What the hell is steampunk?

its a category of engineers made popular by Cyberpunk and thusly, it found it's place in American cult slang.

think of low grade future tech, like robotic arms that have gears and springs run on steam and pneumatics.

EX: Wild Wild West the movie with Wil Smith. The bad guy (Kenneth Branaugh) was a steampunk engineer with his wild spidertank thing. And Frankenstein (again with Kenneth Branaugh) I'd also say the Mad Max series of movies, Serenity/Firefly was a bit of Steampunk-ish and Full Metal Alchemist.

In essence, it is a way to explain future tech without all the streamlined small digital computer talents. think Civil War style materials mixed with futuristic knowledge.

Cyberpunk was coined by William Gibson in the nineties for his stories about somewhat heroic bad guys who exploited the internet and new connections between humans and machines. Now most of the fans of Science Fiction used to be engineers, and when you talk about "Hard Science Fiction" you are talking about some technologically very sophisticated work. Steampunk was derived from Cyberpunk through the understanding that one reason we didn't have many of the technological comforts we have today is we couldn't afford to distribute them. Lady Lovelace is considered the first programmer. She was programming a mechanical computer, not an electronic one, for example. Most of the early writers were born in the early to middle fifties, which meant that they watched Techno-Fiction such as Tom Clancy split off from "science fiction" novels such as Philip Wylie's the Spy who Spoke Porpoise". The stories began as anti-Establishment techno-novels taking off from the technology of about a hundred fifty years ago.

More recent examples have leaned heavily towards fantasy -- Alan Moore's the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen includes Captain Nemo, Jules Verne's character , but also Alan Quarrtermain, created by H. Rider Haggard. So these days most of it is different from, say, Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series of Edwardian fantasies mainly in that Mercedes Lackey is a very inventive writer.

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction.

The name is a play on cyberpunk (also a science fiction sub-genre) because it replaces cybernetics and other high-technology common in sci-fi with victorian age steam power.

Essentially it is alternate history retro-type science fiction set in the type of future imagined and written about by writers like H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.

The role playing game "Space 1889" pretty much launched it as a separate genre.

Like what the other guy said futuristic things set in the past. For example: An airship with computer components powered by steam with a crew of people who look like they live in old england, top hats and suits and the occasional goggles.

It´s science fiction set in the past.

Like advanced computers running on steam.

Retro-futurism.

In a sense Jules Verne´s stuff is steampunk, only not really, because when he wrote his books, it really was science fiction because it was set in the future! : )

John: Don´t be a jerk.

First guy: you dont need to be rude. it's a qwestion. anywayz, yoo are not wierd. It was probably a madeup werd.