Steampunks, declare yourselves!

Oh, man, do I love steampunk. I probably won't be writing any of it myself (although what I'm doing this year for NaNo is very much up in the air), but I love the feeling of it anyway. Speaking of which, I really want to pick up Boneshaker… has anyone read it yet?

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Hell yeah, I'm doing Steampunk. I'm Doing It Wrong though, my novels are set in an alternate 1920s rather than an alternate Victorian Era. Technological advance has slowed in various ways, and sped up in others. This year my novel will be set in the same 'verse as last years; about five years after the events that took place then.

It should be fun!

I am debating whether to complete my spy adventure trilogy I started over the last two NaNo's or whether to embark on my Steampunk adventure where Pennsylvania has become the 3rd Reich and New England is a monarchy (as it should have always been). My adventurers will pilot their flyspring powered aircutters down to the cultured and democratic South to steal the terrifying fleshduster before it's too late.

But my question is whether Steampunk is Fantasy, SciFi, or Adventure?

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Mine is ... well, a little later than steampunk, technologically; it feels like the eve of the First World War, land transportation is mostly horses but there are self-propelled vehicles for the rich and commercial purposes, there are ocean liners and dreadnoughts, aviation but more on an experimental than widespread basis, there are artillery and rifles and handguns, but there is still an old-fashioned social order, decadent monarchies, and the like. My revolution is somewhat inspired by the Russian, but with bits of the French and the British ones. And there's magic, and necromancy. It's a world set a thousand years after the magical apocalypse, with crumbling social strictures against returning to the level of technology that allowed the cataclysm.

That's cool. Mine is set in a peculiarly warped timeline as well, one where the luminiferous aether has made interplanetary travel relatively trivial, and where phlogiston-rich materials are vital to trade and indeed life beyond the asteroid belt. Venusians, Martians, and the lost civilization of the asteroid belt all exist. Steampunk is, in my opinion, a state of mind!

I love the sound of yours, Kassil. Steampunk means a sense of the baroque and the wondrous, to me, of adventure and dirty silk.

Hey, if you feel it fits the bill for steampunk, I certainly won't argue with you. Industrialized magic has been shown to be something that can easily fit the fantasy versions of the genre, among other things. My own doesn't have magic, but the technological explosion of the WWI-WWII era is certainly happening - just down different avenues due to somewhat different physical laws.

All of the above, depending on what you emphasize about it. Steampunk can have magic - industrialized or otherwise, as the setting dictates. Or it can be an exploration of the world as close to scientific reality as you can manage. Or the science could just be an accent to the bold Men and Women of Action who boldly brave darkest Africa or the canal kingdoms of Mars. It's up to you to decide.

I've always wanted to write steampunk, well, since I heard of the genre. Maybe this is the year, I don't actually have a plot yet.
maybe some kind of time-travelling murder mystery in a steampunk setting?

You're not doing it wrong at all. Personally, I've grown rather weary of the tight pigeon hole the all too recent bandwagon jumpers have forced it into. You're actually doing what many steampunk writers haven't the intestinal fortitude to do. It's easy to set a steampunk story in a Victorian backdrop, as that's when steam was at its most prolific... but to extrapolate an alternate, steam driven evolution of technology up through a more recent era... that takes actual work, creativity, and dare I say it, gall.

Kudos to you I say.

Baroque is an awesome word for describing steampunk. Baroque, wondrous, and more than a bit mysterious - vast frontiers remain, and it is up to those with courage, fortitude, and more than a bit of brilliant ingenuity to conquer those dark domains. That's steampunk, to me.

Present and accounted for!

Though I'm more on the 'fantasy' side of steampunk-- very much a 'Girl Genius' fan. :) Hey everyone!

This will be my first steampunk novel; I usually write gritty low fantasy. It'll definitely be a change.

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I will second your kudos! I'm more annoyed by the people who spin of absurd alternate names like clockpunk and dieselpunk to describe their cute variation than anything else. It's still the steampunk ethic; you don't /need/ a steam engine chugging away behind the characters for it to be steampunk. It's the notion of alternate history at the absolute finest.

I guess I'll be writing steampunk this year, too! Although I'm confused about my setting a little...I don't know how many of the 'typical' steampunk characteristics I should incorporate in my novel. Of course, there will be the steam-powered engines and airships, but the problem is that solar energy is absolutely necessary for the plot. Therefore I'm not quite sure if my novel is still steampunk. Also, it's set in modern times, nowhere near the Victorian Era. Though everyone is still wearing nifty old-fashioned clothes...
I tend to call it Solarpunk for the lack of a better genre.

Now the story's played out like this, just like a paperback novel
Let's rewrite an ending that fits instead of a Hollywood horror

Go for it! H.G. Wells wrote about a time machine, after all, and there's a very distinctive 'chrononaut' branch of steampunk.

