As a San Francisco denizen, I can assure you reports of Steam Punk's death are greatly exaggerated.
In my circles at least, some people are annoyed at how much steam punk has infiltrated their other costume niches, like the Edwardian Ball.
As other people have said, the link to the iPhone announcement seems super tenuous given the prevelance of steam punk costumes on Halloween. But also, it's possible that the term needs less definition, and that ideas from the steampunk aesthetic have already permeated other art. For example, there is a lot of steam punk looking machinery and decorations at this new minigolf place in SF, but it's not being advertised as such: https://www.urbanputt.com/
Fair to not call it new, they apparently opened in 2014. But that is still two years after the article dates the steam punk period as ending, and it is still very popular.
Not sure it counts but there are a few anime and video games that some people call steampunk. Sakura Taisen/Sakura Wars, the latest version for PS4 was just announced at Tokyo Game Show a few weeks ago.
To me Steampunk was an artistic movement and as such it is not dead. Sure there where some pretty cool things that actually worked well that came out of it, but it always seemed like that was the secondary purpose to the art.
I believe some people got so wound up in it that they basically became steampunk LARP'ers, but for the most part it was an art period and one that really for some reason catches my fancy. Maybe it's art for tinkerers or something like that, but as a child I really liked the wounder of 1000 Leagues and novels like that, and some steampunk pieces evoke that youthful wonderlust in me.
It's an art form that encompasses a lot of skills that I personally enjoy doing as a hobby. e.g Welding, Metal Crafting, Pneumatic, Hydraulics, Mechanics. Funny enough even though there was a time that I pursued artistic endeavors and was a pretty avid sketch artist and fairly good CG 3D artist. I have never endeavored to design a steampunk piece. Just too busy for art now days.
The question is, who will arise as the Picasso or Dali of the Stempunk period? I would love to know their name and pick up a few pieces now.
Abney Park is in the process of releasing their latest steampunk inspired music CD. (And on cassette tape). Steampunk was never 'huge', but there are still plenty of people heavily involved in all things steampunk.
A bit off on a tangent, but I love the 90s design aesthetic of this website. Is it purposeful or somehow linked to steampunk?
I can actually see old school web design becoming an art movement in its own right at some point in the future. Imagining what current and future tech companies would look like built on 90s style web technology is pretty fun.
Ah, you're right - actually I just realised I clicked through to some of the links which have a completely different design - 2015 link for instance. Main site isn't 90s at all. Actually the design aesthetic I'm talking about might be more early 00s anyway as in the sibling comment.
If we are playing a game of semantics, it could not be dead it was never alive to be alive one has to meet the definition of living and a artistic period certainly would not fit said criteria.
That being said, I would assume dead was a reference to out of fashion and sure it is out of fashion, but there are still people that enjoy it as an art. 70's Disco is out of fashion but there are still people making 70's disco music.
Art on Duval in Key West has 2 really nice pieces, I don't remember the artist name, I am trying to look them up, one is a computer desk and the other is a bar, the bar is all wood gog and gear driven, and it looks like a steampunk contraption, when you open it up all the functional gears move the pieces to reassemble it into a functional mini bar. It's a beautiful piece. I am trying to find pictures and info.
Author doesn't mention it, but the demise of skeuomorphism and slow death of late 00's hipsterism (in the sense of fetishizing historical aesthetics in a modern context) goes hand-in-hand with the disappearance of steampunk.
Man I fucking miss skeuomorphism these days. I'm so damn tired of everything being text floating on bright white backgrounds. I live in a white apartment that I can't paint, at least put some texture and color in my virtual spaces where it's just about free.
I never liked the in-your-face skeuomorphism that Apple did. I would like modern UIs with subtle 3D cues, like Windows 95 had. I don't think that's a huge ask.
Success did it in. The Zybourne Clock was the ultimate implementation and perfection of the genre. Steampunk disappeared shortly after because there was nothing more left to achieve.
