Can you try to give me a sense of what "steampunk" means in a literary sense? When I think of "steampunk" I think of brass machinery, tubes and pipes, oversized hardware, needle pressure gauges, etc... and I struggle to see how that kind of aesthetic would be captured in a literary genre. I would love to know.

For an HN reader, I'd just suggest picking up a copy of the 1990 William Gibson/Bruce Sterling collaboration The Difference Engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine). It's hit or miss from a literary perspective, but it'll get you aimed in the general direction you're asking about.

It is not 'hit or miss'.

It is the first, and still the best, steampunk novel.

It defined the genre.

That is not correct. Blaylock's the Digging Leviathan predates it by several years.

I usually see it in a retro-futurist parallel universe. Depending on the definition of "literature", Wild Wild West was a movie set in The Old West, but exhibits technologies that definitely didn't exist at the time. Those technologies seem to aesthetically fit in the movie's semi-fictional era.

I thought the steampunk genre was born with Wild Wild West - that awful Will Smith movie from '99. That's what I remember from living through it. I would actually have a bit more respect for steampunk as a subculture if it's genesis resided elsewhere - that movie was so ridiculously stupid that steampunk has been tainted for me by association.

Edit to add: apologies all around, dear steampunk enthusiasts! Fwiw Steampunk really didn't enter anything close to the mainstream in my corner of the U.S. until that movie came out, and afterwards seemed to be everywhere I looked, so I don't think it was a totally unreasonable assumption. (And yes, I knew the movie was based on older material, but didn't know to what extent the visual aesthetic had already been defined.) As penance I will purchase one Steampunk item from my local costume store and wear it to my next all-hands work meeting.

> I thought the steampunk genre was born with Wild Wild West - that awful Will Smith movie from '99.

It decidedly did not start with the 1999 film based on the 1960s TV series featuring the same named characters and themes.

Steampunk was most assuredly not born out of the 1999 movie. If some ridiculous movie tainted your view of the genre, I think that's more a reflection of you than the genre or the terrible movie.

That said, the movie was supposedly inspired by a series from the 1960s by a nearly identical name ("The Wild Wild West".) The genre, however, has been around for much longer, and the name 'steampunk' seems to have its creation in the 1980s.

No, steampunk as an aesthetic goes at least as far back as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and the term comes from the 1980s.

Steampunk is a modern retro movement. It is not Verne and Wells, but modern writers writing in a Wellsian mode. Why this should have come formed around a group of writers who, perhaps not coincidentally, had in their younger days been friends with Philip Dick, is unknown.

Gibson and Sterling were actually somewhat late to the game.

For me there is no better example of that aesthetic harking back to Verne and Wells than the 1902 Georges Méliès film, Le Voyage dans la Lune.

> I thought the steampunk genre was born with Wild Wild West - that awful Will Smith movie from '99

I'm very curious, how old are you? This statement baffled me because it reads as if talking about ancient history.

I'm old enough to feel like '99 wasn't that long ago, to have seen the movie when it was released, and formed an opinion of it that I can still defend. I'm not sure which part of my comment made it sound like I was talking about ancient history. But tbh 20 years ago actually is a pretty long time when talking about pop culture stuff.

Maybe because your comment seemed to me like that movie was your first contact with steampunk. I's as if someone told me the fantasy genre came out of Dungeons and Dragons.

I was just curious, nothing important.

Wild Wild West was a bad movie, but I think the whole steampunk aspect of it was really interesting and well done. Not-Will-Smith's decked out spy train car was really cool. The steam-powered spider mech was a little hokey in retrospect, but still kinda awesome in its own way.