steampunk

Meanings

Noun

• A subgenre of science fiction that depicts advanced technology combined with Victorian style and aesthetics, such as steam-powered machines and vehicles, visible gears and screws and people dressed in 19th-century attires.
• A writer of steampunk fiction.
• A person cosplaying as a steampunk character.

Verb

• To depict in a steampunk manner.

Origin

• steam + -punk, by analogy with cyberpunk, coined by science-fiction writer Kevin Wayne Jeter (born 1950) in a 1987 letter to the magazine Locus in response to a review of his book Infernal Devices published the same year (see the quotation below).