This blog is being created to express everything I know and will know through my findings about my latest obsession: SteamPunk. SteamPunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that is super awesome and that I am having great fun reading and learning about. Since I have been having such a good time with it I have decided to share what I know with all of you, you being anyone who is interested in this subject as well, or interested in finding out what people are talking about when they say SteamPunk. Because believe me people are talking about it, you just might not have heard about it yet. But never fear, thanks to me you are about to be in the know. SteamPunk is everywhere now, and when I say everywhere I mean literature, art, film, animation, fashion, and pretty much any other area you can think of, and in each of my posts I will be addressing another way in which the SteamPunk phenomenon is permeating the edges of pop culture. So tune in, because believe me it is going to be fun.
SteamPunk: An Overview
The SteamPunk genre stems originally from futuristic literature by authors like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The Time Machine being one of the more well known pieces is a very fun, short read. It is more like a novella than anything else, and you could probably read it in fairly short amount of time even if you are not an avid reader like I am. I am sure many of you are familiar with at least one film adapataion of the book, there have been a few, the most recent being released in 2002 starring Guy Pierce and Samantha Mumba. This is a good example of the Neo-Victorian style of the SteamPunk genre. All the clothes are of the Victorian England age: tailored jackets, high-waisted skirts, bowler hats, you get the picture. The whole idea is that the stories are placed in this Victorian time period but there are many technological advances in use that did not come along till about a hundred years later (like computer systems) or that have still not been invented to this day (like time machines). One of the major aspects of the whole idea, and where the genre gets its name, is that all of these nifty inventions are run on steam powered electricity rather than the way these things work in the world we know today. Hence the whole fiction part of it. This is what is called speculative fiction, or fiction that is based on some sort of alternate reality.
So, ladies and gentlemen, and future fellow SteamPunk fans, this concludes my brief introduction to the fascinating and oh so fun world of SteamPunk. Tune in next time for another installment of your soon to be extended knowledge of StemPunk!
