Steampunk? Hardly. It’s true, the cogs and gears are a wonder of clockwork and they sure are pretty with copper, bronze, and a green petina, but it’s just not my style. I was born just long enough ago to have had personal computers around for nearly all of my life and I firmly assert myself as a product of the 90’s. So, the victorian age seems… well, just a little too old fashioned for me.
I tried to figure what a slightly modern version of steampunk would be. A time when a gleaming steel B-17 ruled the skys and every soldier carried a raygun as their weapon of choice. This is when people feared Nazis on the moon with death rays and the closest you got to an SUV was a Willys Jeep, a time when your computer was made of bakelite and used nixie tubes and no one’s ever heard of an integrated circuit or microchip. A robot down at the corner gas station with vacuum tubes clowing in his chest was the mechanic for your oil burning car. In design, form just began to lead function and “streamlined” was the buzz-word. You said ZAP! instead of pew!pew! It would be a glorious age of polished steel and great discoveries in physics under the Hoover administration.
What I think it boils down to is nostalgic fondness for the aesthetic styling of grossly obsolete, 65 year-old technology blended with fantastic functionality. But what do you call this anachronism? Do you go with a new _____punk name like electronpunk, or analogpunk? Or do you simply call it “Modern Steampunk”? An anachronistic anachronism in and of itself.
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