> The entire game was planned to be be completed in less than a year, however only one person on the team had previous game development experience as a professional developer. He was banned from the project for criticizing it.
References to Zybourne Clock made it into some pretty high-profile places thanks to former goons becoming adults and working their way into various industries: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Johnny
In the 1990s steampunk was just what we called whatever it was that Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and KW Jeter were writing, and now it is costume goggles you can get at the Party City at the local mall.
Can you try to give me a sense of what "steampunk" means in a literary sense? When I think of "steampunk" I think of brass machinery, tubes and pipes, oversized hardware, needle pressure gauges, etc... and I struggle to see how that kind of aesthetic would be captured in a literary genre. I would love to know.
For an HN reader, I'd just suggest picking up a copy of the 1990 William Gibson/Bruce Sterling collaboration The Difference Engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine). It's hit or miss from a literary perspective, but it'll get you aimed in the general direction you're asking about.
I usually see it in a retro-futurist parallel universe. Depending on the definition of "literature", Wild Wild West was a movie set in The Old West, but exhibits technologies that definitely didn't exist at the time. Those technologies seem to aesthetically fit in the movie's semi-fictional era.
I thought the steampunk genre was born with Wild Wild West - that awful Will Smith movie from '99. That's what I remember from living through it. I would actually have a bit more respect for steampunk as a subculture if it's genesis resided elsewhere - that movie was so ridiculously stupid that steampunk has been tainted for me by association.
Edit to add: apologies all around, dear steampunk enthusiasts! Fwiw Steampunk really didn't enter anything close to the mainstream in my corner of the U.S. until that movie came out, and afterwards seemed to be everywhere I looked, so I don't think it was a totally unreasonable assumption. (And yes, I knew the movie was based on older material, but didn't know to what extent the visual aesthetic had already been defined.) As penance I will purchase one Steampunk item from my local costume store and wear it to my next all-hands work meeting.
Steampunk was most assuredly not born out of the 1999 movie. If some ridiculous movie tainted your view of the genre, I think that's more a reflection of you than the genre or the terrible movie.
That said, the movie was supposedly inspired by a series from the 1960s by a nearly identical name ("The Wild Wild West".) The genre, however, has been around for much longer, and the name 'steampunk' seems to have its creation in the 1980s.
Steampunk is a modern retro movement. It is not Verne and Wells, but modern writers writing in a Wellsian mode. Why this should have come formed around a group of writers who, perhaps not coincidentally, had in their younger days been friends with Philip Dick, is unknown.
Gibson and Sterling were actually somewhat late to the game.
I'm old enough to feel like '99 wasn't that long ago, to have seen the movie when it was released, and formed an opinion of it that I can still defend. I'm not sure which part of my comment made it sound like I was talking about ancient history. But tbh 20 years ago actually is a pretty long time when talking about pop culture stuff.
Maybe because your comment seemed to me like that movie was your first contact with steampunk. I's as if someone told me the fantasy genre came out of Dungeons and Dragons.
Wild Wild West was a bad movie, but I think the whole steampunk aspect of it was really interesting and well done. Not-Will-Smith's decked out spy train car was really cool. The steam-powered spider mech was a little hokey in retrospect, but still kinda awesome in its own way.
Halloween makes a lot more sense. Steampunk searches don't spike in september/october; they begin in june/july and trend upwards, reaching a peak in october before abruptly dying. This is very clearly a halloween trend.
I really don't think Steampunk is tied to the iPhone in any way. "steampunk was a cultural response to the ultimate technological zeitgeist, the iPhone" is a pretty bold claim.
It's like someone picked two topics out of a hat (iPhone, Steampunk) and was tasked with writing an article about them. iPhones (and smartphones in general) were definitely a cultural phenomenon, but there's literally nothing tangible connecting them to Steampunk aside from the author's shallow, fluffed up wordsmithing.
i think it's tied to skeuomorphism, i.e. giving advanced technology a more tactile sense. the author's neglect of this concept makes these concepts harder to parse, since it what tied the previous and current design eras.
