Steampunk and Dieselpunk films

[Magical Realist]

One of my favs is The Golden Compass. Takes you into that alternative reality with beautiful effects and gripping storyline. I never thought of Wild Wild West as steampunk, but indeed it was. The original series was definitely ahead of its time. The movie was outrageous. Here's a full list of the steampunk film genre if you you're ever itch'n for hitch'n your airship to a star.

http://steampunk.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_steampunk_films

[Image: ortega%20steampunk%20ex%20machina.jpg]

[C C]

While The Difference Engine did seem kind of unusual when I read it back then, I never imagined it solidifying the once scattered and isolated instances of pseudo-Victorian speculative fiction into a sustained momentum. Of course, it's no longer even referenced as what triggered the coining of "steampunk", since K.W. Jeter did that directly a few years prior. But I guess it's still tooted as what officially broke the dam and got the movement flooding and recognized on an international scale.

One problem with the punk-genres having that shared word-unit is the indignity of them simply being tongue-in-cheek spinoffs from the original "cyberpunk", which in turn was borrowed from the music culture of that late '70s, early '80s era. The definition of "punk" needs to be refined deeper or generalized further to reflect the later developing usages. Thankfully that has been done:

Piecraft: Perhaps it is best to accept that the 'punk' suffix added to these literary genres developed not out of the same sense as the punk musical scene, but out of the actual definition of the term. Punk referred to a label given to antagonize anyone who was seen as rebellious or anti-establishment; mostly designated to the younger generation, basically one who would go against the grain of society.

This 'punk' attitude was further enhanced with cyberpunk in an all too bleak view of the 1980s drowned in the Digital Age and mass consumerism, but it was later carried into the extraordinary adventures and inventions found in a curious age before the turn-of-the-century. An age that reveled in the world of steampunk, with high hopes about industry and progress, bringing about exciting technology but also social change. Thus the daring adventurers and anti-social inventors of this time could be seen as the 'punks' of their period, rejecting the status quo of the time to challenge and seek their true destinies. We observe that this was further enhanced by the inclusion of the urban, gritty and raw characters found in the 1930s, demonstrated through film noir and pulp literature. --The History of Dieselpunk III: Diesel’s Punk

Larry Amyett, Jr: [...] the number of proposed genre-punks has multiplied faster than wildflowers after a spring rain shower, three genre-punks dominate this phenomenon: Dieselpunk, Steampunk and Cyberpunk. --The Genre-Punk Linguistic Family Tree

[Yazata]

I'm not sure that I even like the current 'steam-punk' fad in what is ostensibly 'science fiction'. (I like 'hard science fiction' and 'space operas' with slightly religio-philosophical 'secrets of the universe' themes.)

Science fiction used to be futuristic. It expressed a general cultural optimism that the future contained unrealized wonders, that years to come would be amazing and even transcendent.

But today, there's a general sense that everything is on a downward-trajectory and that the future will be smaller and more sordid than today. That's a huge cultural-historical shift in my opinion, unlike anything we've seen in the history of Western civilization perhaps since early medieval times after the fall of Rome and certainly since the surging optimism of the Renaissance.

Much of it probably has to do with the death of the manned space program and the failure of the promised future to appear. (Just look at the movie '2001' to see what was expected not so long ago.) What did we get instead? Cheap Chinese-made cell-phones.

So some people seem to be looking for their lost sense of wonder in an alternative past, in a Victorian age in which Western civilization stood astride the world (and all of our industries and technology weren't 'off-shored' to China) and when people were still unashamedly optimistic about the shape of their future.