Editing Steampunk (section)

==History==
In the Beginning there was Mary Shelly with Frankenstein. Then there was Jules Verne and [[H. G. Wells]] and a few others in a time of Scientific Romance in which they put pen to paper and wrote of the wonders and horrors that science and industry might achieve. They imagined the dead reanimated by electricity, submarines navigating the oceans, cannons sending men to the moon, a world eight hundreds of thousands of years hence and intelligent beings from another world coming to the earth and told the world of them. Since these were writing and illustration was expensive, the fine details of aesthetic and functional mechanical design was not a high priority in their work. A few illustrators and really old timey movies were thrown in with various additions and occasionally you'd have a few things like Postcards. Never the less, a few of them stayed in print continuously.

Then came the Pulp Era starting in the 1920s. Beforehand, you had a few writers making a few books here and there. Afterward you have a lot of regular sci-fi writers with an expanded audience as well as artists giving form to words, usually in an Art Deco style (itself a futurist artistic movement). Thus the first wave of Sci-Fi art was born. Sci-Fi movies would follow in the footsteps of the pulps as much as they could, given the shoestring budget they operated on. Gradually the Art Deco influence would give way to Modernism as the design of choice after WWII and going into the fifties and sixties in various permutations. Compare pulp magazine Spaceships from the 1940s with the original Starship Enterprise, then compare the Starship Enterprise with the Millenium Falcon. In short, what people saw as the aesthetics of the future evolved.

Then came two movies based on Old Victorian sci-fi Novels Disney's ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'' (1954) and MGM's ''The Time Machine'' (1960). Where others would update the basic story to modern times these film kept the period piece settings along with mechanisms which were designed with Victorian sensibilities, which helped them stand among the crowd of sci-fi movies which were being churned out at the time. From there the basic idea would be used here and there by a variety of guys from the 1960s to 90s.

=== The Name ===
It was basically inevitable that people would look at the bits and bobs of victorianesque Jules Verne style cogs, clockwork, pistons and brass style retro sci-fi stuff that was steadily becoming more common, lumping it together and slapping a label on it. The name that stuck can come across as a bit awkward and comes out of left-field, but it makes sense in context. It comes from an [[Alternate History]] book written by William Gibson (the grandfather of Cyberpunk literature) called ''The Difference Engine'' about a world in which the Analytical Engine (a proposed programmable mechanical computer designed by Charlse Babbage in the 19th century) was built, leading to a computer Revolution in Victorian Era. 

There is also the fact that a lot of elements of Cyberpunk fit quite well into the 19th century. [[Megacorporation]]s? Standard Oil and the other trusts. Private Armies? Pinkertons and mercenaries. Widespread Poverty and lots of gangs emerging from a neglected underclass? Check and double check. Societal upheaval by new technologies? Well Duh.