Gareth Branwyn Explores the World of Steampunk

Gareth Branwyn has written a great article for Wired News covering the retro-future Steampunk phenomenon that has been “gaining some steam” lately:

“Steam-Driven Dreams: The Wondrously Whimsical World of Steampunk”

The ideas behind the steampunk sci-fi subgenre have been around since Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but it was given its moniker in the late ’80s as a speculative-fiction genre, alongside cyberpunk, ribofunk and splatterpunk. While the others peer 15 minutes into the future, steampunk envisions a future that has collapsed onto a re-imagined Victorian past. Steam and clockworks replace silicon logic, brass and copper stand in for titanium and plastic, and airships replace spaceships.

Unlike other speculative-fiction genres, steampunk enthusiasts are not simply content to read its fiction, or passively consume its media. Today’s steampunks don’t want to just watch the movie, they want to build it, play in it, live it.

Gareth also directs our attention to “Steampunk Magazine: A Journal of Misapplied Technology”, a new publication that is “putting the punk back in steampunk”.