Steampunk is a sub genre of sci-fi that uses 19th century inspired machinery and technology to create an aesthetic design. The sub-genre goes into Victorian England and predicts what the world would be like today if its inhabitants and inventors prevailed over modern technology.

Some of its most evident characteristic’s are exposed wires, gears, metal, copper, and machinery. In this fictional world, fossil fuels have not been discovered yet so everything is steam powered. In this blog post, I will be diving deeper into the history of this fandom and figuring out who is the person to spark this idea? And when this idea blew up into the multi million fan genre.

Steampunk started out as a sub genre of science fiction in the 1970’s it’s inspirations go back to 19th century Jules Verne’s and his books which were written in the Victorian era.

His books used steam powered blimps and Victorian age settings. One of the most well known steampunk type novels is Jules Verne’s “The Steam House” which was published in 1880. The story follows the travels of British colonists by way of a gigantic steam powered elephant.

This novel is said where steampunk was born and this is where it all started. Steampunk’s history has very debatable origins. It is hard to find out exactly where the genre’s first author’s like Jules Verne got their inspiration. One of the things that is known though is that its style was taken from the Victorian era (1837-1901).

One of its earliest depictions on television was on the CBS television series “The Wild Wild West” which inspired the subsequent film.
The term “SteamPunk” originated in the late 1980’s as a variant of “CyberPunk”. The name was created when author L. W. Jeter was trying to find a general term for works by Tim Powers and James Blaylock. The first use of the word in a book title was in 1995 with Paul Di Filippo Steampunk trilogy.

After the use of this title in books became more common steampunk blew up and is now the steampunk you see, watch, read, and hear about today.