I don't hold much truck with the notion that sometimes a dirigible is just a dirigible. The idea that steampunk is popular simply because it's fun fails to take timing into account. I have to ask, if it's such an enjoyable genre (which it is), why didn't it take off in the 1970s, after Mike Moorcock wrote Warlord of the Air, or in the '80s after K. W. Jeter's Morlock Night? Why is steampunk such a phenomenon now?

Personally, I think it's because we live in a world in which empires are crumblin...