Why Steampunk's Time Has Come

Are you ready?

From an article in the Wall Street Journal...

Science fiction is old enough now to have developed a sort of taxonomy. All its subgenres go back to some kind of "What if?" question. What if history had taken a different turn—such as the Confederates seizing Little Round Top, winning the Battle of Gettysburg and going on to win the Civil War? That's "alternate history," as exemplified by Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee" (1953). What if time travelers could go back, on purpose, to make history take a different turn? Operatives of opposing sides would start contending to influence the course of events—a "change war" scenario. (See Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time," 1961.) What if there are any number of universes and you could skip between them? That leads to "parallel universe" stories, of which there are many examples, from Keith Laumer, H. Beam Piper and their successors.

Eventually these subgenres start cross-pollinating. The big newcomer in the 1980s was "cyberpunk," which posited that hackers would be heroes in a future dominated by computers. OK, but what if information technology had developed earlier, but in an alternate world without electronics and microchips? Could you have a computerized world running on mechanical computers? The thought gained attraction because there really had been mechanical computers, going as far back as Charles Babbage's calculating machines from the 1840s. What if you imagined that those early, abandoned experiments had advanced further? You got "The Difference Engine" (1990), written by two pioneers of cyberpunk, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Since then countless novels, comic books and even films have used similar conceits to transpose futuristic plots to the age of petticoats and steam power.