Steampunk Noob

I think the best examples of steampunk can be found in visual media, as it's primarily a visual aesthetic.
The earliest example I saw myself was The Wild, Wild West (the 1960's TV series not the dreadful Will Smith film) but was there something before that? I've read about Adam Adamant Lives! but I've never seen that, and it was concurrent anyway.

I certainly agree on the visual aspect. There are even specialist shops that sell compasses and watches, and various intricately made devices; as artwork, created in a Steampunk-style, and people who collect such things, simply for their pleasing aesthetics. You see them in places like the Lanes in Brighton.

Edit: However, isn't the idea of mechanical computers, as opposed to electronic computers, also a huge element? Or, is that only the case in a small subset of Steampunk?
 
I read the Difference Engine when it first came out. I found myself trying to clutch at the plot. I'm sure there's a damn good tale in there but it came over as a convuluted mess to me.

Isn't this somehow reassuring, that even something by revered writers, that is "closest that steampunk has got to full-on literature," can still be received as a "convoluted mess"?
 
Sorry for the long delay in replying; I've been out of country.

What is magical steam? It is normal steam with the addition of phlogiston, which lends a wide variety of magical properties to a wide variety of objects. Phlogiston, operating through aether, is what powers magic in my world.

As for non-humans, that'd be all kinds and every kind that appears in the European tradition of the supernatural.
 
What is magical steam? It is normal steam with the addition of phlogiston, which lends a wide variety of magical properties to a wide variety of objects. Phlogiston, operating through aether, is what powers magic in my world.
That is an excellent idea. Not just an alternative universe where some inventions were invented before others, but one where Victorian scientific theories were actually correct. There is much more to be explored within that idea which I have never seen written before.
 
There is indeed. Most of my Altearth stories are set in the Middle Ages, because that's the ground I know best. In my world, people go a very long time--about 1,500 years--trying to figure out how magic works. So, all the medieval pseudo-sciences (e.g., alchemy) are sort of right, much in the same way they were sort of right in Real Earth. Just as no one was going to get anywhere without a few key concepts (gravity, elements), no theory in Altearth was more than an unreliable approximation until the discovery of phlogiston and verification of the theory of aether. Once that was accomplished, you get the Altearth version of the industrial revolution, of which Steam was a key component.

Another Victorian era theory that turns out to be real is the Hollow World. The discovery of that forms the spine of my current WIP, Into the Second World. It's going to be a fairly straightforward adventure story; rather a change from my previous novels.
 
I was thinking of diseases spread by 'Bad Air', magical X-Rays that cure everything, and space travel without being limited by the constraints of relativity.
 
That is an excellent idea. Not just an alternative universe where some inventions were invented before others, but one where Victorian scientific theories were actually correct. There is much more to be explored within that idea which I have never seen written before.

Not steampunk, then, but Phlostigon-punk?

(Or aetherpunk - more prosaic, but slicker)
 
Well, we use phlogiston to make the magical substance called Steam. But my OP was really just because I do not read steampunk as a genre (I've read a couple). There's really no punkery involved. We start in a Salzburg train station, head up into the Tyrolean Alps, then underground. So, barely anything urban and no wise-cracking kids. And maybe a shade early--1850s rather than the late Victorian so common in the genre.

Anyway, I very much appreciate all the responses.
 
Ah! But the "-punk" part of "Steampunk" comes from it being a historically earlier alternative to "Cyberpunk" (which is much more "punky". ) In the same way that every kind of uncovered political conspiracy scandal is now a "-gate" since "Watergate."

Like "Stargate" :unsure:
 

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