The Rise and Fall of Steampunk

If you read much science fiction or fantasy, you've probably encountered steampunk. Think of it as Victorian era history with Zeppelins and possibly steam-powered Babbage engines (mechanical computers).

I'm not a big fan though I did enjoy some novels: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ian McDonald's YA Planesrunner series come to mind. I like it more as a visual metaphor; it works better for movies than novels, I think.

In Whatever Happened to Steampunk, John Brownlee looks at the evolution of steampunk and offers some reasons why it seems to have faded in popularity.

In other words, steampunk is a bit of a power fantasy: not of the technologist, but of the maker, the tinkerer, the engineer. The guys who can rebuild an engine from scratch, but who are as powerless to fix the iPhone that they just dropped in the toilet as the rest of us.

And that is exactly why steampunk took off when it did, starting around early 2003. According to Rob Beschizza, an editor at Boing Boing — one of the web’s oldest and most popular fringe culture blogs, which reported on the rise of steampunk firsthand — steampunk became popular alongside the internet’s maker movement, which itself was a response to technology’s rapid evolutionary clip.