Jennifer McStotts, another author, considers the two genres to be close cousins. So playing around with that border between optimistic steampunk and a much more pessimistic dieselpunk, which is more about Nazis, was kind of interesting to me because early in the war we were definitely kind of on the steampunk side of that.

At that point, war is no longer about a sense of adventure and chivalry and a way of testing your nation's level of manhood it's become industrial, and horrible. Because when you put the words 'machine' and 'gun' together, they both change. But to me, World War I is the dividing point where modernity goes from being optimistic to being pessimistic. I like the word 'dieselpunk' if you are doing something like 'Weird World War II'. Differences from steampunk Īuthor Scott Westerfeld addresses the question of where to draw the line between steampunk and dieselpunk, arguing that his novel Leviathan (2009) qualifies as steampunk despite the fact that the technology it depicts includes diesel engines: The term also refers to the tongue-in-cheek name given to a similar cyberpunk derivative, ' steampunk', which focuses on science fiction based on industrial steam power and which is often set within the Victorian era. The '-‍punk' suffix attached to the name is representative of the counterculture nature of the genre with regard to its opposition to contemporary aesthetics. The name 'dieselpunk' is a derivative of the science fiction subgenre cyberpunk, and represents the time period from World War I until the 1950s, when diesel-based locomotion was the main technological focus of Western culture.

Science fiction genre An example of dieselpunk art Fantasy

Fantasy art steampunk splice monster