It’s getting harder to maintain that steampunk is just resting. It may not be dead, but it certainly isn’t as alive as it used to be.
I was never big on steampunk events and I’m not into steampunk music, so I can’t speak for those scenes. But when it comes to art, fiction and the online fandom, there has been a noticeable decline.
Type “steampunk” in DeviantArt, filter for “newest” and don’t tell me you’re impressed. The most recent Hollywood production with steampunk elements was probably The Three Musketeers (2011, our review here). Most of the steampunk blogs and forums I used to frequent are either gone or dead.
The Steampunk Forum at Brass Goggles used to be bustling with activity. Now there are barely a few new posts each day. Our own community, the Smoking Lounge, has seen better days. The Brass Goggles blog hasn’t been updated in six years. The once-lively steampunk community on LiveJournal has withered. Krzysztof Janicz took his English-language Steampunkopedia offline in 2010 (archived PDF here) and his Polish Retrostacja last year. SteamPunk Magazine promised a final edition in 2016 but hasn’t been heard from since. The Steampunk Tribune returned in 2017 after a four-year hiatus but hasn’t been updated in a year. Even The Steampunk Museum, which was founded in part to preserve the memory of the rapidly disappearing online steampunk scene, is inactive.
Exceptions include Kevin Steil, who is still going strong at Airship Ambassador, and Chris Garcia, who still edits Exhibition Hall.
What happened?
Continue reading “Who Killed Steampunk?”