First, some cute little snippets to describe Steampunk:

• Imagine if the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were history, rather than fiction¹.
• Retro-futurism
• Looking to the future through the lenses of the past
• It's what happened when Goths discovered Sepia.

Steampunk is a relative of cyberpunk and is a similar contraction, combining Steam and Punk.

• Steam harkens back to the late 1700s and early 1900s – where Victorian ideals of dress, manners, propriety and style were combined with the Industrial Revolution’s explosion of devices of convenience powered by steam and clockwork. Dirigibles and massive mechanical thinking engines ala Charles Babbage feature heavily, as well as adventuring into Deepest Darkest Whateverica and claiming it for the Queen.
• Punk has the attitude of rejecting the status quo (anti-establishment), the current ideals and replacing it with a solid dose of rebellious self reliance. Constructions made by the self or a group rather than mass produced commercialism is a key concept here.

Some unifying elements of steampunk are Do It Yourself (also helps when things inevitably break; if you know how it went together it’s easier to fix), Neo-Victorian aesthetic (chances are most people have garments that could fit this aesthetic that need tweaking), Retro-futurism (jetpacks et al.), Romanticism (steamy!). If you’d like to know more, there’s the always reliable cough cough Wikipedia article on Steampunk.

Recommended Reading Experiencing

Articles

• Variations on a Name: The -Punks of Our Times
• Timepunk (or Punk Punk)
• Letting off Steam - Article in our state newspaper on Steampunk in Brisbane

Stories

• Curious Fictions' steampunk tag
• Across the Stonewind Sky
• Parasol Protectorate (series)
• Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium
• The League of Extra-ordinary Gentlemen
• Girl Genius
• The Difference Engine

Actual Plays/ Podcasts

• SteamRollers Adventure Podcast
• Copperheart - note, I play a part in this one. Yeee!

Authors and Artists

• Ged Maybury
• Gail Carriger
• Jaymee Goh
• Michael J Rigg
• Baron von Borg's Deviantart
• Weta Workshop's rayguns

Blogs/ Magazines/ Subscribe-ables

• Airship Ambassador
• Beyond Victoriana
• Metapunk
• Never Was Magazine
• NineteenTeen
• Silver Goggles, sadly no longer updating, but read for the history.
• Voyages Extraordinaires

Music

• Clockwork Cabaret - Starting as a terrestrial radio show showcasing steampunk and related music, it's now got a faint Steampunk theme but great fun.
• Unwoman - Amazing chellist.
• Littmus Steampunk Band - Townsville steampunks (that's near me, vaguely!). Traditional-ish
• Thomas Bejamin Wild Esq. - British, banjo, swearing. I'm sure there's at least one song you know of.
• The Clockwork Dolls - Their cover of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda stirs me every time. Story albumns.
• The New Orleans Steamcog Orchestra - Spectacle! Delight! Silliness!
• The Cog Is Dead - Another band specialising in story songs, a song of theirs sadly announces the Cog is Dead.
• Professor Elemental - Cup of Brown Joy instigated a lot of silliness.
• Abney Park - Piratical scoundrels the lot of them.
• Emilie Autumn - Songs in the key of disturbing.
• The Clockwork Quartet - Very moving story songs but... only a few of them, and now they've poofed.

Movies/ TV

• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• The Time Machine
• Baron Munchausen
• Doctor Who, "The Next Doctor" 2008 Christmas Special
• Warehouse 13
• The Librarians

Steampunk Stuff by Me

On this very site you can see information of the steampunk group I co-created years ago and my fellow founding members of the Royal Omnitological Society for Electrodyne Adventurers. My blog has posts tagged Steampunk. There's a web-app for generating cogs, however my gauge generate was naff so I removed it.

Silly Terms

Pronunciation guides are specified in English phonology. Badly. For fun. The ever popular TV Tropes website has a Punk Punk article that goes into way more areas that are more well known than these.

SteamPost /ˈstiːmpəʊst/

Instead of rebelling punk, its a survivalist post apocalyptic rationale that drives this intra-genre. Typified by grime, grit, rust, cobbled-together relic-devices from lost civilisations (spoilers: us) and very smart urchins. Some of them explain how we ended up in this mess but many of them just let us surmise that, somewhen, “we done goofed.” TVTropes refers to this as The Apunkalypse.

SteamPulp /stiːmpʌlp/

Things can be marvellous and adventure is everywhere. Evil is obvious and can be defeated by a swift punch to the chin, it may cackle and threaten; but rarely do they do things like break fingers to prove points, evil loves the idea of a civilised duel to show who was right. Strange locales, rose-tinted views of just about everything.

SteamPast /stiːmpɑːst/

Take actual history and en-tech-ify it. Larger and more solid class divides, many more orphans, the march-of-modern-technology (read: industrial revolution) results in a depression and massive job loss rather than a wonderful age of reason and wonder (unless you’re monarchy or upper class, then bully for you).

SteamPink /stiːmpɪŋk/

the horror…

Only one example exists to my knowledge. Thank Tesla.

I kid, this is Ged Maybury, excellent Steampunk author, having fun with the genre. Fun! It's what we're here for!

SteamParts /stiːmpɑːts/

Just about anything, as long as you cover at least part of it in cogworks, gears, vents, brass or other sciencey doodaderry.