A craft-driven writing exercise with context explaining what the exercise trains and which authors used the technique
An original reflection connecting the exercise to a real writing principle you can use today
A quote from a literary master to ground your morning in craft, not hustle
What this genre demands
The technology has to cost someone something.
Steam power isn't clean. It runs on coal, which means miners, which means lungs full of soot, which means a working class that pays for the gears the wealthy admire from a distance. China Miéville's Perdido Street Station builds New Crobuzon around this reality: the city's miraculous technology is inseparable from the labor exploitation that produces it. If your steampunk world has beautiful machines and no one is suffering to build them, you haven't finished the worldbuilding.
The Victorian era wasn't charming for most people.
Top hats and tea parties existed alongside child labor, colonial violence, and poverty that would be criminal by modern standards. Gail Carriger handles this in the Parasol Protectorate series through comedy and social satire, using supernatural elements as a lens for the era's class and gender absurdities. The writers who treat the Victorian period as purely aesthetic miss the tension that makes the setting interesting in the first place.
The divergence point shapes everything.
Every steampunk world has a moment where history branched. In Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, the divergence is biological: Darwin discovered DNA manipulation, splitting the world into nations that use living machines (Darwinists) versus steam-powered ones (Clankers). That single choice shapes the politics, the warfare, the culture, everything. The weakest steampunk worlds are the ones where the divergence is "what if the Victorians had cooler stuff" without following the implications.
Inventions need to fail.
Real technology is buggy, unreliable, and dangerous, especially in its early stages. Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines features mobile predator cities that consume smaller towns, and the technology is magnificent and constantly breaking. When your mad inventor protagonist builds a device that works perfectly on the first try, you've skipped the part of the story that generates the best tension.
The genre lives or dies on specificity.
Cherie Priest's Boneshaker is set in an alternate Seattle during the Civil War, with a toxic gas called Blight that has turned parts of the city into a walled-off zombie zone. The specificity of that premise, a real city, a real war, a plausible-feeling catastrophe, gives the steampunk elements something concrete to attach to. Generic steampunk (unnamed city, vague era, unanchored technology) reads like cosplay.
These observations are drawn from the worldbuilding choices of leading steampunk authors.
For a deeper look, start with how to write steampunk with substance.
On writing steampunk
Steampunk
How to Write Steampunk With Substance
What Miéville, Bancroft, and Parker-Chan teach about worlds that work beneath the brass. →
Steampunk
Steampunk Techniques Worth Studying
Ideas from Carriger, Westerfeld, and Clark that changed how the genre works on the page. →
Steampunk
Steampunk Tropes That Actually Work
Observations about which genre conventions still carry weight and which need updating. →
A sample from your daily email
July 4th
"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."
- Richard Feynman
Feynman was a physicist, but this is a writer's problem too. We cling to outlines, to the plan, to the version of the story we decided on before we started writing it. And sometimes the best scene in the book is the one you didn't plan, the one that showed up because you followed a character into a room you hadn't mapped and found something there you didn't expect.
For steampunk writers, this matters more than usual. The genre tempts you to design everything in advance: the technology, the politics, the alternative history. But the worlds that feel alive are the ones where the writer left space for discovery. Where the inventor character builds something that surprises even you. Where the city has a neighborhood you didn't plan that turns out to be the most interesting part of the book.
Today's exercise: write a scene where your protagonist finds a piece of technology they don't recognize. Don't explain how it works. Let them guess, get it wrong, and figure it out by accident. The scene teaches itself.
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Steampunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction set in worlds where steam power, clockwork, and Victorian-era aesthetics meet advanced technology. The genre typically features alternative histories, anachronistic inventions, and societies structured around industrial-age class dynamics. Key authors include China Miéville, Gail Carriger, Cherie Priest, and Scott Westerfeld. The best steampunk goes beyond goggles and gears to explore what an alternative industrial revolution would actually mean for the people living through it.
Start with the technology and ask who builds it, who profits from it, and who gets crushed by it. China Miéville's Bas-Lag novels work because the steam-powered and thaumaturgic technology shapes the politics, economics, and daily life of every character. The aesthetic (brass, gears, top hats) should emerge from the world's logic, not be applied over the top of it. If you can remove the steampunk elements and the story still works, they're decoration, not worldbuilding.
No. While Victorian England is the genre's default, some of the most interesting steampunk fiction is set elsewhere. Cherie Priest's Boneshaker takes place in an alternate-history Seattle. P. Djélí Clark sets his work in an alternative Cairo. Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun draws on Chinese history. The Victorian era provides the technological and social template, but the setting can be anywhere that an alternative industrial revolution makes sense.
Don't ignore them. The Victorian era was defined by colonialism, rigid class structures, and racial hierarchies. The steampunk writers who earn reader trust are the ones who engage with these realities rather than wallpapering over them with adventure and gadgets. Gail Carriger addresses class and gender in her Parasol Protectorate series through comedy and social satire. China Miéville confronts industrialization's human costs in Perdido Street Station. Pretending the era was all top hats and tea produces shallow worldbuilding.