I’ve been working my way through Stephen Hunt recently. I’m finding them a great read.
Usually it’s both, AIUI. You need Victorian culture and futuristic stuff that the Victorians might have come up with had history and tech development been a bit different. Thus, the Internet is out (too complicated by Victorian standards), but giant steam-powered mechanical adding machines? That’s fine.
Similarly, Zeppelins are almost de rigueur, but Jet aircraft are out. Solid-fuel rocket-planes might be OK, but they’re not going to be terribly advanced or large.
Typically, the end of WWI is about as “modern” as you can get and still claim a “Steampunk” setting- from the 1920s onwards it’s really more “Retro Futuristic”, really.
Reminds me of the arguments about whether or not Star Wars is sci-fi or Space Fantasy
It’s a bit of an outlier, but you might enjoy The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. a western sci-fi show (not to be confused with sci-fi westerns, such as Firefly or Trigun). Basically a cowboy show taking place in the late 1800s, with the characters dealing with what could be considered to be sci-fi inventions in the 1800s (I recall horseless carriages, airships, rocket engines, and artillery capable of attacking a target more than two miles away. Oh, and time travel and motorcycle gangs.) Show starred Bruce Cambell as Brisco County, Jr., a Harvard lawyer-turned-bounty-hunter tracking down the men responsible for the murder of his father, US Marshall Brisco County, Sr.
Also, another vote for Girl Genius which bills itself as “Gaslamp Fantasy” (though the author admits that she made up a name for a genre that she later learned was already called “Steampunk”). It’s very funny, very well drawn and written, and has such awesome book titles as “Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones” (which won a Hugo award recently). Also, it is worth reading just for the Jagermonsters and the Dingbots.
I think there was a Marvel comic taking place in an alternate universe 1600s. One of the characters, IIRC, was basically a steampunk Iron Man.
There is an anime collection from the 80’s called Robot Carnival. One of the segments, “A Tale of Two Robots”, is a hillarious short about a battle between two giant robots in Tokyo… in 1899. Both robots are fueled by shoveling coal into a furnace, and controlled by pulling on levers, ropes, spinning wheels, etc. One of the robots has a muzzle-loading cannon that must be loaded by hand.
Nitpick - one of the authors - it’s cowritten by Kaja and Phil Foglio.
1602 by Neil Gaiman. The premise being that the Marvel Universe got started during Elizabeth I’s reign. It was in New World (one of the sequels) that Lord Iron - Iron Man in a primitive armour - showed.
:smack: For some reason, I never remember this one.
I should also note that while you should start off with Morlock Night, it frankly isn’t very good IMO.
Jeter would seem to disagree with you:
You probably want to read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. No, not watch, READ. Besides, what would you watch ? The League has never made it to the silver screen. No sir.
Then, read up on the works referenced by said League : the Robur books, Jules Vernes, etc…
The sorta-atomic powered Nautilus? Those electric guns? The sea-shell diving gear?
Steampunk.
I am glad that is has as (if you’d read this thread you’d have read…)Actually, the film is better than the book, IMHO. It doesn’t make travesties of other authors beloved characters, like Moore did. Moore did horrible things to other authors characters- which he claimed was OK as the works were out of copyright. Then, Moore complains when the dudes who bought the rights to his works changed them around. We call that hypocrisy.
As a kid in the 60s I remember watching a TV show called “The Wild Wild West” that definitely seemed to have a steampunk theme going on.
I came late to the steampunk party, too, and am quite intrigued by it, so I am enjoying this thread.
Dune is definitely not steampunk, even just considering the visuals.
And as for “first”, I think stuff like Disney’s 20 000 Leagues Under The Sea(if a pre-1990 Dune counts, so does this) and The Wild Wild West TV show give the lie to that.
This is not a Victorian aesthetic.The male Atreides uniforms, yes, definitely. But the women’s costumes are more medieval/renaissance or ethnic. And the sets vary - only the Atreides & Imperial palace design even comes close to what I’d call a steampunk aesthetic, and it’s hardly the dominant aesthetic of even the first part of the movie, with equal parts grim Industrial (Harkonnen) and general wierdness (the Guild, Arakeen).
By that reasoning, The Difference Engine and all the steampunk novels (including the ones by the person who invented the term) are not steampunk.
If you want to play victory by definition, then there’s no point in arguing. But steampunk clearly used the Victorian aesthetic of Jules Verne as a starting point. All the people who invented the genre set their books in the 19th century. They were using Verne as a touchstone (and, of course, he remains so).
The visuals in things like 20,000 Leagues and The World of Jules Verne and Wild Wild West are exactly the visuals in any steampunk book or movie.
But nuclear reactors are used to produce steam to power things(engines, electrical generators), so one would think that would make nuclear reactors very compatiable with steampunk.
Especially if you called them “atomic piles.”
I can see that Wild Wild West is James Bond in a steampunk series.
The name is West… James West.
All true. But as far as my understanding goes, the distinction between steampunk and the stuff that informs/influences it is that the influences are what they are, when they are, if you catch my meaning; whereas steampunk takes that aesthetic and transports it, extrapolates it, into a speculative future or alternate universe. It’s that speculative leap that makes it steampunk, rather than an actual Victorian, uh, artifact. And while this is for more open to debate, for me it also means something that was created more recently than actual Verne, or even than Wild Wild West: I think of steampunk as a *reaction *to more classical SF; as an anti-steel/chrome/acrylic-SF aesthetic. Thus, stuff that came before that reaction informs it, isn’t retroactively *part *of it. Which is why I see *Dune *as a big part of its origins. Dune’s aesthetic was HUGELY a reaction to the traditional white-plastic/chrome/acrylic aesthetic of classical SF, e.g. 2001. And while Alien’s grungy, lived-in look was just as much a reaction to that same shiny brightness, Alien’s aesthetic was not informed by same design sources that became steampunk. (Though it’s worth noting that Giger was involved with both projects.)
Anyway, I don’t claim you’re wrong as far as this disagreement goes. But I do still think of *Dune *as the beginning of the stylistic movement that I think of as steampunk. As least as far as film goes; I’m less familiar with the literary iterations of the genre.
Again all true, but I don’t see how that’s relevant: no one has suggest that Dune was fully developed, refined steampunk; only that steampunk had a lot of its aesthetic origins in Dune.
“African tribal art influenced Picasso.”
“Picasso did a lot of stuff that was not influenced by African tribal art.”
Those two statements are not irreconcilable.
I’m familiar with the basic principles of Atomic Energy, but nuclear reactors are still 1950s Retro-Futurism, not Steampunk, even though theoretically you should be able to have Atomic Submarines in a Steampunk setting.
It’s just vital that an atomic submarine include as many brass fittings and steam gauges as possible. 
See, if you say "Lots of inarguably Steampunk works and *Dune *share an aesthetic sensibility in the use of certain Victorian motifs in costume, props and set design ", I can see that and I agree.
But when you instead say what I bolded there, you’re flat-out wrong. I like the Lynch *Dune *just fine, but but isn’t the aesthetic origin of jack. Certainly, it’s not quoted as such by anyone I know of. I think it’s just you.