The Brass-Powered Canon, Catalogued
The Steampunk Field Guide
by Stephen Hunt’s SFcrowsnest
Books, airships, automata, empires, goggles, mad engines and other useful Victorian impossibilities.
The short answer
Steampunk is a retro-futurist genre and aesthetic that imagines steam-age technology, Victorian or Victorian-inspired societies, alternate histories, automata, airships, brass machinery and rebellious futures that never were.
Choose your route
Four ways into the guide
This is a control room, not a corridor. Pick the door that suits your mood.
What Is Steampunk?
The plain-English answer first, then a proper guided tour of the genre.
Set off Route 02Explore the Timeline
Two centuries of brass, from proto-Verne machines to frozen survival cities.
Set off Route 03Browse the Canon
Search and filter the catalogue by medium, era, origin and steampunk fit.
Set off Route 04Start Reading, Watching or Playing
Hand-picked first steps for readers, viewers and players alike.
Set offThe animated chronology
Watch two centuries of steam unspool
Our animated chronology sends you gliding from Mary Shelley’s laboratory to the frozen generators of the present day, era by era, machine by machine. It is the spectacular way to feel the shape of the genre.
Prefer to read? Every date, title and note also lives in the plain, crawlable text timeline, so nothing is locked away inside the animation.
From the field guide
Featured articles
The pillar essays that hold the whole cabinet up.
Pillar articleWhat Is Steampunk?
The genre, the aesthetic and the argument, explained without letting the goggles get in the way.
Read the article
Pillar articleThe Ages of Steampunk
Five eras from Frankenstein to frozen survival cities, and how the genre kept reinventing its own past.
Read the article
ThemeAirships in Steampunk
Why the genre keeps reaching for lighter-than-air craft, and what an airship is really carrying.
Read the article
ThemeAutomata in Steampunk
Clockwork servants, brass minds and the recurring question of who, exactly, is the machine.
Read the articleFrom the cabinet
Featured canon entries
A dozen field notes pulled from the drawer, spanning books, screen, anime and games.
YA Steampunk-adjacent / Airship Adventure
Airborn
Kenneth Oppel's Airborn is a YA steampunk-adjacent airship adventure, full of alternative-world travel and skyfaring romance.
Core early RPG
Space: 1889
Space: 1889 is an early steampunk tabletop RPG from Frank Chadwick and Game Designers' Workshop, built around ether flyers and Victorian Mars.
Core Anime Steampunk
Castle in the Sky
Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky is core anime steampunk, full of air pirates, Laputa, lost technology and skyward adventure.
Core Steampunk
The Difference Engine
Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine is a core steampunk landmark, imagining a Babbage-powered Victorian information revolution.
Proto / Weird West Steampunk
The Wild Wild West
The Wild Wild West is proto-Weird-West steampunk television, mixing secret agents, gadgets and frontier super-science.
Core Steampunk Fantasy
The Court of the Air
Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air is core secondary-world steampunk fantasy, with airships, revolution and ancient powers.
Core Steampunk Fantasy
Jack Cloudie
Stephen Hunt's Jack Cloudie is core Jackelian steampunk fantasy, effectively Hornblower with airships and the Royal Aerostatical Navy.
Post-apocalyptic Steampunk
Mortal Engines
Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines is essential YA steampunk, imagining post-apocalyptic traction cities and mobile London.
Core Anime Steampunk
Steamboy
Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy is core anime steampunk, set in Victorian Britain around steam power, industry and war.
Whalepunk / steampunk-adjacent
Dishonored
Dishonored is Arkane Studios' 2012 stealth action game of plague, whale-oil technology, occult powers and class decay in Dunwall.
Core survival steampunk
Frostpunk
Frostpunk is 11 bit studios' survival steampunk city-builder of coal furnaces, frozen apocalypse, social ethics and desperate lawmaking.
YA Core / Biopunk-Steampunk
Leviathan
Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan is essential YA steampunk, setting Clanker machines against Darwinist biotech in alternate WWI.
From the field guide: the Jackelian Sequence
Stephen Hunt and the British steampunk imagination
Stephen Hunt’s Jackelian books form a secondary-world steampunk fantasy sequence of airships, revolution, strange machines, ancient powers, class tension, political lunacy and adventure.
Jack Cloudie is effectively Hornblower with airships, sailing with the Royal Aerostatical Navy. The Jackelian world also gives us Mechancia, a civilisation of more-human-than-human steam-driven robots, and the vast Transaction Engines, steam-driven punch-card computers that help drive the realm.
