Guide: How to Tell Steampunk, Dieselpunk & Cyberpunk from Other Punks

I'm not sure of its original source -- and if you know, please let me know -- but someone recently posted to Reddit this handy visual guide at right to the various "punks" of online/gaming/popular culture we talk about a lot on New World Notes, categorized by features and fictional era. (Click to embiggenate.)

Steampunk is surely the most well-known and practiced at the moment, though thanks to Keanu, cyberpunk is seeing a second (or fourth?) resurgence.

Cyberpunk, arguably, is the godfather of them all, since its leaders drove an ironic revival of old science fiction tropes from many previous era, only now seen from an anarchic post-modern point of view -- first starting perhaps with William Gibson/Bruce Sterling's Difference Engine which popularized  (pioneered?) steampunk.

Perhaps more interesting are the styles in between steampunk and cyberpunk, since they're less popular:

I guess you could argue that the post-cyberpunk Star Wars films are a kind of raypunk, since the original movies jumped off from the old Buck Rogers movies/comics (the OG raygun genre).

Far as Dieselpunk, I'd say Captain America: The First Avenger qualifies, while the Fallout game series has a lot from Atompunk, such as the ironic Pip Boy iconography. (Or as someone pointed out, Fallout is a Dieselpunk apocalypse built on top of an Atompunk past.)

Meanwhile, the Stranger Things series revels in Cassette Futurism.

(Those are all actually pretty obvious off-the-cuff examples -- I'd love someone to out-geek me with better ones.)

Interesting question for longtime NWN readers: What well-known Second Life experiences fit into these categories?

Steampunk has whole communities based around it in SL, as does cyberpunk (hello, Hangars Liquides), but the other categories are harder to come by.

I'd argue that the classic Petrovsky Flux/Bogon Flux, usually described as steampunk, better fits into the Dieselpunk slot. Since the Mad Max franchise counts as Dieselpunk, Second Life communities like The Wasteland sims and community are basically that too. See also this roleplay community based on the Fallout franchise, full of Dieselpunk sexiness.

I've seen some great examples of Cassette Futurism over the years, such as amazing recreations of 80s era video game arcades, but examples that come readily to mind are tributes to pre-existing variations from other genres: For instance, an SL-based recreation of the 80s themed-hangout from Ready Player One, and a recreation of the whole 80s Upside Down town from Stranger Things. But again, that's stretching the definition to the point of breaking.

What other examples of any punk belong here, from any genre or virtual world?

Comments

[Fionalein]

Cyberpunk - like true Victorian SCiFi (not to be confused with Steampunk) - was a real SciFi genre wheres the others are about fantasy "what if" aesthetics...

Sorry but I find the comparison lacking. What Keano now does is no Cyberpunk anymore - it is '80s retro-SciFi'. Science has moved on and clinging to old expectations of technological advancements will not get the visions back. It is a fantasy aesthetics thing now.

[Phil]

These may seem obvious in retrospect:
Literature: Verne and Wells
TV: Robert Conrad's The Wild Wild West

[Gatito]

It could be argued that the only difference between sci-fi and fantasy are aesthetical. At least that is what is written at the beggining of the book «How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy» by Orson Scott Card.
Also, Cyberpunk is all about a hard and unforgiving world controlled by big corporations, with protagonists that are only not owned by those big corporations because they are too much at the bottom to matter. It is understood there are wonderful inventions but the story doesn`t show them, because it follows people at the edges of society where those wonders are just out of reach. Most definitely not a Victorian viewpoint.

[Rob]

Dieselpunk era starts in WW1 1910s era through the 1950's. Not WW2 as the image shows.