Well I dreamt I went away on a Steam Powered Aeroplane.
I went and stayed and damn near didn't come back again.
Didn't go very fast on a Steam Powered Aeroplane,
Oh the wheel went around, up and down, and inside and then back again.

Sittin' in a 747 just watching them clouds roll by,
Can't tell if it's sunshine or if it's rain.
Rather be sittin' in a deck chair high above Kansas City,
On a genuine old fashioned Steam Powered Aeroplane.

- John Hartford, Steam Powered Aeroplane*

For those of you unfamiliar with steampunk, it's an interesting phenomenon, a sort of bastard child of history and imagination that is difficult to categorize - is it a movement, a philosophy, an art, a science? Perhaps a bit of each, really.

For a long time, Fantasy was basically a medieval homage, with occasional forays into the Renaissance. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a useful case study for this approach, because so much is taken on faith. In a society containing beer, barrels, boots and bread, there have to be brewers, tanners, cobblers, bakers, farmers, millers, coopers, and a plethora of other trades, but Tolkien rarely touches on the mechanics of Middle-Earth society, that's not what he's interested in. The near-fate of the Shire as a smoke-belching wasteland would seem to clearly demonstrate Tolkien's general position on technology and progress, a position shared by some of his fellow fantasy authors.

The other side of the coin is, of course, Science Fiction, with the emphasis on Science. In its purest form, SF worships at the altar of technology, but technology at a remove, technology inaccessible to the man on the street. Star Trek in its various incarnations is the perfect example of this approach, an almost clinical future without moving parts, grease or grit.

Steampunk stands between these two options. As the name suggests, the steampunk aesthetic dates from the era of the steam engine, but it's really a sort of retro-futurism, in which technological developments like robots, computers, and time machines are created using the technologies of the past: steam, rivets, gears and dials as opposed to electricity or electronics. It is heavily influenced by the work of its patron saints, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and steampunk fiction is often set in an idealized Victorian milieu.

The term "steampunk" was coined by science fiction author K. W. Jeter in a 1987 letter to Locus Magazine. Looking for a term to describe the work being written by himself and his friends Tim Powers and James Blaylock, he jokingly suggested "steampunks", a play on words regarding the cyberpunk genre of science fiction:

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term... Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like "steampunks," perhaps.

In addition to Jeter, Powers, and Blaylock, authors such as Paul di Filippi and Jay Lake have contributed to the steampunk library, and cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling paid tribute to the genre in their 1990 collaboration The Difference Engine. Jay Lake and S. M. Peters have presented an alternative approach to steampunk in their writing, which they refer to as "clockpunk", revolving (no pun intended) more around clockwork and spring-powered technology than steam.

Another related style is that of the gaslamp romance, which is less involved with technology but which takes a mash-up approach to the Victorian era, combined historical and fictional characters to create alternative histories. A perfect example would be British author Kim Newman's 1992 novel Anno Dracula, wherein Count Dracula marries the widowed Queen Victoria, and Jack the Ripper stalks vampire prostitutes through the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

Surprisingly, steampunk has developed a role beyond that of just a literary sub-genre, and has established itself as both a fashion trend and an artistic movement, and for some people a philosophy and a lifestyle. Followers of steampunk fashion sport top hats, goggles, and muttonchop whiskers, and accessorize their frock coats and corsets with brass ray guns and complicated ocular mechanisms.

Steampunk artists embrace an aesthetic based around copper, glass, wood and leather, and build both fantasy creations and reconstructions or modifications of modern technology such as laptops, iPods, electric guitars, and even vibrators. (N.B. there are certain devices which do not successfully combine extreme heat and metal. Apparently the steam-powered vibrator is one of them.) In addition, a wide variety of characters and stories have been re-imagined into the steampunk milieu: Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and DC comics characters, and so on.

Steampunk has inspired or influenced a number of movies and television programs, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the movie version of Wild Wild West, and is the milieu of Katsuhiro Otomo's 2004 animated film Steamboy. Last year's Doctor Who Christmas special featured a marvellous steampunk robot, a gigantic smoke-belching automaton that stalked across Victorian London, leaving the traditional path of destruction in its wake. However, in spite of these attempts to move steampunk from the fringe into the mainstream, to date steampunk has yet to have its Star Wars, as it were.

But there's still hope - a quick Google search resulted in over 500,000 hits for the phrase "steampunk star wars", so obviously someone is working on it.

- Sid

* With this set of lyrics, we once again pay homage to the infamous Colin Campbell. Colin sometimes bemoans the cleansing process of a few years back when he divested himself of his vinyl collection (records, that is, he didn't collect 60's tablecloths or fetish clothing or anything like that). I seem to have a certain knack for finding what we might charitably describe as "unlicensed" music online, and when he wistfully mentioned John Hartford and his album Steam Powered Aeroplane as among the deceased, I had the great good fortune of finding eleven digitized John Hartford albums online for him within minutes, including the one in question.

(The Star Trek Steampunk wallpapers are from the Rabbittooth web site, credit where credit is due.)