For the past few days, the FLIGHT class has been working on revolutions
and more importantly, steampunk. For those who don’t know what steampunk is… don’t worry I was there too. Essentially, steampunk is an alternate universe where steam powered machines and aesthetics from the Victorian era thrived. Normally, steampunk worlds are dystopian futures of which there are only steam powered machines. Sometimes thats not the case. For example, we’ve recently been reading a book called “The Leviathan” by Scott Westerfeld that takes place in an alternate version of WWI.
The book is considered steampunk. There were numerous events in the book where there were steam powered machines of war. There was something off though. In the book, there were two sides of the war, the Clankers and the Darwinists. While the Clankers worked on steam powered machines, the Darwinists went in a different direction and worked on genetically modifying animals. This got me wondering, because genetically modifying animals is definitely not something that fits entirely with the steampunk genre. So what does it fit in then? I did a little bit of research and found that there were steampunk sub genres that were similar, but had different aspects that made them unique. Using this information, I figured that there must be better fits for The Leviathan than just steampunk. Saying that, I found four sub genres that could be good candidates for The Leviathan…
-Gaslight fantasy
-Nanopunk
-Biopunk
-Dieselpunk
I’ll be looking at different aspects of The Leviathan and using them as guidelines for the sub genres as well as the steampunk genre as, maybe the right answer may just be steampunk. I’ll be looking at how close the sub genres were to the different aspects of The Leviathan and ranking each out of five.
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So clearly there’s a tie between dieselpunk and steampunk. If I had to lean one way or the other, I would go for steampunk as the winner. Although I do think that dieselpunk was a very good fit for being The Leviathan’s genre, steampunk is just much more open to interpretation and can be much more open in terms of genres. Dieselpunk was a heavy hitter when it came to being similar with WWI and the Clankers, but it fell short when it was time to talk about the Darwinists and the similarities of the book. Steampunk was a good all rounder that got good, consistent scores throughout the chart.
I think that overall, this was a pretty good learning experience for me as I started breaking down my problem into components and that made it easier for me to get all my thoughts organized. I enjoyed putting together these charts and putting them up against one another. It gives me a new perspective on writing and how a genre like cyberpunk or steampunk could branch off into several sub genres.
Sources: –Nanopunk
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