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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 1042254" data-attributes="member: 151">Tim Powers' Anubis Gates being labeled as Steampunk would be something of forcing a square peg into a round hole, IMHO.  While it does have strange occurences with the eqyptian magicians and a variation of Sping-Heeled Jack (though it would years before I even knew who that was), it's mostly a book about head-twisting time travel tricks and hanging with Shelley and Byron.  And whlie Neuromancer was the book that put the genre on the map, a lot of people would contend that it had been running for several years by that point.  Hell, Johnny Mnemonic, by Gibson, was several years old at that point.  Folks like A.E. VanVogt, Alfred Bester and Phillip K. Dick (not to mention movies like A Clockwork Orange and BladeRunner*) had already walked much of this territory...just not under a convienent label.Steampunk always struck me as changing the window dressing of Cyberpunk, but keeping the core ideas, to some extent.  However, that quickly changed into a campier, more romanticized version, with anime giant steam-powered robots sitting side by side with The Babbage Engine.After that, it was merely an attempt to 'buzz word' in something that was easy to label, and hopefully carried some meaning to the reader, vaguely intended to mean 'cutting edge', but often just meaning 'clueless'.* - And let's be honest here, Blade Runner is THE cyberpunk movie...much moreso than say most other movies for it's strong visual aspects and references.  Ironically, The Matrix never even came to mind as a 'cyberpunk' movie, even though it bears most of the trappings of the genre, and I'm not sure why I think that way.</blockquote>

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