Department of English

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“Steam Wars,” the special edition: steampunk on the move in Philip Reeve’s and Christian Rivers’s Mortal Engines
(2024) Perschon, Mike; Danahay, Martin A.; Howey, Ann F.
While steampunk continues to defy a fixed definition, certain features can be identified which appear in almost all steampunk cultural products. These features are technofantasy, retrofuturism, and vintage elements. This last feature is often represented as neo-Victorian. While it is undeniable that many steampunk works are set in worlds or alternate histories based upon the Victorian culture or period, there is a growing body of steampunk works set in other cultural spaces, temporal periods, or even secondary worlds. This article suggests that it’s time to leave the tacit conflation of steampunk and neo-Victorianism behind, in favor of vintage, a more dynamic term that points to a past that is decades distant, but not in the ancient past.