I’ve read that
Those comments frankly strike me as bizarre, because my impression of steampunk is that it tries too hard to try too hard. What plot could be more “forced” than grafting modern technologies onto an era we know lacked them, using science we know is invalid? The Difference Engine is compelling because the premise works on a technical level; analog computers existed and Babbages Difference and Analytical Engines lacked only financing, not functionality. Steam powered anachronisms are another matter entirely. They fit well with a 1900s science text I once saw proclaiming steam the greatest power man will ever know and electricity a mere toy, but are implausible in an age when the physics rather than the vision has proven lacking. Verne and Wells looked to a future much like the past of steampunk, but the “difference engine” there is that we have achieved what was possible of their vision and recognize the rest as fantasy rather than science. The Victorian Age embraced most technology, and considered a scientific utopia as imminent as cyberpunks elements are now, notwithstanding the odd technological nightmare.

After a brief Edwardian renaissance, the Great Wars 50 million bullet and plague riddled corpses permanently ended utopian dreams with another nightmare from which we have only recently begun to wake. “Dystopian” isn’t broadly applicable to cyberpunk, much of which features happy functional communities, but postmodernism is--just as it was typical of steampunk until recently. Here the “difference engine” is that those impulses, fully at home in the present and near future, were aberrations in the Victorian Age. The noir sense prevalent in cyberpunk and its inspirations all the way back to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet is jarringly out of place in the often naïvely enthusiastic Nineteenth Century. It is telling that some RAFOlk question a steampunk pioneer incorporating “punk” in christening the genre: Punks rebellious fatalism fits the cyberpunk that borrows its name, but doesn’t fit the latest (century old) high fashion or the Queens English at all. Thus, rather than being true to the postmodern age as in cyberpunk, steampunk noir, much of steam punk, is literally an “absurd” “forc[ing]” of inappropriate atmosphere on the Victorian age “purely for the sake of being ‘dark’ or ‘gritty’”.

Ironically, Gibsons cyberpunk short The Gernsback Continuum illustrates the fundamental flaws in expectations for both Victorian natural and social science. None of that diminishes science fantasy, but it does raise the question of why historical science fantasy draws such wide audiences with little interest in the science fiction that spawned it. I like science fantasy and alternative history, but prefer science fiction and epic fantasy. When I seek marvels that omit explanations no amount of education or advancement would make possible, I choose pure fantasy rather than fantasy pretending to “science”, invalidated many times over by ACTUAL science. Again, I do not begrudge steampunk to its devotees, nor them to it; Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (a rare Victorian example of dystopian alternative history) has long been a favorite of mine, as is alternative history as a whole. Steampunk offers the most out of ten cyberpunk derivatives Wikipedia lists (I'm not sure how slasher films, or “splatterpunk”, innovate beyond anything since a lion disemboweled and dismembered the first human on the African savanna). What escapes me is faded interest in cyberpunk despite much of it materializing before our eyes and the likelihood so much more will, particularly when compared to the popularity of alternative history that often requires a generous dose of alternative science. What bothers me is the possibility that “escape” is the operative word, that the near future is so much more daunting than inspiring that most people prefer to fantasize about an impossible past.