Category:Steampunk

April 2018 event, with Professor Elemental [image info]

October 2017 Steampunk event [image info]

Steampunk is a loosely-defined genre that usually involves using deliberately anachronistic combinations of technology and design.

Steampunk design tends to focus on distinctively Victorian and Edwardian materials and construction methods and then applies them to more modern types of machine, often inspired by Victorian science fiction or "alternative history" ideas. How might Victorian technology have changed if Charles Babbage's brass-cogged Analytical Engine had been further developed and run using steam-power? How might steam locomotives have developed if they used nuclear fuel to generate their steam? What if the Venetians had developed glass-blowing and glass-pulling to develop fibre optics and optical computing? What if the Victorians had invented antigravity and ised the technology to maintain their control of the British Empire and start space colonisation?

While some connoisseurs concentrate solely on Victorian era design, others extend the range of design influences up to the 1930s and the start of WW2.

Design Themes

Steampunk design usually involves embracing a design language that no longer exists in modern manufacturing – the use of silver, brass, gunmetal and leather rather than steel aluminium and plastics, glass rather than perspex, rivetted joints, aviator googles or automobile goggles, Victorian clothing combined with C20th occupations, and the widespread use of archaic transport such as Zeppelins.

A few steampunk media influences and inspirations

Jules Verne - Ficticious submarines and spaceships typically designed in movie adaptations to show Victorian-looking rivetted techology
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954, Disney)
Space Battleship Yamoto (tv, 1974-) – a sunken WW2 battle cruiser is fitted with a warp engine and converted into a spaceship.
Brazil (1985) – Terry Gilliam's reimagining of George Orwell's 1984, but with 1980s-style technology implemented using 1930s mechanisms. Messaging is by pneumatic tube rather than email, and computers have skeletal brass keyboards and Fresnel-lens screens magnifying tiny vacuum tube displays.
The Wild Wild West (TV Series, 1965-) – "James Bond set in the Wild West", complete with anachronistic gadgets.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) – Collects a range of Victorian novel heroes and villains, from the Invisible Man, to Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to Frankenstein and Dracula. Draws on ficticious scientific advances by the characters, and features advanced weaponry by a Vatican R&D department inspired by "Q"'s department in the James Bond films.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) – 1939 reimagined with Giant killer robots and artificial intelligence.
Iron Sky (2012), in which technologically advanced Nazi scientists have fled to the Moon in flying saucers in 1945.