It’s getting a bit frustrating seeing every article discussion of steampunk still beginning with “what is steampunk” five years after the renaissance began.
The list also hammers home strange and disparate a genre it is. The Prestige and The Golden Compass are both decent films, but without a film that proudly wears the label and penetrates deep into the public consciousness I’m worried that we’ll be explaining what Steampunk is for a long time to come.
I deeply love the genre, obviously. But it’s gotten so broad, so fast, it seems to me that it’s greatest legacy may may be simply having expanded the range of times and elements that we can consider in our fantasy stories, even though the genre itself is fundamentally Science Fiction. And maybe that’s part of the problem as well…
