2010 07 19 Trent Jamieson Author Interview

Suddenly, projects like Sean Orlando’s Steampunk Tree House became the flagships of an aesthetic with more than just cult appeal, and tinkers like Von Slatt were being treated like rock stars, Steam punk had threatened to burst into full clockwork prominence at various times since the coining of the term by writer K. W. Jeter in 1987, but it took thirty-plus years of stops and starts for it to break out.

 

In a sense, Steampunk could only gain true popularity by moving away from its roots in fiction and becoming part of the broader world. Indeed, many of the people who today call themselves Steam punks have not read the literature, taking cues instead from history, visual media, and the original fashionistas who sparked the subculture in the 1990s. What is Steampunk? This book explores that question, but here’s one answer, an equation I contributed to a notebook cover created by English designer John Coulthart.

 

STEAM PUNK, the Mad Scientist Inventor. His invention is a steam airship or metal man in baroque stylings or a pseudo Victorian setting. A  progressive or reactionary politics  adventure plot. While one admit the description may be a little tongue-in-cheek, even limiting, it does sum up the allure of Steampunk, both in fiction and the movement it spawned.