
So… I’ve heard the word before, but what exactly is steampunk?
That’s a good question, because not everybody means the same thing.
Some people consider steampunk to be a ‘literary genre’ – often described as “Victorian Science Fiction” – and while the Victorian era and early sci-fi are certainly big influences, that doesn’t really cover it.
- Film played just as large a role in the development of steampunk as literature, and it’s now a label covering games, fashion and music. It’s definitely not just a literary genre.
- There are plenty of steampunk works set before and after the Victorian era – or in parts of the Earth (or entirely fictional worlds) where Victoria’s reign was irrelevant.
- Loads of iconic steampunk works have more in common with fantasy than sci-fi
Other people get hung-up on the specific words – it’s not real steampunk unless it’s got steam-technology on it, or it’s not proper steampunk unless it’s got a punk ethos behind it. But the name has always been catchy branding – riffing off cyberpunk – rather than a particularly appropriate descriptor. Neither steam nor punk are actually essential.
Attempts to try and define it further by narrow time periods and type of technology – dieselpunk, atompunk, gaslamp fantasy, etc – miss the point that steampunk is about remixing history AND science AND fantasy into something new. You don’t need a different label for each new combination – they’re all flavours of steampunk.
I like the definition outlined by the Steampunk Scholar (Mike Perschon). He argues convincingly that steampunk is more akin to a style than a genre, which is why it has translated to films, games and fashion so successfully.
Perschon highlights the three hallmarks of the steampunk style:
- Hyper-vintage (evocative of the pre-digital but post-Renaissance past in broad and fanciful ways)
- Techno-Fantasy (looks like science but works like magic)
- Retrofuturism (how we imagine the past imagining the future)
If a story ticks two of those three boxes, it can probably be called steampunk. That doesn’t mean it can’t be called other things too, of course. Steampunk is an adjective you can tag onto anything. Steampunk adventure. Steampunk romance. Steampunk RPG. Steampunk hat.
Powerclash is a steampunk project.
Why pick steampunk for this project?
I didn’t sit down at the start of this project and specifically decide to create a steampunk world.
The idea of the overarching plot – a global battle royale with superpowers – came first.
The part about the secret alien symbiotes who were behind it all – that landed second.
Third was the concept that this was an alt-history version of Earth, with multiple branching points – from Pangea breaking up differently, through to the outbreak of the choke epidemic.
At this stage, it didn’t feel very steampunk – I’d have said it was a sci-fi concept.
I was tempted to set it in the far future, but because advanced technology would offer solutions similar to some of our character’s superpowers, it felt like there’d be less influence associated with the powers and it would be too easy for civilians to take control of the Powerclash.
I didn’t want to set it in a modern world, because the project is already focused on characters with unique individual superpowers – a modern setting would make it far too derivative of the contemporary Marvel/DC estates.
Similarly, I didn’t want to set it too far in the past, such as the mediaeval or renaissance period, because I wasn’t aiming for a classic sword and sorcery fantasy.
That landed me in the appropriate time period bracket for steampunk; post-renaissance, but pre-digital.
And because it’s an alternative timeline Earth, where we’re free to mess-around with any sense of historical accuracy – it fits neatly into this concept of ‘hyper-vintage’.
At this point we get to technology. I wanted this to be a global story, with characters drawn from all corners of the planet, but they needed to get close and interact for drama to happen. So I needed to give them easy access to means of travelling around the world relatively quickly. I needed boats, trains and flying machines – staples of the steampunk aesthetic.
Thinking of alt-history vehicles and machines really sparked my imagination. What if an outside force (such as our secret aliens) stopped these humans from taming electricity, or refining oil? How might other technologies have been refined if they weren’t replaced? It quickly became an essential part of the project. I was seeing beautifully mad clockwork and steam contraptions, many of which would need a helping hand to defy physics. I didn’t want to lean too far into outright techno-fantasy: no creating magical new energy sources or implausible materials – this is still supposed to be a realistic-adjacent alternative Earth. But we can certainly lean into that gap of what makes it ‘alternative’ and imagine geological, biological and cultural variations which could result in different resources for these people to work with. It may be a bit subtler than aether powered flapters, or adamantium claws, but it’s still an excuse for why X which wouldn’t work on our Earth, work here. It’s still techno-fantasy.
Having hit two of the three hallmarks, I had to admit that Powerclash was now a steampunk project.
But was it retrofuturist? Had I completed the steampunk clean sweep?
So far – no. Neither the overall concept, nor the worldbuilding as developed to date, are concerned with how the people of a specific time imagined the future. But that’s not to say that individual stories written within the Powerclash universe couldn’t tick that final box one day!
I didn’t pick steampunk for the project – I just set about developing the concept, and then one day it stood up and told me that it was steampunk now – and I couldn’t be prouder.