Very much a Girl Genius fan here, too. Not my ONLY steampunk inspiration, but I like it a lot -- and such a deliciously complex story.

I'm sorry if my above post may sound stupid to you, or everyone else, now. It's just that I'm more than a little confused by all of these genres.

Now the story's played out like this, just like a paperback novel
Let's rewrite an ending that fits instead of a Hollywood horror

Don't worry about it -- just don't spend too much energy worrying about whether you're doing "true" steampunk.

I dunno, it sounds steampunk enough for me. One of the oldest steampunk RPGs out there, Space 1889, used solar boilers to drive the aetherships between planets.

The Victorian era, as noted above by another person, is overemphasized as 'the definition' of steampunk. It's merely when steam power was at a height. Extrapolate, build your setting, and if you feel you're writing steampunk, I'm not going to argue the point - after all, if fantasy can range from Lord of the Rings low-magic epics to corny high-magic D&D-style exploits, and science fiction can range from hard science Asimovian stories on off to the absurdity of Star Wars and Star Trek, why can't we have a fair range of breadth, too?

I haven't written much as far as Steampunk goes, and I haven't read much as far as Steampunk goes, but I'm definitely going to set my NaNo novel in a steampunk universe, and I really can't wait to get writing. I'll probably be flicking through steampunk webpages/images for inspiration but mostly, I feel like I'm on the right track for a good novel as I'm not- as of yet- heavily relying on the technology to drive my plot, but rather my characters and events occur naturally within the setting. So, that was my major fear, my reliance on the genre to fuel the story too much.

It's cool. Like Morven said - don't worry about if it's "true" steampunk. You'll always have elitists who look down on any variation from what they consider steampunk. Quite frankly, their opinions don't matter. Steampunk is a state of mind, and like any genre we should be able to afford some latitude.

And don't take it as an insult when I note my annoyance; the major annoyance is the narrow-minded behavior of a vocal minority of steampunks who are elitist about what they consider 'real' steampunk. Clockpunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk - it's all steampunk to me. ;) I'm happy to have more people in our genre than I am concerned by 'purity' of what would otherwise be an absurdly small niche.

Thank you! I quite enjoy Doing It Wrong though! Re-writing history -- especially through the technology boom of the Great War and onwards -- is fascinating. Re-writing history just to suit the 'verse for the stories you want to tell is probably insane. Not that this has ever stopped me.

I hope everyone has a great time this year! :D This is a fun genre, and we shouldn't let it get pinned down!

It's relieving to read that :). Thanks a lot for not being one of those elitists and thanks for making me certain that what I'm going to write will be steampunk!

Now the story's played out like this, just like a paperback novel
Let's rewrite an ending that fits instead of a Hollywood horror

Yeah, I'm writing steampunk for the first time. :) Heavy on the fantasy. Most people are all :o about technology, 'cause its new and exciting.Technology advances slowly, though, because the world is so damned full of monsters, getting materials, information, and money from A to B is very difficult. I'm rather enjoying coming up with inventions, however! And coming up with ways for magic to screw it up!

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Well, when you go to a gathering of people who declare themselves steampunks and see everything from British explorers through Tesla-gun-wielding airship pirates to mohawk-wearing chrononauts, you tend to get a sense that we are a rather diverse lot - and that, quite frankly, is much more heartening than seeing everyone dressed up in exactly the same way would ever be. If all fantasy looked like Lord of the Rings, or all sci-fi like Asimov, we'd have run out of stories for those genres quite some time ago. I'd rather know that what I write has a strong, broad base from which to draw both inspiration and support!

Don't forget the crazy geniuses who think that trying to combine magic and technology is a good idea!

It's a perfectly valid concern. Too much emphasis on the shiny bits would read like a bad episode of Star Trek, I think - one of the ones where technobabble causes and fixes the entire plot. So, welcome aboard!

I'm doing steampunk. I think. I really actually know very little about steampunk and my novel is set on Not Earth so places and what have you will be invented... but my novel is telling me it has a steampunk feel, so who am I to argue with it? I just do what it tells me. 8D So I'm slowly learning about it... we'll see what happens!

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"Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible." ~Leo Tolstoy

I'm definitely in over my head, but I'm going to attempt writing steampunk this year!
It's set in a fantasy world where a nation revolted against all the magic and dragons, and went technology-crazy instead. Now they're getting critiqued about the increased speed at which the technology advances, and how they're tearing down historically valuable or magical places in order to develop their ever-growing cities.

Well behaved characters rarely make history...

I'm a steampunk newbie! I'm going to attempt to rewrite on of my old fantasy medieval novels, now changing it to victorian steampunk ... I hope I can do the genre justice! It's exciting to see how many people are doing steampunk too! =D

It's 2 a.m. Do you know what your MC is doing?

NaNo '09 - Eloquence (Steampunk/Dark Fantasy)