
The new article on this blog will focus on the decades before the word Steampunk appeared in print. There was a time when the works could have been considered part of the Steampunk Universe but they had the bad taste to appear before the date of 1987. Even KW Jeter, who coined the word, openly admits that it existed with or without him. On his website he says:
"Here's the deal: I didn't invent steampunk. But I did happen to invent the word steampunk. "There's a lot of creativity, written and unwritten, and general enjoyment, in the realm of Victorian -themed fantasy and science fiction, and if a word I created became the common name for it all, I'm flattered. But it would still exist, with or without that label."

As we have seen in previous chapters, it is difficult to define the boundaries of Steampunk. There is a red line that I am personally willing to draw in the sand, but others may disagree. This question comes up quite frequently:
Is Victorian-era science fiction “Steampunk”?
My personal answer to this question is a very short, resounding "no." I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but here is my logic.
The "science fiction" (as these stories were called by their contemporaries) written by the likes of Jules Verne , H.G. Wells, etc. were decidedly forward-looking. They were largely written about a near future that the authors thought (or hoped, or feared, depending on the story) was possible. Steampunk, on the other hand, is more or less backward-looking. We are technologically and intellectually beyond the time period that this genre draws on. Even if a story is set in the future, if the technology is from the Industrial Revolution, it is a throwback.
Additionally, Steampunk works often use archetypes and tropes created during the steam age, but use them to offer a critique of the past or present. Therefore, I consider them to be fundamentally different books from the Victorian "classics" up until the 1950s.
However, Steampunk works often draw directly from Victorian-era fiction, so I'd like to take some time to explore these works as food for the imagination, as well as some of the adaptations that followed their creation.
From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: An Extraordinary Journey
The Age of Steam at the center of retrofuturism.
Some of the most beloved works of the steam age were adapted into stage productions, even during the author's lifetime. For example, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was staged only a year after the novella was first published. The writer attended the performance and then stormed out in a huff.
In the book, he was careful never to say precisely what the good doctor found so "bad" about him (and which in turn manifested itself in the form of Mr. Hyde). In the play, they decided to show this evil by making Mr. Hyde an inveterate womanizer. Stevenson was dismayed that his "evil" character could be minimized by giving him such a trivial vice.
While vagueness is fine for writing, it wouldn't have worked at all on stage. If you had asked the playwright, not being able to choose visual clues as to the nature of this "evil" would have ruined the play. The truth is that many wonderful books simply don't translate to a visual medium without some sort of concession to both the medium itself and the audience's expectations. In other words, the books are almost always more "Punk" and less watered down than the adaptation.
When it comes to Jekyll and Hyde, the more adaptations there are, the more they tend to deviate. In the original, the reader doesn't know the connection between the two men, and the story is told through a third person. In most visual adaptations, there is no narrator, other than Jekyll and Hyde themselves, who are usually played by the same actor. This goes completely against the original and fundamentally changes the audience's experience. (Although you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone these days who isn't already familiar with Stevenson's story .) Between the pressures of the particular medium and the pressure to do something new, the stories change with each new adaptation.
Steampunk Universes Constantly Revisited
While this may seem counterintuitive of me, this is why I have placed the many adaptations of 19th century classics more firmly in the Steampunk canon than as actual Steampunk works. Note that I say "more firmly" by which I mean that they don't necessarily fit in at all, but that by being adaptations, there is a potential for change that has distorted the author's vision. Additionally, some would be more comfortable in one of the other anachronyms of the genre like teslapunk or clockworkpunk and other dieselpunk... so you may disagree with the examples I have provided. Regardless, these are some of the earliest film adaptations of works written during the steam age, and they are worth noting as inspiration for those who were destined to bear the Steampunk moniker later on.
Alice in Wonderland

The book was first published by Lewis Carroll in 1865 and was first shown in movie theaters as an 8-minute film in 1903. It is close to the story, but as a silent film it lacks the charm and resonance of Carroll's incredible language.
The 1931 adaptation gave the story a literal "voice," but apparently amateur American actors had trouble reproducing British accents. In the 1930s, several plays, puppet shows, and other types of adaptations emerged, as "Alice fever" spread throughout the English-speaking world.
Two decades later, Disney Studios gave it their best shot, but this time in animation. This is their 13th animated feature film. Disney had originally started working on an animated film adaptation in the 1930s, but abandoned the project. The idea was revived in the 1940s and came to fruition in 1951. This film is considered one of the best ever made by the studio, and is often hailed as one of the best adaptations of Alice in Wonderland ever made.
You probably know the movie, but what most people don't know is that Walt Disney had already made a series of short films paying homage to the story in the early 1920s, called "Alice Comedies."
Around the World in 80 Days (1919 and 1956)
I was surprised that this Jules Verne story was one of the first to be adapted for film. I had assumed that with so many different locations, filming would have been very expensive and time-consuming. The original story was written in 1873, and the first adaptation came out of Germany in 1919. Despite the World Wars, Germany was a major force in film during the first half of the 20th century. This version is a parody of the original story and was originally going to be called "A Voyage Around the World" due to a copyright dispute with the Verne estate.

