Actually as was pointed out above, Cyberpunk is pretty much the only one that IS “punk”.
Edit: and regardless of how much you (dis)like the term, there really isn’t a better name of this stuff.
I’m a hardcore dilettante, and haven’t got deep into the underpinnings of the genre. Aside from that, finding stuff has always been a bit of a bother. Perhaps I should start (or search for) a recommendations thread.
Anyway, to return to the original question, entirely aside from the atomic question, Ottensian. Perhaps not as optimistic as I found it described when I was looking around, but not the dystopian nightmare of Piecraftian. Sky Captain, Rescue Rangers, Indy, that movie with the Nazis on the moon–those are all in the general vicinity of where I’m aiming.
This is a bit of a side discussion, but “punk” can have a broader meaning than we tend to attach to it. Below is a quote from a blog post on Ottens’s site discussing the name, itself quoting a conversation Ottens had elsewhere.
I don’t personally have a dog in this fight; I’m a descriptivist. Just thought I’d add that for those who’re interested.
I … I’m not sure what that means. 
Here’s a question I have: for any genre (steampunk, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, etc.) what, in plain terms, attracts the “…punk” ending? Is it just ‘fiction in the style of’, or is there something more to it?
It’s marketing, lazy marketing. You want to sell any kind of fanciful/speculative quasi-historical fiction, append “-punk” to a period-technology word.
I should say, more precisely–cyberpunk was a real and distinct thing. “Steampunk” was as well, though the name is hackneyed (also, the actual thing existed before some asshole slapped the label on to make the “genre”).
All the rest are just stylizations with marketing labels. Of course there are some good ideas, good stories among them–but the labels won’t particularly help you find them.
“The -punk suffix in dieselpunk is a postmodern phenomenon with an emphasis on the poststructuralist aspect that, rather than a metanarrative, involves a first-person narrative. The individual reconstructs or reimagines the source material and consciously intends to blend this inspiration with a contemporary idea or style. In addition, the -punk suffix reflects a countercultural attitude of dissatisfaction with contemporary society and displays that dissatisfaction in the way the person celebrates dieselpunk individually and within the community.”
Wow, I have heard of 'techno-babble" before but this is a new genre. :dubious::rolleyes::dubious::rolleyes:
As I said, I’m a bit of a dilettante–the dieselpunkest things I have are some tube radios. But this is a touch dismissive and offensive, and I suspect would be much more so if i were really into this stuff.
That said, this is properly fodder for a different thread, IMO, and I may make one later if no one else does.
Adding -punk to a genre is like adding -gate to a scandal.
But as a descriptor it means to take an arbitrary setting and reimagine it from a modern take. So Jules Verne stories weren’t steampunk, but if today you wrote a story with the same sort of technology and setting it would be steampunk, because you couldn’t help but to bring modern sensibilities into the setting.
The original -punk genre was cyberpunk, and it was intended to differentiate between the shiny futures imagined in the 50s and 60s and grimy used future imagined in the 70s and 80s. Often there was a focus on the way computers could change the way the future would work. Here we are in 2015 and those extrapolations written in 1985 or even 1995 are a bit dated. Anyway, 70s-style punks in a near future setting defined cyberpunk.
Then -punk started getting added to other genres, notably steampunk, as a retronym to describe the sorts of Jules Verne-y settings that in the past were just science fiction, but now 100 years later were a weird mishmash of Victorian and retro-modern attitudes, and future tech mixed with steam age tech. But in reality the “-punk” part didn’t fit, since the explorers and adventurers and science heroes of the steampunk genre generally aren’t powerless cogs rebelling against a faceless corporate dystopian world, but empowered people changing the world through science and adventure.
I guess that if you were a writer in 1890 you might imagine that the world was an interlocking web of empire, monarchy, social repression, money, colonialism and so on and suspect that there nothing would ever change. Except along came World War I and smashed that world into the dust. Except we don’t despair when we see that oppressive system, since we know that system was destined for the scrapheap.
A modern person looking ahead to a world of corporate power, environmental degredation, nihilism and so on, a world just like our world except more so, can’t feel that same feeling. Our current world system is destined to vanish just like the empires of the 1890s, except we don’t yet know it and we don’t know the shape of the system that will replace it. And so it’s easy to imagine a future just like today only worse because X. Or if the whole system is swept away you replace it with Mad Max style anarchy because what else can you imagine?
So cyberpunk and steampunk, then all the other -punks are just riffs on the same idea. Atompunk, stone age punk, dieselpunk, and so on are the -gates, even though they don’t really match. They’re just a way of thinking about genres and settings. You could run a straight Stone Age game that was realistic. But a Stonepunk setting would have neolithic guys building pyramids with mammoths, neandertals riding terror-birds into battle, bamboo gliders, the occasional unfrozen dinosaur, and so on.
Aaaand, here’s the TVtropes “Punk Punk” page. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PunkPunk
Definitely.
The Piecraftian/Ottensian question already covered that for the OP. There aren’t really equivalent terms for steampunk - maybe Vernian vs Wellsian?
-Punk is like -Gate. It originally had some sort of meaning as part of a word and became a suffix that doesn’t necessarily mean what it used to mean but does mean something. The punk in Cyberpunk was there for reason but the punk in Steampunk is just a suffix indicating Sci fi/Fantasy with the word Steam specifying what kind.
Exactly. And how damning this is. The “-gate” thing is stupid as shit. It’s also an actual problem, in that it is used (by lazy media whores) for both serious and trifling “scandals,” and therefore obscures the difference and makes them all seem like reality-TV-level newsertainment.
Fair enough. At least it’s an effort to describe the actual heart of a story, rather than just going off visual cues such as would work on a movie poster.