You can't swing a dead cat through the Steam game listings without hitting something Steampunk inspired. They aren't brand new, but Frostpunk, Forgotten Anne, and They Are Billions are all since the article claims Steampunk peaked, and they have done quite well.
It's possible that the aesthetic has just become so ubiquitous that it doesn't bear noticing anymore in that context.
Steampunk not dead. It's just that we discovered retrofuturism instead and graduated from the Victorian age that never was into the space age that never will be.
What's more likely? The iPhone has some hidden, subtle responsibility for the death of Steampunk -or- something niche like Steampunk found mainstream success, over saturated the pop culture market, then fizzled away back to something niche again?
Off topic from the Article, but I like contrast between Steampunk and Dieselpunk. I find Steampunk optimistic about technology and Dieselpunk pessimistic. A motif in steampunk is that technology is here to enlighten and save us -- it's something to be welcomed with open arms. Diselpunk treats technology as something of we aught to be cautious. In that way, I think the 2000's, into the early 2010's were optomistic. In general, I'd assert that we are collectively much more cautious about technology today than we were then.
"I like the word "dieselpunk" if you are doing something like 'Weird World War II'. I think that makes perfect sense. But to me, World War I is the dividing point where modernity goes from being optimistic to being pessimistic. Because when you put the words "machine" and "gun" together, they both change. At that point, war is no longer about a sense of adventure and chivalry and a way of testing your nation's level of manhood; it's become industrial, and horrible. So playing around with that border between optimistic steampunk and a much more pessimistic dieselpunk, which is more about Nazis, was kind of interesting to me because early in the war we were definitely kind of on the steampunk side of that." ~ Scott Westerfeld, via Wikipedia.
>How the iPhone popularized steampunk… and how the iPhone killed it off
The iPhone had very little to do with either popularizing or killing steampunk... Its moment come and went (as far as a little more mass appeal goes) before the iPhone...
Steampunk helps me come to grips with the industrial revolution, 150 years on. In an age of gigahertz radio waves and nanosecond computer speeds, I like thinking about 1 Hertz, 1 Volt, 1 Ohm, and 1 Farad (!) alt-histories.
As the story said,
> It’s about using design to make the working of technology scrutable through an object’s aesthetic.
If one takes Steampunk to be technological advancements beyond (but inspired by) the era coupled with an intense devotion to the style of the era, then Stranger Things could be considered the spiritual successor to Steampunk.
But Steampunk is just the Age of Steam version; the prototypical version is Cyberpunk. Which is actually inspired by roughly the same era as ST, but focussing on different elements of the era (and usual set farther forward from the inspiring era.)
If you trace back to those inspired by Ken Liu, and whom Ken Liu is inspired by, you'll find the elements of silkpunk (if not silkpunk outright) abounding without editorial labeling, imo.
I've never heard of that, but the steampunk aesthetic is present in Dishonored, for example, and many other computer games.
Steampunk is alive and well, and (arguably) more alive than ever. There are steampunk conventions, steampunk meetups, steampunk games, steampunk magicians even. This didn't used to be the case. It started as an obscure literary subgenre that few people had heard of. Asking on HN about steampunk 10 years ago would have probably drawn mostly blank looks. Now many people actually know what it is, and even participate.
Of the top 20 most popular HN submissions with "steampunk" in the title, including this one, 6 were 9 or more years ago. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=steampunk
In my circles at least, some people are annoyed at how much steam punk has infiltrated their other costume niches, like the Edwardian Ball.
As other people have said, the link to the iPhone announcement seems super tenuous given the prevelance of steam punk costumes on Halloween. But also, it's possible that the term needs less definition, and that ideas from the steampunk aesthetic have already permeated other art. For example, there is a lot of steam punk looking machinery and decorations at this new minigolf place in SF, but it's not being advertised as such: https://www.urbanputt.com/