The Best Steampunk Books

Steampunk began as a joke, or at least as a label with its tongue tucked into its cheek. K.W. Jeter famously suggested “steampunk” as a playful cousin to cyberpunk, referring to the sort of Victorian fantastika he, Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock were writing. The name stuck because it was useful, and because “Victorian scientific romance, alternate-history fantasy and retro-industrial weirdness with possible goggles” would have been hard to fit on a bookshop shelf label without frightening the staff.

The roots, of course, go deeper. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is not steampunk in the modern sense, because Verne was not looking back at the nineteenth century and retrofitting it with speculative machinery. He was standing inside the age of steam and iron and peering forward through the periscope. But Captain Nemo’s Nautilus remains one of the great sacred machines of the genre. It is the submarine as palace, weapon, refuge and political sulk. Without Nemo, half of steampunk would have to find somewhere else to store its brooding geniuses.

H.G. Wells is another ancestor whose shadow falls across the boiler. The Time Machine supplies the machinery of temporal escape, while The War of the Worlds gives us towering engines of invasion and the useful reminder that empire is less enjoyable when the tripods are pointing in your direction. Wells was sharper, colder and more socially savage than some of the brass-polish nostalgia merchants who came later, and that matters. Good steampunk is not just old technology with a nice waistcoat. It is progress with teeth marks.