plus heat equals steam. The world will be saved by steam!

"Imagine it. The Victorian Age accelerated. Starships and missiles fuelled by coal and driven by steam. Leaving history devastated in its wake."

— The Tenth Doctor, "Tooth and Claw"

Retro-style Speculative Fiction set in periods where steam power is king. Very often this will be in an Alternate Universe where the internal combustion engine never displaced the steam engine, and as a result all manner of cool steam-driven technologies have emerged, ranging from the plausible to Magitek with a Hollywood Science Hand Wave. Largely, Steampunk runs on Rule Of Cool. Sometimes combined with the work of Charles Babbage on mechanical computers to produce a kind of retro Cyber Punk set entirely in the Victorian era or a close analogue, minus the exploitation.

Steam is on the rise (At least by webnerd meters), more or less replacing the near-dead Cyber Punk culture. The fact that most Victorian fiction is on the public domain helps, too. The zeppelins don't hurt either.

A related concept is "clockpunk," which is set prior to the Industrial Revolution but is otherwise essentially the same, with intricate clockworks replacing steam power as the technology of choice. On the other end, steampunk scenarios may edge into Raygun Gothic territory.

Steampunk may be a modern reflection of the 1930s-40s trope of The Gay Nineties, an idealized version of the 1890s. The term "steampunk" was coined by K. W. Jeter to describe the speculative fiction stories in a Victorian setting that he, Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing in the early 1980s.

The first works of steam punk were inspired by the same ethos as cyberpunk, hence the name. However, the name is more attached to the technology than to the ethos. As a consequence, steampunk can be bright, shining, cheerful, and upbeat, rather than "punk". Try not to think about it.

As an aside, many writers and fans now refer to the "shiny happy" version as "Victorian Fantasy" or "Victorian Futurism", to distinguish it from "true" punk-ethos steampunk. Particularly now that the steam and clockwork versions are increasingly becoming merged; and supernatural or paranormal tropes are more frequently included (the Encyclopedia of Fantasy favours "Gaslight Romance" for this). This is not exactly hurt by the optimism of much of the Victorian era (until it crashed into World War I).

As an interesting aside, note that any Victorian-era society which actually tried to create steampunk technology would soon find itself in SERIOUS trouble. The power requirements necessary to make real-world versions of steampunk devices (or at least Victorian-era versions of 20th century technology) would be enormous, and would soon exhaust all available supplies of coal and wood. A real steampunk society would have to either immediately transform into a fully modern society (with oil, gas, and nuclear power driving devices made of modern, lighter materials) or would quickly become, in all probability, a technological dead end.

If instead of industrial era technology, the setting has pre-industrial technology, see Clock Punk. If it includes internal combustion engines in place of steam, see Diesel Punk.