Steampunk Popularization (part 1 of 5)

Literary

The 1981 educational book, Elementary BASIC - Learning to Program Your Computer in BASIC with Sherlock Holmes by Henry Singer and Andrew Ledgar may have been the first fictional work to depict the use of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in an adventure story. The instructional book, aimed at young programming students, depicts Holmes using the engine as an aid in his investigations, and offer program listings to perform simple data processing tasks required to solve the fictional cases. The book even describes a possible enhancement to Babbage's machine; a device that allows the engine to be used remotely, through telegraph lines. Companion volumes, Elementary Pascal - Learning to Program Your Computer in Pascal with Sherlock Holmes and From Baker Street to Binary - An Introduction to Computers and Computer Programming with Sherlock Holmes, were also written.
1988 saw the publication of the first version of the science fiction roleplaying game Space: 1889, set in an alternate history in which certain discredited Victorian scientific theories were probable, thus leading to new technologies. Contributing authors included Frank Chadwick, Loren Wiseman, and Marcus Rowland.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 novel The Difference Engine is often credited with bringing widespread awareness of steampunk.This novel applies the principles of Gibson and Sterling's cyberpunk writings to an alternative Victorian era where Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage's proposed steam-powered mechanical computer, which Babbage called a difference engine (a later, more general-purpose version was known as an analytical engine), was actually built, and led to the dawn of the information age more than a century "ahead of schedule". This setting was different than most steampunk settings in that it takes a dim and dark view of this future rather than the more prevalent utopian versions.
Nick Gevers's 2008 original anthology Extraordinary Engines features newer steampunk stories by some of the genre's writers, as well as other science fiction and fantasy writers experimenting with neo-Victorian conventions. A retrospective reprint anthology of steampunk fiction was released, also in 2008, by Tachyon Publications; edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and appropriately entitled Steampunk, it is a collection of stories by James Blaylock, whose "Narbondo" trilogy is typically considered steampunk; Jay Lake, author of the novel Mainspring, sometimes labeled "clockpunk"; the aforementioned Michael Moorcock; as well as Jess Nevins, known for his annotations to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Boilerplate. Mechanical Marvel.

While most of the original steampunk works had a historical setting, later works often place steampunk elements in a fantasy world with little relation to any specific historical era. Historical steampunk tends to be science fiction that presents an alternative history; it also contains real locales and persons from history with alternative fantasy technology. "Fantasy-world steampunk", such as China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, Alan Campbell's Scar Night, and Stephen Hunt's Jackelian novels, on the other hand, presents steampunk in a completely imaginary fantasy realm, often populated by legendary creatures coexisting with steam-era and other anachronistic technologies. However, the works of China Miéville and similar authors are sometimes referred to as belonging to the 'New Weird' rather than steampunk.
Self-described author of "far-fetched fiction" Robert Rankin has increasingly incorporated elements of steampunk into narrative worlds, both Victorian and re-imagined contemporary. In 2009, he was made a Fellow of the Victorian Steampunk Society.

Roots of Steampunk

          Steampunk is influenced by, and often adopts the style of, the 19th-century scientific romances of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Mary Shelley.

Twentieth-century precursors

Several works of art and fiction significant to the development of the genre were produced before the genre had a name. Titus Alone (1959), by Mervyn Peake, anticipated many of the tropes of steampunk. Remedios Varo's paintings combine elements of Victorian dress, fantasy, and technofantasy imagery. One of the earliest mainstream manifestations of the steampunk ethos was the original CBS television series The Wild Wild West (1965–69), which inspired the film Wild Wild West (1999). The film Brazil (1985) was an important early cinematic influence toward creating the genre.

Origin of the term

Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of cyberpunk. It seems to have been coined by science fiction author K. W. Jeter, who was trying to find a general term for works by Tim Powers (The Anubis Gates, 1983); James Blaylock (Homunculus, 1986); and himself (Morlock Night, 1979, and Infernal Devices, 1987)—all of which took place in a 19th-century (usually Victorian) setting and imitated conventions of such actual Victorian speculative fiction as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. In a letter to science fiction magazine Locus, printed in the April 1987 issue, Jeter wrote:

Dear Locus, Enclosed is a copy of my 1979 novel Morlock Night; I'd appreciate your being so good as to route it Faren Miller, as it's a prime piece of evidence in the great debate as to who in "the Powers/Blaylock/Jeter fantasy triumvirate" was writing in the "gonzo-historical manner" first. Though of course, I did find her review in the March Locus to be quite flattering.
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 for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like 'steam-punks', perhaps.

—K.W. Jeter

Modern steampunk

While Jeter's Morlock Night and Infernal Devices, Power's Anubis Gates, and Blaylock's Lord Kelvin's Machine were the first novels to which Jeter's neologism would be applied, they gave the term little thought at the time. However, they were far from the first modern science fiction writers to speculate on the development of steam-based technology or alternate histories. Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium (1962) and Ronald W. Clark's Queen Victoria's Bomb (1967) apply modern speculation to past-age technology and society. Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air (1971) is another early example. Harry Harrison's novel A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (1973) portrays a British Empire of an alternative year 1973, full of atomic locomotives, coal-powered flying boats, ornate submarines, and Victorian dialogue. In February 1980 Richard A. Lupoff and Steve Stiles published the first "chapter" of their 10-part comic strip The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle and His Incredible Aether Flyer.
The first use of the word in a title was in Paul Di Filippo's 1995 Steampunk Trilogy, consisting of three short novels: "Victoria," "Hottentots," and "Walt and Emily," which, respectively, imagine the replacement of Queen Victoria by a human/newt clone, an invasion of Massachusetts by Lovecraftian monsters, and a love affair between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

More Than a Culture

For one day let's trust Wikipedia and find out what the SteamPunk culture really is.

Steampunk is a genre that originated during the 1980s and early 1990s and incorporates elements of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror, and speculative fiction. It involves a setting where steam power is widely used—whether in an alternative history such as Victorian era Britain or "Wild West"-era United States, or in a post-apocalyptic time —that incorporates elements of either science fiction or fantasy. Works of steampunk often feature anachronistic technology, or futuristic innovations as Victorians might have envisioned them, based on a Victorian perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art. This technology includes such fictional machines as those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or the contemporary authors Philip Pullman, Scott Westerfeld, and China Mieville.
Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of such technology as lighter-than-air airships, analog computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's Analytical Engine.

 
Fashion trend or something bigger?

Steampunk also refers to art, fashion, and design that are informed by the aesthetics of steampunk literature. Various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by individual artisans into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical "steampunk" style, and a number of visual and musical artists have been described as steampunk.