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I've heard many talks about the Steampunk genre. So far the only book I've read in that context is the Golden Compass, but I've also experienced it in video games such as Thief.
Is steampunk a popular genre because I've heard that it had great potential but then dropped shy of the intended success. I've begun writing a story that for all purposes appears to fall into steampunk category.
I'm interested to hear of your experiences with reading as well as writing steampunk stories. What are its good sides, what the bad sides?
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Gee...I've always taken "steampunk" to involve anachronistic technology introduced into the societies of centuries past (usually the Victorian 19th Century period)...but did not take The Golden Compass, which I haven't read, to be steampunk at all.
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One way of thinking of steampunk is "Victorian science fiction." Think of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen falls into it. The Vandermeers have two anthologies of stories, and new things have been popping up here and there. Gail Carriger, Cherie Priest, Scott Westerfeld.
I started writing steampunk because I have always just loved the genre growing up (before it was called steampunk!). I love both science fiction and historical fiction, and it is a fun way of combining the two. I also love the do-it-yourself aspect of the whole thing. You can really get into it. And the goggles. I love me some goggles. There is also adventure, and mad scientists, and airships. Automatons. Hats, bustles.
People have been saying it is the next big thing, but I don't know if "true" steampunk will ever be mainstream, much like "true" cyberpunk never really was. In my opinion, and I could be wrong, I just don't think it will be as pop as vampires were. There may be a watered down version of it that pops up, but...well, if punk is ever mainstream, it's not punk anymore, right?
My advice--write it if you love it, but don't write it just to be big. Fans, especially steampunk fans, can tell a fake from a mile away.
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It could be argued that the tv series WILD WILD WEST was a kind of steampunk western. (In fact, I see that wikipedia calls it steampunk.)
The idea, as I understand it, is that the science is based on what was believed to be true in some particular past period in history--so you have people flying through "ether" when they go out into space and walking around on the other planets in our solar system without protection from radiation and lack of atmosphere, for example.
You can write historical fantasy the same way--treat the way people believed things happened (folk magic, for example) as the way things really did happen. (See OSC's Alvin Maker series, as one manifestation of that.)
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There's is a great series of graphic novels called Girl Genius, they regularly win the Nebula. The best part is they are free on the internet. (They also have a novel based on them but I haven't read it so I can say yes or no about it.)
streampunk seems to be making a come back... if it ever left. The last time I was at Barnes and Noble, a few days ago, I saw five maybe six streampunk novels. The time before I bought one... "Phoenix Rising" by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris. Personally I wonder if those are pen names, they sound like streampunk characters. Anyway, it's a spy story.
B&N also had two reprints of older streampunk by Hunt, I think. And two others I found in the stack, that I think were streampunk. Seems like there was another one, maybe an anthology.
Phoenix uses airships for transportation. No computers, no wrist radios, if there are radios at all. The guns the MC uses were never invented, as far as I know, but they could have been back in the late 1800s or early 1900s.
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