Steampunk for me is the fantization of the victorian era, asking the "what if" question: "What if Charles Babbage's difference engine had been built and worked? And what are the effects of that radical a technology shift on a society that was just beginning industrialization?"
Most of the work out there in genre seriously idealizes the era, without all that much understanding of the society of manners of the upper crust (All those noble female adventurers!) or the class problems involved - Like most fantasies, these are glossed over. Hazard of the metagenre. (Someday, I will write a boring character sketch of minor-but-wealthy steampunk nobility, and their normal day. It will not involve airships, it might involve trains. And a postal service that works.)
On the other hand, what do I know? I play a widowed patroness of the unusual arts and sciences around the turn of the century.
I'd put the beginning of steampunk in the mid eighties, but it really took off somewhere around '05.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninetydegrees
no subject
2010-11-17 15:26 (UTC)Most of the work out there in genre seriously idealizes the era, without all that much understanding of the society of manners of the upper crust (All those noble female adventurers!) or the class problems involved - Like most fantasies, these are glossed over. Hazard of the metagenre. (Someday, I will write a boring character sketch of minor-but-wealthy steampunk nobility, and their normal day. It will not involve airships, it might involve trains. And a postal service that works.)
On the other hand, what do I know? I play a widowed patroness of the unusual arts and sciences around the turn of the century.
I'd put the beginning of steampunk in the mid eighties, but it really took off somewhere around '05.