Steampunk

Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. K. W. Jeter coined the name in 1987, in a letter to Locus magazine, as a tongue-in-cheek variant of cyberpunk for the Victorian fantastic fiction he, Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine (1990) anchored the alternate-history branch, with Verne and Wells claimed as ancestors.

For novel and web-serial writers the genre is an aesthetic contract backed by research: one technology level (steam, clockwork, early electricity) and its social order, held consistent across the whole work. The machinery's limits are world rules: readers come for the brass and airships, but they audit what the machines can and cannot do.