But the version you probably saw came from Disney in 1956. While this adaptation is not meant to be funny, the writers did take some liberties. The most obvious is the addition of a stop in Spain and the arrival of Phileas Fogg in a hot air balloon. While this scene is not in the original text, it could be a nod to another Verne classic, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863). To make room, they dropped a (rather long) section of the Mormon story. Passepartout should have sat and listened, but I don't think the audience would have minded!
The Mysterious Island (1929, 1941 and 1951)
The first film to tackle this Jules Verne tale in 1929 bore the same name as, but bore little resemblance to, the book. In many ways, it was more of a prequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, except that the captain (here called "Dakkar" rather than Nemo) dies at the end of the story, as in the book. This version was thought to be lost until a copy was discovered and preserved in Prague in 2013.
The 1941 film was made in Russia and follows the original text much more closely. Ten years later, Columbia Pictures produced the first English-language adaptation, but could not resist a little "punishment" along the way. In addition to the pirates and natural phenomena that threaten the shipwrecked heroes, aliens from Mercury also inhabit the island. They were able to fit in this additional plot because it was a serial with a total running time of over 250 minutes.
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: A Journey into the Unknown
Treasure Island (1934 and 1950)
This is another Stevenson work that has been popular on the silver screen. What it lacks in obvious steam is made up for by the "castaway" theme. Several writers of the steam era wrote stories about poor lost souls who get stranded on a mysterious land. Personally, I wish Steampunk would focus more on this, but writers seem to be more comfortable in urban settings.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
This is one of the most popular film adaptations of Jules Verne's work, if not the most popular. However, it departs significantly from the original in terms of technology. Instead of relying on a chemical reaction to create electricity, Nemo's Nautilus is powered by a nuclear reactor. This choice likely reflects the enthusiasm of the time for a new technology rather than any problem with Verne's science. The film also makes the encounter with the giant squid a much bigger event than it is in the text. This film is certainly a clear turning point in the visual aesthetic of Jules Verne as seen by the general public. It can be said that the Steampunk visual is taking shape and changing our view of the original work little by little.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
In Jules Verne's 1864 book, an eccentric uncle and nephew follow centuries-old directions to find a tunnel that leads to the center of the earth. This adaptation adds murder and conspiracy to what is more or less a travelogue. Rival factions try to prove the claims true and are willing to kill to do so.
The early novels are retroactively called Steampunk
Ronald C. Clark devoted most of his writing career to nonfiction. His favorite subjects were mountaineering and biographies of historical figures, such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. However, in 1967, he published a book that many consider to be the first Steampunk novel. Queen Victoria's Bomb is an alternate history in which the British develop the atomic bomb during the Crimean War.

A few years later, Michael Moorcock gave the world the first installment of his "The Time Traveler" series. Time travel, as found in the work of HG Wells , is the main theme of the series. However, other essential elements of Steampunk, such as airships, are also present. In the first book, we meet an Edwardian soldier stationed in India. He travels to a parallel universe where the First World War never took place. The second book, originally subtitled "a fictionalized scientific novella", in homage to its predecessors, deals even more openly with Britain's imperialist history.
Between Moorcock's second and third installments ( Tsar of Steel ), KW Jeter published his sequel to H.G. Wells's time machine, Morlock Night, in 1979. Since Jeter and his compatriots were familiar with the era before and after the word Steampunk, I've placed the reference to their books here. Interestingly, however, time travel itself seems to be an important gateway to these explorations of the industrial age and the historical implications of actions taken during that time.

The case of Western-Punk or Cattle-Punk
In the same way that Victorian fantasy, sometimes also called Gaslamp, can be considered a forerunner of Steampunk, the Wild West enriched with retrofuturism is also a genre that is intertwined to make something new. For many members of the baby boom generation, and even before, their childhood was marked by romantic visions of the pioneer era, interpreted by the likes of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Sam Elliott.
These big screen dramas faded in popularity in the 1970s, but on television, writers began playing with the format as early as 1964 with Wild, Wild West . Although the series had a cowboy setting, the name is a play on words based on the main character, James West. With the help of his partner and their wagon full of gadgets, they spy for Ulysses S. Grant. This series mixes the genres of the western and spy thrillers such as James Bond, which were popular at the time. The series ran for four seasons between 1964 and 1969. In addition, 1980 saw the making of TV movies, Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild West Revisited. We won't talk about the movie starring Will Smith here...
The decline of the cowboy drama and its place in recent memory also paved the way for Mel Brooks’ 1974 hit Blazing Saddles. It’s a significant moment in cinematic history, not only for the commentary on racial intolerance buried beneath the jokes, but also because it was the first time anyone “debunked” the cowboy myth in a film. (Incidentally, Brooks also released Young Frankenstein that same year, which is of course a parody of Mary Shelley ’s gothic science fiction novel The Modern Prometheus (aka Frankenstein). The Weird West is also a genre unto itself, so I won’t try to dwell on it. However, it’s worth mentioning as a cousin of Steampunk and Cattlepunk,
Thank you for reading, and see you soon for a new article on the fabulous world of Steampunk!