Steampunk. It’s a weird word. But its meaning is weirder. Steampunk is a genre of book, movie, or anything else where technology advanced in a different direction to the one it has today. As you can probably guess, lots of things in steampunk are powered by steam. It’s as if we took the Victorian era, with its clothes, class system, and technology, and made it have more advanced versions of its technology, instead of the new technology we have today. That means gears, brass, copper, exposed wires, steam power, and so many more things. 

Society has always had steampunk elements, which eventually spawned the genre. In fact, steampunk is an exaggeration of things that became more efficient during the industrial revolution, like trains, steamboats, and steam power in general.  All of our factories are filled with huge machines, ever since the industrial revolution. To explain more clearly what we have in our society that’s steampunk, I think I should start with what isn’t steampunk in our society today. We don’t have any robots, steam powered zeppelins, or zeppelins at all, really. We’re no longer in Victorian times, too, so the things made to separate their intense class system would have now worth today- royalty having bigger machines, lower classes working hard in furnaces and engines with coal and steam. 

However, the culture of steampunk is seen in entirely different ways. Many, many novels have been written in the genre of steampunk, yet, depending on who you ask, it’s completely unheard of. However, to some people, steampunk is almost a way of life. Those people are the ones who dress up and create awesome things for conventions and other events, similar to Beakernight, which, now that I think about it, had some steampunk elements as well. There was a giant Tesla coil, which could be controlled by a keyboard. The Tesla coil was invented during the industrial revolution, in 1891, and it certainly fits the aesthetic of steampunk, with wires and brass. 

But the people who make these amazing steampunk creations are the people keeping the steampunk culture alive, even though their numbers are dwindling. Even when there’s no more people who would go to those lengths for steampunk, there’ll be books and movies in the genre and the idea of steampunk, even if it’s not recognizable by name, will remain.