The Difference Engine
question
Steampunk without the punk?
J. M.
Dec 01, 2025 07:20AM
The Victorian era is a fascinating parallel for our own age: rapid technological change forcing social upheavals: on work, culture, class, gender, power, politics. Stories set there can examine our own world from a comfortable distance.
From its inception, steampunk has always been about rebellion against oppressive systems, the costs of invention, the collision of reason and superstition, and the struggles of people living in a world remade by machines - both wonderful and destructive.
- The characters are often rebels or loners or misfits - hence the 'punk.' Nothing wrong with that.
- The worlds often involve magic (Cheri Priest's Boneshaker, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials) or the supernatural (Gail Carriger's Soulless) or the fantastic (Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, China Mieville's The Scar). Nothing wrong with any of that either.
But is there anyone - like me - interested in steampunk without the punk/magic/fantastic elements? A more mechanical and politically realistic version? My gold standard is Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine - just gritty realism against a complicated alt-world, with lots of politics and power games.
I'd love to put together a canon of examples of this steamTECH subgenre and discuss its relative merits versus the others. Can anyone make any recommendations or offer any scintillating observations?
From its inception, steampunk has always been about rebellion against oppressive systems, the costs of invention, the collision of reason and superstition, and the struggles of people living in a world remade by machines - both wonderful and destructive.
- The characters are often rebels or loners or misfits - hence the 'punk.' Nothing wrong with that.
- The worlds often involve magic (Cheri Priest's Boneshaker, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials) or the supernatural (Gail Carriger's Soulless) or the fantastic (Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, China Mieville's The Scar). Nothing wrong with any of that either.
But is there anyone - like me - interested in steampunk without the punk/magic/fantastic elements? A more mechanical and politically realistic version? My gold standard is Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine - just gritty realism against a complicated alt-world, with lots of politics and power games.
I'd love to put together a canon of examples of this steamTECH subgenre and discuss its relative merits versus the others. Can anyone make any recommendations or offer any scintillating observations?
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