Steampunk
Steampunk is a genre that imagines advanced technology built with nineteenth-century means — steam engines, brass gears and airships — usually in a Victorian or alternative-history setting.
Where the word comes from
Coined by the novelist K. W. Jeter in a 1987 letter to the magazine Locus, as a joking counterpart to cyberpunk.
In depth
Steampunk stories borrow the look and technology of the industrial nineteenth century and push it into fantasy: clockwork automata, steam-powered computers, airships over London. They often take place in an alternative history where Victorian technology developed further than it did.
In comics
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, begun in 1999, gathers characters from Victorian fiction into one steampunk adventure and remains the genre's best-known comic. Manga and Franco-Belgian comics have their own steampunk series.
Common elements
Steampunk settings usually feature Victorian or Edwardian society, steam and clockwork machinery doing what electronics do in our world, airships, inventors and adventurers. Many stories borrow characters and imagery from nineteenth-century fiction, especially Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and play with the gap between the period's optimism about progress and its costs.
Where to find it
Because steampunk is as much a style as a genre, the books sit across the catalogue: adventure graphic novels, fantasy, science fiction and some manga. Our steampunk shelf collects the comics where the technology and the period are central rather than decoration.
Where it appears
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. steampunk adventure built from Victorian fiction
What it means today
Steampunk overlaps with fantasy and alternative history; the shelf is small but the genre turns up across many others.
