noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
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"There's railroad trains, a lot of steam-driven stuff, but that's about it. More ‘steam punk’, I suppose."
"Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, [James] Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like steam-punks, perhaps..."
"It wound up being an overwhelmingly positive experience that made me appreciate the steampunks around me even more."
"[Director Paul W.S.] Anderson's answer to the question of what to update in this film seems to be: steampunk everything. Hence the elaborate airship contraptions and weapons, all made in wood and iron and powered by choo-choo engines. What seems to be missing is the why. When far-fetched techno-bits and bobs are put into a story, these items must have a meaning and purpose. Here, the gadgets are throwaway items used for their visual effect, then discarded."
"This game has a steampunk setting, so expect to wear top hats and smoking jackets."
A subgenre of science fiction that depicts advanced technology combined with Victorian style and aesthetics, such as steam-powered machines and vehicles, visible gears and screws and people dressed in 19th-century attires.
This game has a steampunk setting, so expect to wear top hats and smoking jackets.
Pronounced /ˈstiːm.pʌŋk/.
From steam + -punk, by analogy with cyberpunk, coined by science-fiction writer Kevin Wayne Jeter (born 1950) in a 1987 letter to the magazine Locus in response to a review of his book Infernal Devices published the same year (see the quotation below).